Christmas Special - Speed Paint with Hika and Kirarin! (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!  

As promised, here is the speedpaint for this year's Christmas special. Since it showcases the kind of artwork that'll be featured in LGTS, we figured sharing how this promotional artwork came to be would fit right into this month's tutorial! Although it's not much of a tutorial per se, we do hope you enjoy it nonetheless!  

The software used in this video was Adobe Photoshop, which was used to paint both Elise and the background, and Adobe AfterEffects to tackle the lighting, animation and effects. The piece itself was a collaboration between KirameKirai and O_Hikaku who shared, and worked, on the same file which can be tricky and requires good communication as to not end up with overwriting each other's work. 

The process itself was pretty standard at first. Kira sketched the initial concept and lined it using the  Chisel25 tool from Kyle's ultimate set. We recommend varying the lineweights in order to achieve a more appealing and dynamic image which will come in handy for the coloring process, especially the shading. Harder, thicker lines for the outlines and softer, more delicate ones for the more detailed bits!

After this was done, Kira filled in the base colors and determined the overall color palette that fit the intended mood before handing the file over to Hika who did both the background and foreground of this piece. 

For this, Hika used the Oil Rich tool for the base coloring which added the intended more traditional texture that contrasts with the harsher cell-coloring Kira had previously done on Elise. Hika started by laying out the basic volumes and contrasts of the objects before moving onto detailing which be achieved by gradually defining the edges, detailing the objects' textures and, finally, by adding the lighting and shading effects. 

After wrapping the background and foreground, Hika sent the file back to Kira so he could redefine Elsie's shadows and highlights in order to maintain a cohesive and coherent atmosphere with the environment Hika had just put together. This also gave her a much cleaner and sharper look to resemble that of an anime cell! A round, hard edged brush did just the trick to achieve this!

After the final piece was done, Hika uploaded the file onto AfterEffects where he added the flickering light effects, the sparkling bits and the falling snow! Of course, he also added the retro anime filter to achieve that good old vintage animation aesthetic!

We hope you enjoyed this tutorial as much as we enjoyed putting it together! Please do tell us if you're interested in seeing more of this "show don't tell" format in the future!   

Thank you so much for watching and reading through! We wish you all a Happy New Year!


_______________

We would like to apologize for the lack of background music in the video. We had an issue with the video codecs where the music glitched in a random and very unpleasant way, so we decided not to include it. We're sorry for the inconvenience.

We would also like to apologize for not being able to upload it sooner. Thank you so much for your understanding!

AstralShift