PROCESS VIDEO // emotions

I put together the process video for my emotion sketches! I figured this was an interesting one to share because it shows how much I depend on painting and rendering to get an expression just right. My initial sketch is very different than the final result!

These drawings are inspired by a painting I made last month in which I pushed the facial expressions for storytelling purposes. I wanted to use a similar color scheme and vibe to create similar types of intense expressions, just to practice for the future. This is definitely an area I want to improve in!

Some information about this process video:

• The process has been sped up by 400% - so 4 times the original speed. 

• This painting took me about 4 hours to make in total.
  

LOOSE SKETCHING

For these expressions, I kept my sketches really loose and fast. That’s because I knew I was going to have to work out a lot of the finer details in the rendering phase - just like the painting that these sketches are based on. There’s a lot of trial and error involved in getting the expression to look just right, and I knew it would be a waste of time to get the sketch perfect since I would just end up painting over all of the details later on anyway. That’s why the sketches are really rough and in some ways inaccurate and unfinished. Sometimes it’s really worth the extra investment to get the sketches just right, but for more painterly stuff, I try to move on to the rendering phase fairly quickly. 

TRIAL AND ERROR

In the early stages, you’ll see a lot of trial and error with the colors and rendering. Initially I was thinking of going for a more earthy color scheme but I quickly decided to stick to the original inspiration in terms of color and vibe. I also switch between different painting styles a lot: sometimes going for more defined edges, lines and shapes, and sometimes going for a softer style with more diffuse edges. I cycle between these two constantly during this process, and I think in the end I go for a mix of the two. I think the main reason I found it difficult to commit to one of them is because each expression had different strengths. The grumpy one in the top right looked way better with a crisp, defined style, and the really angry one on the left side looked better with more blurring and softness. Trying to bring them all together and get the style consistent was really challenging! 

RETURNING TO A PREVIOUS VERSION

I spend a lot of time trying to get the middle left expression just right, but everything I do seems to take the intensity away. She goes from being genuinely angry to just having her mouth open. I try a lot of different ways to clean up the painting while maintaining the expression, but usually find that nothing really works. So at 50:50 minutes, I just return to an older version. You may have noticed that I have a lot of layers open in my layers panel - this is because each layer represents an earlier stage of the drawing, which makes it really easy to switch back. There are more efficient ways of doing this, but this method has always worked for me as a way to keep my progress in check. In general, I really recommend saving incrementally or keeping older versions in your file so that you can always check your progress - it’s a lot better than seeing your drawing get worse over time but not knowing how to fix it! It’s definitely saved my drawings many times!

I hope you find this process helpful ❤