(TIME-LAPSE) Valentines Day with Monika

I wanted to do a time-lapse of how I worked on a Valentines Day commission with Monika. Commissioned by Danko - he wanted Monika receiving a bouquet of flowers and a Valentine's day present of Chocolates. I also added a stuffed plushy of Danko's cat as a present to Monika. Danko and I work together VERY often and I've gotten into a habit of adding Danko's cat into every Monika piece he commissions just so that it feels like Monika's really in his world. I really like personal pieces like that where it feels like the character is living with you or better described - has that personal touch of sharing a world. I really enjoy working on pieces of Monika After Story for this reason as the amount of customizability is just off-the-charts and we can really work on getting someone's "Monika" drawn to their liking. Though I enjoy drawing Monika either way. Monika is wearing a glittery green dress here, I had a LITTLE bit of an issue getting the glittery pattern down, but I was able to use an airbrush that had a little bit of texture to it. Not a huge fan of it, but I think for a first time trying to do something glittery.. it's fine.

The background was provided by Danko as well which I ran through an auto-action: see how to do this here - which is always really fun if you want to use your own photos that you take IRL as a background for your art. You'd just want to use a very gentle brush to gently overlay any places that look too harsh - I usually use my normal cream brush to overlay any colors that I want or use the blend tool to make the colors look more cohesive. I wasn't able to capture how to do the auto-action for the background in this piece since auto-action in Clip Studio Paint flattens the ENTIRE piece so it would be erasing Monika as well. It was a lot easier to work on it in a different canvas so that it looks remotely kind of drawn, then move it behind Monika and then render it accordingly so that you can see how it'd look in the final piece. 

It's one of my first times really using it on a complete piece and it's nice when you just want to focus on an atmosphere. I used a lot of lighting overlays to pad this piece's atmosphere. There's probably 5 different shadows overlaying this piece and around 3 glow layers for lighting.