Early Look: Golden Hour ✨ + My thought process! ☺️

Hello & happy Thursday everyone!! 💛

Here’s a sneak-peek of a photo study I worked on last night! 💌 I included my reference in this post for you guys to see as well ☺️ I almost never draw realistic backgrounds in my character drawings, but I decide to challenge myself with it and see what would be the result 🙈 and I really like how it turned out! I decided to write a little overview of my process for this drawing, so keep reading if you’re interested in the thought process behind this piece☺️💛📝

✨My process:

My main focus was to first get all the proper values in place without worrying about detail. To do this quickly, I worked in grayscale so I could easily see where the shadows go, the light, and the midtones. This also works as almost a “trial run” for me to determine whether I like how it looks and want to continue working on it, or to scrap it and move on to something else, without wasting a lot of time. The grayscale sketch took 38 minutes, which may sound a little fast, but that’s because I only made a basic sketch layer and followed it with 2 or three simple multiply layers, blocking in the values with my selection tool, and a normal layer for the light.

For the coloring process, I merged my sketch layers and adjusted them in Curves to be a shade of red. Click here to watch my tutorial video on how I color my sketches and why I do this ☺️✨ After that, I color in the base colors and use a Hard Light layer to create that warm, saturated, golden light color on the skin and hair ✨ it’s my new favorite layer mode because it’s so easy to use and instantly brightens up the colors!

I used a series of Soft Light layers to add softness & brightness to the skin, (its great to use for highlights!) and then I moved on to the details. I used brushes from Max Ulichney’s Comic Maxpack for the details because he has some brushes that create texture without me having to work very hard, so I could work even more quickly. Next, I merged my canvas layers again so I could adjust the colors slightly in Color Balance to try to find the mood I wanted. And that’s it! The drawing took me 3 hours 29 minutes ✨

That’s a lot of writing! 🙈 but I wanted to try out writing something like this for you guys in case any of you find it helpful to hear the thought process behind one of my drawings! 💛 I’ll be making a process video of this drawing for all Big-Hearted Butterflies and a PSD & Procreate file for Devoted Dragonflies ✨ stay tuned! 🥰

Have a lovely & beautiful day everyone! 💛

Love,

Lydia ✏️