ART PROCESS (Captian Marvel) (Patreon)

PREMISE: I use CLIP STUDIO PAINT and I love it to death. Layer modes should be similar to Photoshop and Paint Tool Sai, though.

1) ROUGH LINES

 2) SKETCH 

 3) LINEART. I use watercolor brushes to draw my lines ("opaque watercolor" for the defined parts and "transparent watercolor" for the softer/blurred ones). Brush dimension is usually around 20/25 x 4000px. 

4) SHADOWS on the lineart. I've reached this method over the years because I wanted to simplify my coloring & I didn't wanna loose too much time studying the lighting and where/how to place shadows. Now I place them only in key points to help me with the contrast! 

5) OVERLAY LAYER over the lineart. I feel this layer is strongly needed with my style, because my lines are heavy and without this "filter" to soften them they would make my piece look pretty muddy. In some points (e.g.the city) I desaturated the color because it was too pink. 

 6) FLAT COLORS + BLUSHU. Blushu is the name of the layer, no lie :'D It's literally what the name suggest: some reds in key points to help me give a healty look to the skin. 

7) SHADOWS on the background. Basically, a gradient from below.

8) SHADOWS on the characters. As you can see, they're pretty flat, because I feel like I've already put enough in the lineart stage. Shadows are in "multiply" mode or "linear burn" mode. 

9) LIGHTS on the backgrownd. Here comes the sun!

10) LIGHTS on the characters. If you're familiar with my artworks, you might have already noticed it. I always use side or back light and place them on the outlines, because, as I said above, I don't wanna lose time studying lights sources and drop shadows. I do love to color, but I prefer to focus on the palettes and overall atmosphere. Reaching this conclusion, I feel like I turned a weakness of mine into a strong, peculiar point, and I'm proud of it. 💪
I use two layers for lights. One in "glow dodge" mode for more softer/blurred lights, and one in "add glow" mode for the very outer ligths. I also soften the lineart that faces the light with this layer. 

11) OVERLAY FILTER. Okay, I love overlay mode, I use it a lot! Here I usually put a warm color on the zone that's in the light and a cooler color on the darkest parts. 

12) A correction layer to adjust the CONTRAST

13) TEXTURE to give everything a less "plastic" look. 

ANNND DONE! Hope you found this step by step interesting and maybe useful!  ☺💗 Feel free to ask me questions if you have them!!