Swagever

Well, seems like it’s almost been a full year since my last full-process drawing.

I didn’t really have any reason to put as much effort as I did into this, but I figured I’d seize the chance to dust off my background and excessive eyecandy skills.

I cheated the first panel’s floortile pattern with the perspective tool, and I have the strong feeling I messed it up to some extent, as it doesn’t line up that well with the rain puddles. Still an outcome I prefer far more than spending an ungodly amount of time on hand-drawing a fairly precise pattern (which happened a couple years back).

I can’t help but think I still need to figure out a proper process for backgrounds though, doing things with the wannabe-MSPaint-highlighter I used here wasn’t all that fun, and the result, while decent, definitely leaves something to be desired.

Getting the fullbody shot of Homura to look right took a fair amount of attempts, I’m still not really used to drawing characters below their waist. Eventually, I ended up getting a pretty decent sketch though, and I based the final lineart on it.

Moving onto the second panel, I think Homura looks pretty good when looking at the drawing at the intended size, but I feel like her head looks too large or “padded” when zooming out. It wasn’t that noticeable though and I didn’t want to start an endless back-and-forth of attempted fixes, so I just left it as-is.

Nothing much to say about the final panel, besides maybe I should’ve made Kyouko’s head a tiny bit shorter and raised her nose a little. Her hairstyle differs somewhat from the one she has in the first panel because I used different references for the two shots (respectively the original edit and a shot from the show).

The style overall is a quite a bit more polished than usual, maybe partly as a result of me using a 4px brush for some of the lineart (instead of the usual 3px nearly everywhere), but I think I still prefer the messier look from most of my other drawings.

While doing the final color tweaks I learned that using a Soft light blend mode on the tints I overlaid on the panels achieves quite a nice effect. Unlike Burn overlays, Soft light does a better job at making specific colors pop without boosting the contrast of the whole picture.

Overall, quite the good outcome for the hundredth shitpost redraw! Now that I broke the ice with full-process drawings again, I think I might (finally) continue, and hopefully finish the Jujutsu Kasane saga. There’s still a handful of shots I have to redraw (and animate) to recreate the original MP4 that inspired me to watch Jujutsu Kaisen in the first place, but if I put my mind to it I could probably clear them at a somewhat relaxed pace in a couple months’ time.