BTS - KISMET, Ch. 1 pt. 5 - 05 (Patreon)

By popular demand--a Behind the Scenes post for you guys!

In my previous BTS posts, I talked a bit more about the various complaints I had with Procreate, but I thought I'd go over my typical workflow in today's post!  Clip Studio Paint thankfully allows me to have as many layers as I like, so there are no janky piecemeal panels here (just absolutely ENORMOUS files with 150+ layers 💀).

Typically, if there's a big background/landscape element on a page, I'll work on that first.  Backgrounds are my least favorite part of any page to draw, so I always try and get the important ones done first, so I don't end up running out of steam and half-assing them 🤣  You can see here that I started by drawing the planet + gateway + space train before moving onto drawing the characters!

As for my rendering process, I've broken it down into a couple different phases:

1. Lineart + flats - I'll ink in the sketch and lay down the flat colors under the lineart.

2. Shadow pass - I throw on some cel-shaded shadows, and sometimes also a black gradient set to multiply to darken things up where necessary to add more contrast.

3. Lighting pass - This is my favorite step! I usually add at least one layer (set to "Add (Glow)") with white to add in either rim lighting or accent lighting, and often a second layer (also set to "Add (Glow)") with Kismet's signature accent green!

4. Color/Texture overlay - Finally, I'll throw on a couple of clipping masks set to "Overlay" on the panels to just add a bit more color to the page!  I try to maintain some level of continuity for what colors go where in the environment, but I'm usually just eyeballing it to see what looks good. I also slap on one final noise texture over the whole image to give it a bit of the "Film Grain" effect that I love in movies (and the original Mass Effect game 😁).

And that's it!  Feel free to ask me any questions you have about the process--it's always evolving, and things tend to change over the months/years, but I've actually used some variant of this process for my rendering since 2014!