Jennwolfgal

Jessica Jones: After vs Before (A long rant about my art process) I have the head and the torso in two separate layer groups, each with their own lineart layer, and their own layer group for flat colors, shadows, and highlights. Once I have what's on the right (the before image), I then make a copy of both the head, and the torso layer groups, and flatten each. Then I zoom in and make adjustments and fixes. For example, with the hairline, I just needed to take the smudge tool, start at the top of her forehead, and just draagg it up to bring that flesh-tone up through the new hair part. If I wanted to do this before, where everything was in it's own layer, I would have had to erase the hair color layers, which were on TOP of the skin layers. Throughout working on rendering a piece, I have had to learn how to tell myself "that looks off, but I'll fix it later". The point is to get like 80% of the way there by building up sketch, then lineart, flats, and then rendering layers, and THEN the remaining 20% is by just zooming in, flattening a copy of that layer group, and just fixing those little things I missed, or got wrong the first time. Another example is the jacket's right lapel. When I was doing the lineart, I was just going off of my memory as to what this kind of biker jacket looked like. But once I got to this final adjustment stage, I looked at images of the Jessica Jones character and realized her jacket has that zipper along that right lapel, sitting on this strip of leather. So, painted on top of the jacket that extra little black leather strip, and then drew the zipper teeth array on top of that. You can find zipper teeth brushes available for free download with a quick Google search, or make one yourself, it wouldn't be too hard if you know how to use the brush settings. There's of course a bunch of other fixes and adjustments I made that you can probably notice. This extra step has made my art quality jump up by a lot. The idea is that you don't need to have everything locked down at first. The lineart doesn't need to perfectly-defined the silhouette and shapes -- you can always paint over, or smudge tool it later to adjust it. It's okay if the mouth isn't the right shape while you're laying down your basic rendering -- you can always smudge tool the corners of the mouth into a better shape later, or darken the mouth with a new multiply layer later.

Woah okay, do you all like girl-on-girl that much? Jeeeesus