Condom Horse - Notes and Thots (Patreon)

Peek into my brain on my most recent post. I have insight to share :D

This is one of the most labor intensive commissions I've taken, but it went by in a breeze.

I made sure to take regular breaks. I allowed my mind to rest from the piece when it needed to.

I even did a shadow/pose study, and a bit of gift art, in the middle of this piece's workflow.

Safe to say, this is much more sustainable.

Lets get into it

60+ layers::

With this number of layers, I had to actually try to organize. I don't have a full system worked out yet, but color coding helped immensely.

Each panel got it's own color. This helped me refer back to old panels, and ensure they all more or less look similar.

Still need to work on this, though.

Sketching::

These started life as simple thumbnails, small drawings that I can make quickly. I scale them up after I decide on the poses I want, and sketch them out more thoroughly.

Initially, I wanted the last panel to show an X-Ray view inside Leti, showing her tummy full of condoms. I had to scrap this, as the piece was becoming noisy.

I redid large portions of the sketch. Never be afraid to do this. The sketch is a first draft, and if you get too attached, your drawing will suffer from it. 

When push comes to shove, don't be afraid to "Kill your darlings".

Lining::

Lining is always straight forward. But this is also where most of my editorial work is done (preferably)

This time I did do something a little different...

(Line layer offset exaggerated here)

My lines in this piece are two layers. Both are a saturated maroon. 

The top layer is an Overlay, and the bottom is set to Linear Burn. This gives an interesting, warm effect.

I may play around with this more in the future.

Color::

Nothing really to say about the colors. 

I used a mask layer for each panel to keep things separated.

(The gold layer is the mask. I chose an unused color, so I could see where the mask bled through)

Rendering::

Shading, Lighting, whatever you call it, I call it Rendering. It's the hardest part of drawing in my opinion.

Get rendering wrong, and you may be better off with none.

This took 8 layers, per panel. Just for rendering alone.

I use a multiply layer, with a de-saturated plum color for the shadows...

And an Add (Glow) layer for the highlights, rimlights and shine. 

With this layer setting, it's easy to color pick the material you want to make shine, and just paint away.

Background and Framing::

I'm still so bad with this....

I do like the effect of the characters overlapping the frame but, idk.

Feels lazy.

Finishing Touches::

Of course, no drawing is complete without a ton of effects and illegible text.

I added what I felt was a conservative amount, but,,, it may have been overboard.

I like doing these in a flat white, or a near-white color. Really makes them POP.

I use these lines to highlight important features too. It's a fun touch I think.

They're typically all on the same layer, above the rest of the drawing.

Wrapping Up::

So something I promise the Lover's Tier is timelapses. I hate the process of exporting and converting timelapses from CSP to GIF.

So I made a robot to do it for me.

My computer came with Microsoft Power Automate, and with it, I was able to program a bot that, on the press of a button, will:

• Export the timelapse from CSP (exports to an MP4)
• Open and navigate Firefox to a converter website
• Upload the MP4
• Wait for the conversion to GIF
• Download the thing
• Move it and rename it to my specifications.

Yea.

It turns a 4 minute annoying task into a single click. I'm so glad I did this, and I highly recommend others to automate their workflow, if they can.

Anyway that's all I've got. Hit me up with questions if you have them (email:jazzthedrawer@gmail.com, discord:BigJazz#3277).

Later.