Kaiju Onyx (Patreon)

Hey there Patrons!

Onyx seems to have gotten quite a bit bigger and beastlier, and are really eager to show their new body to the folks in the city! But just what made them so big?

Well the obvious answer is you, the patrons! You know, given that you all voted on it!

Finally managed to get this pic finished! Overall I'm pretty happy with it, especially with how the lighting came out in the end. I don't get to do a lot of piece with really detailed lighting like this so it was nice to get to spend some time and keep those skills sharp.

Onto the retrospective! For some behind the scenes details, I had actually used a completely different brush to do the inks for this piece, mostly in an attempt to get faster inks done. I wasn't really satisfied with that aspect, as while it was a little faster to ink, there was a LOT of fighting the brush initially. I think the inks might be fine for a piece that isn't going to be colored, but I was also running into some other (albeit minor) issues when I came to start coloring. Namely, the brush doesn't put down a solid color when you put a line down (there's some transparency/density tied to pen pressure), and I really prefer having solid lines for linework that eventually gets colored.
But on that note, you can really easily make the argument that that sort of thing doesn't really matter, because despite the initial qualms I had with the brush, everything else came out great afterwards! And if I were to take a more objective look at it, the lineart really isn't that bad compared to what I would usually want for a piece. In fact I think most folks would be pretty hard pressed to find the difference between the two. And the more I think about that, the more I realize that a lot of the struggles lately have also been stemming from the fact that I personally want a specific level of polish and precision for my lines. Sure I can knock out a pic like Loona's in a day without any issue, and most folks might think it's just as good as my more polished piece, or at least close enough that it shouldn't concern me, but there's just some different level of satisfaction I get when I get those really polished lines, and this piece came close to that, but it wasn't quite there.
I think the biggest takeaway from this is that I really need to find a way to be more comfortable with looser, messier linework. Just because I appreciate the extreme precision and detail doesn't mean I should think of looser pieces as inherently "worse", especially when there's it's very likely that a good amount of people probably won't even pay attention to it to the same degree I would. Would you even consider this linework to be messier or looser than my usual stuff? Because I do, and I think that says a lot about the mindset I have for my work. I'll keep trying to improve that though, because I think if I can find a way to be comfortable with messier line work (even messier than this piece), that'll probably get me out of this larger slump that I've been fighting lately. I'm still going to try other brushes though, because there's a few that might be a good fit for what I'm looking for that also won't have the opacity issue (though that's also something I should learn to not really care about), and I haven't gotten to try them yet!
Only other thing I want to mention in the retrospective is that it took a surprising amount of work to get the color temperature right for some of the lights and shadows. The problem stemmed from how I usually do most if not all of the image's lighting on a single layer, with some supplementary layers to add extra effects and boost areas as needed. This one I actually did the two major light sources in two different layers, one for the moon, and another for the light from the city below. There was a lot of struggles with layer blending initially, but I eventually got to where I wanted to be, and again, I'm really happy with how everything came out in the end!

Alrighty, that'll do it for this one! Hope you enjoy the piece! And as always, thank you all for your support!