"Temperance" Timelapse [ Lineart Process ] (Patreon)

I think this is one of those timelapses in which you can see how painstaking the detailing of the armor and pose really was. I don't normally go through so many redraw phases so to give you an idea of what's going on in each stage:

0:00 to 0:30 - redrawing a more proportional body over the initial draft (including messing around with the pose of the outstretched hand to see what would work better in the composition)

0:30 to 1:20 - setting down the armor foundation and a glimpse of the background to get a better sense of the composition flow once all the detail sets in.

1:20 to 3:30 - first pass at detailing the armor. This would normally be the point in which I actually try to make the details as clean as possible in order to leave only a bit of polish to the end, but in this piece the level of detail was so intense that I decided to not worry to much about cleanliness to instead focus on the perspective of each of the little pieces in the chestplate.

A fun fact about this- one of the things that makes drawing armor so complicated is that, in the same way we talk about perspective in the head and the body, when you draw armor with lots of filigree each of those little independent pieces has to be exactly proportioned in accordance with that perspective. Meaning that if the chestplate has a symmetrical pattern that splits down the center, but the body is tilted to the side and up as it is here, each of the pieces facing away has to be manually drawn (i.e, not just copy-pasted from the other side) to represent this foreshortening. Getting even a tiny part of this wrong can totally offset the balance of the whole piece.

3:30 to 3:40 - in this 10 second blip I had to readjust the whole pose after receiving some experienced feedback on the composition being off-balance. This was incredibly frustrating, especially after having worked all that detail in and now needing to redo a great portion of it due to the above, but in the end it proved to be the right choice as it made for a much more solid pose after all.

3:40 to 8:10 - this HUGE chunk of time (bearing in mind that 1 min of timelapse is usually over an hour in real time) was then spent in fine tuning all the detail I had previously drawn to the new pose. Again, this would have been the place where I normally settled into the clean linework, but once again I had to shift my focus to the perspective and foreshortening (as you can see by the appearance of parallel lines to measure the spacing and incline). This is when the process got very tedious and I felt like it was never going to end; it was a really hard 5-6 hours.

8:10 to 12:30 - and FINALLY I go in for the final clean-up. This was another long, long part of the process, but it was a lot more gratifying since I could finally see the ending. Here you'll see my refs pop up on screen as I agonised over making sure that every little belt, buckle and baubble was correct.

12:30 to end - this will be harder to see if you're not watching the video in full screen, but this is where the lineweight magic happens. Slowly, I go over all the key areas of the piece and reinforce areas of darkness or lighten lines facing the light. To be fair, this part is completely unnecessary if the piece is going to be painted as color completely negates any effects on the lines. That said, I do this to indulge myself, as it does make the lineart look really slick and ya girl me deserved a treat after all that hassle.

This piece involved a much longer and more grueling process than I usually go through for most lineart pieces (hence the unusual breakdown of the video). Looking back on it there were parts I could have probably streamlined or made a little easier on myself, but at the same time, I didn't feel very confident about this piece during a good part of the process and sometimes it's worth going the long way around if it helps you figure out what you're doing.

Plus making sure that everything was correctly placed in the lineart stage actually made the painting process A LOT easier, so here's to silver linings!

Either way, I hope you enjoyed and/or found this extensive process breakdown useful! As always, love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. =]