Twinsies: Costume Party Tonite! - Process (Patreon)

2. Final sketch, refining all the details.

3. Inking. I use mono-width lines for the furniture and variable-width lines for the characters. There's a lot of overlapping areas, especially with the wig and the little ruffles, so I worked on lots of separate layers in Manga Studio to make it easier to erase overlapping areas. (I felt kind of dumb when I finished drawing the demon wings because I spent too much time drawing curly hair that got erased when I forgot that it would be covered by the wings.)

4. Color blocking.

5. Form shadows. Here's where I paint the general shading to create a sense of form. I used a dark brown layer for the basic form shadows, painted with a soft round airbrush. I separated it into two layers with color burn for the hair and multiply for everything else. Color burn is just too intense for other things in a scene where the lighting it's very dramatic.

6. Cast shadows. Here is where I painted the shadows cast by one object onto another object. I used the same dark brown color, set to multiply.

7. Backlight. I added a thin backlight on the right side of everything, using screen with a light blue matching the backdrop.

8. Shiny. I used white to add shine to the clothing and eyes. I used white with color dodge for shiny hair. For the hair, I use a variable-width hard brush, then go back and smudge it up with a small soft brush.

9. Colored linework.

10. Final details. I dropped a pattern and gradient into the backdrop. I added a glitter texture to the halo (found texture set to hard light, overlaid on the halo) and painted a little sparkle on it. I added eyelashes (black variable-width brush with a few streaks of dark grey for depth) and blush (a red layer, painted with a soft airbrush) to the characters.

11. Then I collapsed the character layers and adjusted the position for the final composition. It's almost painful to overlap the characters so much, since it covers up details that I spent time painting, but it winds up looking better to have the characters overlap.