Behind the scenes: "Truant" step by step

Truant actually began his life a bit earlier than the sketching process - or before I even knew I was making a piece. You see, I hadn't actually intended to make one at all, I'd simply wanted to make a generic male body in Design Doll that I could summon up at later dates and make adjustments to, since the ones people usually upload to their database are seldom to my liking and the ones I had floating around from previous works needed some polishing (if there is interest, I can write a longer post about Design Doll and how I use it). So I polished one up and, for no real reason, decided to pose it prior to saving it.

You can guess what happened then.

Not that it matters too much, but the resolution I started sketching in was 3000x4000, 600dpi. I think I will actually start working larger in the future. I started in Clip Studio Paint, which is my current go-to for lining and flat colors.

I used to real pencil tool which comes with the program. 

For Truant I mostly just sketched over the base pose I created. If I'd wanted something more inherently stylized I could have exaggerated it in the program or, just as likely, used the pose as more of a reference than a "base".

This is really just a time saving device. I am well aware of my capability of drawing from life, or from dolls or whatever, and I have no doubt that, on a long enough time line, I could replicate what I was seeing on the screen if I put it on a separate monitor. Don't be mistaken, I also do those kinds of practices - they are very important - but I don't think forcing yourself to do it without purpose has any real point.

I know there is a lot of debate online about using these kinds of tools. But they are exactly that - tools.

These posing programs, whether Design Doll or Clip Studio, don't have perfect anatomy, and you need to bring your external knowledge of bodies and physiology into your art when you are working with them. Each kind of exercise - drawing from life, drawing from the mind, and using references like these - offer different skill sets that you can grow and foster.

I always sketch on gray to begin with by the way - it's better for the eyes. Especially since mine have gotten very light sensitive after getting sick.

I used a lot of references when filling out his costume. I looked at patch jackets online, grabbed a few pairs of boots from my closet, and pulled up a ton of Vietnam war images - his main source of the overall aesthetic. The arm was mostly from my own imaginings, though I did look through a lot of art from the Ghost in the Shell manga to inspire me.

You can see I added a rectangular block in DD to give myself an idea of the placement for his AK-47 guitar. I tried a lot of different positions and liked this one best. I then pulled up reference photos online that fit that position, altering them just a little bit to make it line up right. I did, however, end up making it much too small, which you'll see I had to wholesale correct in the next panel. There's a reason I always make sure everything has it's own distinct layer.

Now I've got the lines a bit more filled out. I released this WIP, which you may have seen on my Twitter feed, complete with some mark up notes for myself.

For the curious, I was reminding myself to...

Add his cigarette, with smoke.
Fix the line of his sleeve - I'd moved the cuff further down to be more, well, fashionable, and needed to adjust the line.
Raise his pants. As much as I like low slung jeans, I didn't leave any room for his manly bits.
Add a zipper line to his pants.
Change the placeholder words on this patch from "Daisy Daisy Dukes" to "None Of Us Are Human", a simple play on "Everybody's Human."
Add the words "Factory Seconds," carved into the metal of his arm.
Add the words, which will be probably be unreadable in the final image, "War is heck" to his helmet band.
Draw in the boot laces, which I'd forgotten.

I added some temporary darkening of the eye just to give myself an idea of how it would look in the final image since without it his eyes look quite jarring.

I added a quick flat layer behind Truant and sketched in a messy mess of a BG. I originally intended it to largely disappear into white in the center - even at this point I had a general idea of what it should look like in its final form - but I ended up making something a lot more complex. There's no horizon line (you can see this from the DD pose image), so everything you see on screen is "floor" since I specifically didn't add in any walls (since, you know, fading into nothing).

I actually made a substantial mistake in this stage of the game. Do you know what it is? We'll find out soon enough.

I decided to do something a little tricky so I didn't kill myself doing all those damn wires. I made a few layers of heavy black lines - about the thickness I wanted the inside of my wires to be. I then right clicked each layer and made a selection from the layer.

I then chose "edit" and "outline selection". I tried a few different widths and settled on one that looked right compared to the subject character.

I then made a new layer and took a big brush - the real pencil worked decently in this case, but I ultimately used a brush I got from Grut Brushes - and filled in the newly created selection.

I then, importantly, went back to the original black line layer, made a new selection, and used it to delete out the center portion of the the newly created pencil version. After that was just a matter of erasing overlapping lines, adding plugs...

