Resource I want to show how I draw line art

What the title says. I just made probably one of the most complicated line arts I've ever done and it pretty much took 2 days. The full thing is still not actually done. I might update this once I've finished coloring and adding a background and everything. This is a big thing I've been planning to commemorate the death of a player character who went out in a literal blaze of glory during our last session.

Looking back at the start, it kind of reminds me of this:

Spoiler: For comparison

Don't mind that awful looking fire effect, that's just a rough sketch to give an idea of how I want the fire to look after I color, since that's an effect I'll add close to the end.

So to start off, you can see in this first image, I just drew a few circles and a basic outline of how I want the body to be posed. I always start off with a circle for the head and two more for the shoulders, since it's pretty easy to add lines for the arms and torso off of that. Normally I wouldn't draw the circles for the shoulders so close to the head, but I did this time since I was planning for the pose to be kind of hunched over.

Spoiler: Step 1

After this I cleaned up the lines a little and added some extra details, like rough facial features, the swords (after also cleaning up the hands a little more), and a rough sketch of how I wanted the hair to look, which was just a placeholder at this point. The eyes are also going to glow in the final version, so there are some lines to sort of indicate that.

Spoiler: Step 2

You might notice the sword in her right hand is positioned differently than the final version. That gave me a headache later on. I hadn't decided to change it at this point though, so I went ahead and cleaned up the sword a bit more. I tried to experiment a bit with perspective on this drawing, so drawing the sword was a bit of a challenge. I thought the hexagon-shaped guard would be kind of a cool design.

Spoiler: Step 3

At this point the base line art is actually pretty much done, with the exception of making the face a bit more detailed which I try to spend some extra time on. After fixing up the face, I changed the opacity on this base line art layer to around 50% and then started drawing the armor over it.

Spoiler: Step 4

After finishing the armor and cleaning up the sketchy line art that I've been making this far, this is the "final" result before changing the positioning of the sword and adding some more detailing to it. I also changed the sizes of the feet to try to create more of that perspective effect I was trying to experiment with and changed the face contours to make her look a little older (something I usually have difficulty with). I usually draw the head too big at first, but this one actually turned out pretty well on the first attempt so I didn't need to worry about resizing for once.

Spoiler: Step 5

Next came the part I realized I had to change the positioning of the sword. She's supposed to be charging towards an enemy and the way she's holding the sword now looks like she's already attacked. I ended up making 3 different positions in total and I had to draw the hand differently each time.

Spoiler: Step 6, with movement arrows

I don't even know where she's aiming with that thing.


Much better!

I was happy with the movement of the last version, so that's the point where I stopped last night. Compositionally it looks a lot more interesting too. Repositioning the sword and redrawing the hand each time took a lot of time, probably as long or longer than the rest of the process.

Earlier today I picked back up where I left off to add some of the finer details. It might look complicated, compared to the last one, but it's really just adding a bunch more extra lines on top of what I've already done. Those extra details really add some life to it. The most complicated part was adding some stray hairs to make her look more ragged. (And her hair is usually pretty messy anyway.)

Spoiler: Step 7

Then I added some more swords and the scabbards of the two she's holding. This character somehow ended up collecting a lot of swords throughout the game.

Spoiler: Step 8

One of the last things I did was draw the fire dragon and the tattoo on her arm that it's coming from. I drew the dragon separately and then just made a loose sketch of the fire around it since that's an effect I'll add later.

Spoiler: Step 9

I also changed her expression very slightly by having her mouth open in a snarl. I thought it fit the character and the scene a lot better than the sort of forlorn expression she had before.

Spoiler: Step 10

Spoiler: And then the line art was finished! (pretty much)

To color, I usually prefer not to use the select/magic wand tools unless I plan on leaving the line art in, which I won't for this. Instead I do the same thing I did when drawing the armor over top and I change the opacity. Usually around 30% works better for this. Then it's pretty much just coloring inside the lines like a coloring book.

Spoiler: Something like this

And here are the base colors finished without the line art layer visible. (I'll add the tattoo later when I do the fire effect.) I might edit this post (or make another thread later since this ended up being kind of lengthy) with my coloring process.

Spoiler: base colors

Also if you're interested, here are some references I used. The first is an earlier drawing I did of this character (and her dog) probably a year or more ago. The second is an unfinished, more recent version that the character's player made. (My character is on the left of his version!) This version I'm working on is kind of a mix of these two versions.

Spoiler: earlier pictures

One thing that changed pretty drastically between the two was the skin tone. Because of this character's heritage, she has darker skin than typical for the setting. I actually drew her with darker skin than I usually do for Asian characters in my original version, but it might not be as apparent because of the highlights I added after the fact, which made her look lighter. I used the same base color for this newer version above. I'm thinking with the darker version for reference, and given the lighting effects I plan to add later, that same base color should work fine and the final version will end up being a skin tone somewhere between these two above.

And that's all for now because I'm pretty tired from drawing so much. I'll probably do more tomorrow.

 

I'm glad you like it!

I still haven't decided if i'm going to make a version for coloring since that's a bit more of an involved process and it's taking a very long time to do.