Behind the Brush: Thoughts and Technical Insights

I feel that lately I've already covered the key aspects of my artistic process or art tips in general, so today I just wanted to write a bit about these latest practices. Nevertheless, if you have any art doubts, troubles, or general struggles, drop them in the comments and if I haven't written about it yet, I will! Subscribe to unlock this content and comment.

Crashed Kiss

The crashed car that kind of looks like a kiss was a picture I saw a few days ago and I've found particularly odd, since it has an interesting range of cold colors and values. I felt compelled to try it. It was random enough, to be honest.

I started with very simple line art just to define and separate the car covering the whole composition and the ones in the back, then proceeded to quickly add a few colors and jumped straight to the shadows. Even though nothing was refined, I wanted to make sure at the beginning of the process that I would be able to catch that very abstract shape that looked like two people kissing. Worst case scenario, if I could not, I would just move forward with a different reference, but luckily it was not that tough.

I just slightly created that volume using different shadow tones, a different approach from my usual shadow technique in which I define the shadow silhouette using one tone. The thing is that for this particular spot there is a wide variation of shadows within the main shadow. Simplifying would have been more tedious.

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Eating Lip

So this portrait was more of a fun drawing exercise in which the values were the little extra. I simply wanted to push her anatomy into more curved, stylized shapes. I like to save plenty of drawings I've found on the internet, not even knowing the authors but very much liking the aesthetic in their line work.

So the way it goes is basically me starting to draw the whole thing and then checking those drawing references to see small details I find beautiful, like double lines, line composition (meaning having some spots very messy and others almost without lines), having very thick lines in some spots to create volume through ambient occlusion shadowing.

The trick is to have your work 80 or 90% done and then boost it with things you love from art that's not yours: details.

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Fancy Feets

I suppose this picture looked cool and I wanted to paint it. Sometimes it's just that simple.

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In case you want to dive deeper into these steps, I'll be sharing the process video, references and more about these practices this Friday. Check the tier in which you can access them and consider upgrading!.

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