PROCESS VIDEO // procreate character superpost

I dug through my procreate folder and made a long video with all of the process videos featuring character art! It’s 1 hour 20 mns long in total. 

Here are the main steps of my creative process, which you can see more or less repeated in each drawing: 

1 // ROUGH SKETCH

I like to keep the sketch as simple as possible, to maximize movement and gesture! The less detail, the better, because that allows me to focus on the overall shapes and movement most of all. I tend to keep it fast and loose. In a lot of these drawings, you’ll see me making a bunch of different loose sketches before settling on my final sketch!

2 // CLEANER SKETCH AND/OR LINES

I usually make a cleaner, more defined sketch after that. This is where I start to think a bit more about the details, constructing those on top of the rougher sketch. I think it’s the balance of looser, dynamic lines with more defined and cleaner lines that makes a sketch look good, so I always do both - usually on separate layers. If I want to make a clean drawing, I’ll do clean lineart on top of that as well. But I always keep my rough sketch lines, because they give lots of movement to the drawing! You’ll see some of my rough sketch lines showing through in almost all of my art. 

3 // BASE COLORS

On a separate layer below the lines, I block in the basic colors. Usually I’ll set the lines to ‘multiply’ and change the line color to something saturated, like brown or red, so that they interact nicely with the colors below. I use color editing tools to tweak the colors a bit so that they ‘feel’ right to me. 

4 // MERGE & DETAIL

Once the base colors and line color are set, I’ll merge them together and start adding detail on top. I like leaving this til the end, because it’s just a lot easier to work in the details when the colors and overall shapes have already been established. It’s a more intiuitive process to decide which areas need more attention. When adding detail, I try to use the colors on the canvas as much as possible - so I’ll pick a dark grey or blue that’s already there, instead of introducing new dark colors. This keeps the color scheme more unified! 

For more info on which brushes I use in Procreate, check out this post!

I might make another one of these for studies and speedpaints, let me know if you are interested! If you have any questions after watching it, let me know - I’m thinking of putting together a quick procreate tutorial and your questions can help me come up with ideas for one!