Daecon glows up (and possibly gets a new art style)

[ThunderChicken]

So I've been thinking of changing my MC's appearance for a while. Not anything major, mind you - just a tweak here and there. In the story he is described as becoming more powerful as he grows into his magic, so I wanted to add some muscle. I also wanted to get rid of his mullet and give him some proper long hair, and I felt for some reason that his chin should be a little pointier. He grew a small "soul patch" to honour the memory of his father, who was murdered before his eyes (somewhat related fact: I also have a "soul patch" that I wear to honour a friend who committed suicide in 2000 - I have had it since he first went missing and vowed I'd not shave it until he was found. To this day his body has not been found).

So, anyway, here was Daecon before. This was a concept drawing and thus was done in the same style as my other series, Wild Nights, Hot and Crazy Days. Cartoony eyes and mouth, wide but thin wings.

I did not keep that style, I went with more realistic facial features. Here's a newer Daecon (sans wings):

So today, I was screwing around. I sketched Daecon for a "Why u no end hiatus" update. It was really only supposed to be a sketch, but while doing so I decided to play with his features and make the changes I'd been planning. Then I did something I've never done before: I coloured the sketch. Usually there is an "inking" stage in which I draw smoother outlines, then I add the colour. I skipped the ink this time and went straight to colour.

...and you know what? I like it. I really, really like it. I like the rough look over the smooth lines of before. also I added some gold ties to his hair, braided it, narrowed his chin, and widened his chest. The last several drawings of Daecon have featured him in a colourful shirt, and that is now going to be a trademark of his. HIs jeans are 1980's retro "acid wash" denim.

One of my biggest problems before was drawing smooth, straight lines. Parkinson's runs in my family, and though I haven't been diagnosed it's probably in my future. My hands have always been shaky. Even the brush stabilization tools in Krita are no match for my shakes. Can't blame it on coffee, alcohol, cigs or drugs, because I use none of those. It's just natural shakiness.

You can see a good example of this shakiness in this fanfic pic I did of Daecon dressed up as The Blue Fedora. Look at how wavy the outline of the arm and coat are:

Now look at this close-up of Daecon in the new style. The lines are still squiggly, but now it looks like they're supposed to be that way. Also, I like the rough look it imparts. This is how I used to draw with pen and paper many years ago (yes, I've always been shaky, and pen & paper don't have brush stabilization!)

So tell me, what do you think?

[sleepykuya]

It's really cool to be able to see Daecon growing throughout your art style! I don't know, it seems more confident to me. It looks fantastic, good work!

[KevinReijnders]

I think going straight from sketch to color works better for you. Especially with your shaky hands, trying to go for clean lines draws attention to the wobbliness of your linework. With the sketch, you get this cool rough look.

[ThunderChicken]

That's exactly what I was thinking. The rough lines will still need some refinement, but overall it's better.

[Vikthetoonaddict]

Same! The colors are the first thing I always notice about the artwork!

[KevinReijnders]

I wouldn't go too far with refinements (I think the example you showed here is perfectly fine), personally I often find that the real rough sketches have more personality to them!
(As long as the sketch is legible)

[ThunderChicken]

The only refinements I would make would be to the colouring. If you look at the closeup, around the outlines of the shirt, you can see the base pink colour in places because I didn't make that transparent when I did the final colours. Now that brighter pink bugs me.

[KevinReijnders]

Oh yeah now that you mention it. When I was on mobile I barely noticed it, but on Desktop I can see them.
But that can be easily fixed depending on your workflow and how you use layers.

I don't know if Kritia has clipping masks like photoshop or clip studio, but you could use that as a tool to easily apply your colorful texture over the base color. Either that, or transparacy locking (again, not sure if that's a feature in Kritia) your color layer and going wild with that.

Eithet way, seperating line art from color is going to be a major benefit in preventing those 'artifacts' in your coloring.

