Aloy, Horizon Zero Dawn -- Exclusive 5/11/21 (Patreon)

Here she is!

I'll be honest, I struggle with rendering soft fabrics and clothing. You can't really define much of it in the lineart, lest you end up with these dark, hard lines that end up breaking the visual immersion. So, I have to get by with somewhat bare-bones lineart for pieces like these, and have to rely on the rendering stage to really convey the forms. This is the same issue I ran into when doing the character's feet -- hard, dark lines suggest an area of harsh shadow, usually from a deep recession in the material like a wrinkle -- but the wrinkles in both clothing and especially the bottom of feet are not that harsh; instead, they are much softer and gradual, such that the shadows shouldn't be as intense. So, I instead end up foregoing a lot of the detail I used to do in the lineart, saving it for the coloring stage, and it looks so much better now. It gives the feet a much softer feel, and reserves the lineart for (1) the silhouette, and (2) boundaries between areas of different materials.

I'm also using the lasso tool a lot more often, and use it to isolate areas to work on independently, whereas the magic wand is an inaccurate flop.

Let me know what you think in the comments below!