And, oh yeah, CUTTING UP HUGE SECTIONS OF THE BG AND COMPLETELY REARRANGING IT BECAUSE I HADN'T DRAWN THE HANGING WIRES IN PROPER PERSPECTIVE WITH THE IMAGE.

War is hell, baby.

Decided to add in some more pipes to better balance the image and create visual interest.

Background lined and ready to go!

Since I knew how I wanted the image to look in the long run I made some basic tone gradients to kickstart the coloring process. I chose an amber light and complementary blue shadow, which you will see come into play much later so the fog takes on a warm eggshell hue with a pale blue gray vignette.

For now I completely ignore the tone gradient I literally just made and block in some base flat colors. These are the midtones, the neutral colors that the highlights and shadows will be worked into. If you're familiar with the original image you might be a little surprised to see his jacket is actually very dark grey/black.

Back to that tone gradient. I dropped it back over the flat colors and added some basic off white gradients to where the foggy areas will be in the bottom area of the image.

Note that this is the same gradient from before, simply set to overlay. It will generally make the character pop a bit regardless of where in the image you look and also sets the stage for a bit of lighting.

From here on out I switched over to Krita. I think it has much better tools for painting and blending. I can do the same amount of work in a fraction of the time it takes me to do in CSP (I've tried... a number of programs).

Next comes the very messy and rapid-fire act of blocking in light. I used two layers for this.

The first is done in a yellow amber color set to soft light.

The second uses a rich blue color, set to multiply.

I don't do it this way every time, and I don't use these settings every time. This is just one way to accomplish these effects. Do what works best for you and your images!

The lighting getting blocked in if I take the layers off of soft light and multiply and back to normal. What a mess! I wasn't worried about going over the lines - I could always make a selection from the flat fill I had done earlier and mask out anything that went awry. I actually didn't need to, in the end. Everything just came out in the wash.

Fog! I really like how this turned out. It made my heart so happy. I mainly used Krita's watercolor brushes and some of their oils.

You can also see the little selector dots I made to make sure I kept consistent with my highlight and shadow color.

Filling in more small details before I move on with the rendering. Making sure everything is at least the color it is supposed to be.

More rendering. I added a new layer over the skin to add in shades of red to make it appear more lifelike, and to make Truant himself look a bit more tired.

I also made a new layer for  the shading that didn't fall into the amber/blue paradigm - namely the colder/whiter shines on the metal pieces, most specifically his arm, the glow from his red lights, accents on the patches and pins, and a bunch of other small details that would reflect light a bit differently based on their materials.

Here he is basically fully rendered without the fog layers. I made sure to reeaaally dig into those darks and pull out a lot of tonal variation. There's those dots up in the corner too, a bit corrected over time.

I used mostly the "wet paint" brushes in Krita, along with various blenders, the occasional airbrush, and a number of erasers. Like in CSP you can also set a brush to be its own eraser, so you can erase with a wet paint or watercolor brush. Very handy stuff, especially when you are doing something with more liquidy blending.

You can see I did the same amber/blue treatment on the background as I did on Truant himself.

Also how did I end up drawing two bare midriff pictures in a row? Stunning.

And with the fog added back in. I ended up dropping just how heavy the fog was in later iterations.

More details on the background and, an ever important touch, reflected red light hitting the fog. You'd be surprised at how much little things like that add to an image. I colored the individual cords in various colors but it's almost impossible to tell, other than that they have unique tones.

The first "final" image I created. I took it into photoshop and did some basic edits, namely lowering the vibrancy by 25 to make it a little less loud.

I also made some very slight blue gradients and set them to multiply to darken the top of the image a smidge. In truth it's barely noticeable.

This second variant hits much harder, and seems the be the one people prefer.

I applied a curve, dropping the midtones but largely keeping the upper and lowest ranges intact. It looks like this:

I dropped the vibrancy even further, this time to -40.

And I did an even heavier color grading in both blue/cyan and orange.

This third variant was an attempt to make a "best of both worlds" fit. 

It uses a less dramatic curve:

It still uses the same subtle blue gradients the first version did, but makes use a thinner/lighter band of orange gradient along the bottom.

And I think that's a wrap for now! If you have any questions please hit me up so I can expand this post! You can also request all of these images in a zip file to compare them more easily.

Thanks for reading!

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