Art experiments with Yama

Leaving the lineart for this unfinished in the canvas of yesterday’s drawing would’ve been a waste of effort, so I went and colored it while adding some extra frills.

Lineart tinting is something I’ve been doing for over a year, but I always limited myself to a single tint, spread across the whole drawing’s lineart.

Today, I thought about taking things a step further by experimenting with more detailed lineart tinting. To be more precise, I used no single, object-wide lineart tint here; the tint changes across different surfaces, together with fill colors. To put it shortly, the hair’s lineart is tinted dark blue while the skin’s is dark orange.

I gotta say I really like the result, it’s a great way to create contrast without using ridiculously strong fill colors. The only mistake I’ve done about in that regard here was forgetting to make shadows affect the lineart tint, darkening it further.

As you may have noticed, I also played a bit with composition complementary colors. The background’s pale orange on the left is supposed to balance out Yama’s signature blue hair on the right.

On the other hand, there’s no particularly deep reason for the shadows’ rosey color, I just picked something that looked cozy to me.

I do feel like I could’ve added a proper point of interest on the bottom left to better balance the drawing, but I admittedly do really like the clean look I ended up with.

Speaking of clean, I didn’t try shading the hair in a needlessly detailed way. I took a page from Saghaley’s book and limited myself to uniformly shading one side of her hair. Not only was this a big time-saver, I’m pretty sure it also looks better than what I would’ve done without this shortcut!

I really recommend watching Saghaley’s hour-long video about drawing Urotsuki from Yume 2kki in his style, working on complex backgrounds and other general tips. I find it pretty rare to come across this kind of detailed art guidance that does not come from artists using a more generic artgod style… as much as I dislike calling it “generic”. Seeing a guide by someone using a more stylized look (somewhat akin to mine) was a welcome surprise to me.