[ThunderChicken]

I have a really strange, probably-the-least-efficient-way-possible way of doing my colours and textures. Basically I will do the inks and flat colours. Then I will create a mask of each individual thing to be coloured, then I do the shading and texturing to each component, then I add that mask on top of the final image. I can end up with twenty or more layers if it's a complex image, but then I merge layers until I end up with only two or three: Background, subject, and shadows/lighting. Again, this is probably not the ideal way to do things, but I'm an old dog trying to teach myself new tricks (up until early 2022 I had only ever used MS Paint, and to a lesser extent Paint.net). I didn't even know what a layer was until about a year ago, I drew everything flat.

[KevinReijnders]

Allow me to share with you my layer structure, hopefully it helps.
Personally I'm not a fan of merging layers, unless necessary for performace (luckily my PC is powerful enough to never need that), but I prefer to keep as many useful individual layers around as possible, you enver know when you spot a mistake and need to fix an error or something (like the bright pink for example).

This is my basic layer set up. There are more or less layers, depending on the use case, mostly adjustment layers, or when It's easier to have a seperate group for a different character or a background etc.

(I use this system in both photoshop and clip studio, and pretty much any program where I can implement it. Hell I even used it in TVPaint haha.)

[ThunderChicken]

That is a LOT more organized than I am!

Performance isn't the issue with me - I'm running a 13th gen Core i7 with 16GB of RAM, but I usually reduce my layer count to reduce the file size. It's funny that you should mention that though - my Surface Pro 8 was an 11th gen Core i5 with 8GB, and that used to crash all the time. With no notice the program would just close. It was so bad that I had to set it to autosave every 60 seconds. Since I got this new machine I haven't experienced a single crash, and I've drawn much larger images.

I draw big pictures (they are often over 5000 pixels wide), and with multiple layers that can top 500MB for a single image. I store a copy of my stuff "on the cloud" (MS OneDrive to be precise) so storage space can be an issue.

I may have exaggerated when I said how far I simplify an image, though. Here is the typical layer structure of one of my "final product" drawings. Note the fancy layer names I reduced it to seven layers, but it was at least 12 layers at one point. The layers are numbered out of order because I move them around as I draw.

And even reduced to seven layers, here are the dimensions, including file size:

Of course when I save as a PNG all of the layers are flattened anyway, but the raw file size with all layers and transparencies intact is 382MiB!

Like I said, probably the least efficient way to do it. It works for me, though. I'm gonna look into that clipping mask thing though. That might save me some work...

[KevinReijnders]

I have to admit that I do pride myself on my structured workflow haha.

Storage isn't an issue for me, I have several Terrabytes worth of hard drive on my PC, plus some external drives for back up. I'll doubt I'll ever run out of that.
Then again, my files aren't as big as yours get, which seems kinda exessive to me. Though I rarely find it usefull to go as big as 5000+ px wide. For my comic pages I've set my documents up for 7x10,5 inch at 300ppi, resulting in a document that's 2100x3150px. Gives me plenty of space for details, without getting lost in the nitty gritty that no one will ever be able to see, while also giving a nice crisp result in print.

The largest I ever go is A3 sized canvasses, but that's generally never for finished works, that's pretty much my sketchpad haha.

[2DLenzy]

Daecon looks fab with that glowup! And I like the sketchy style personally, cause it changes things up from always seeing 'refined' lines in a lot of works (which includes mine too)

Also, funny you mention having only 12/seven layers...

Just thought I'd show you my crazy mess, for laughs...

And all those layers are just for an illustration (my most recent comic has SO many more!)
Which is exactly why I work at a low res often (here it's 72dpi), so my computer won't die XD

[ThunderChicken]

It’s funny, because the first time I drew something in this style was when I did Daecon dressed up as Friar. It was just thrown together quickly one evening after work and was never really meant to point me into a new style. It was mainly left rough because everything was white and there wasn’t much colour anyway, but I did like the way that one came out as well: