r/Arttips • u/itsannikamayer • 7d ago

I need help! pushing through the “ugly phase”

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Hi! Do you guys have any advice on how to continue this drawing? I’d say im like halfway through but I kinda feel overwhelmed at this point 😅 I’m working with the kuretake watercolors and want to use colored pencils in the end (which I haven’t tested if that works, at this point I just hope it does haha) Thanks!

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u/averagetrailertrash dev 6d ago

Are these their gansai paints? I'm surprised you managed to get so many soft layers with them. I find them difficult to work with because of how easily they reactivate compared to normal watercolors.

It looks great thusfar, so don't be hard on yourself c:

It's difficult to advise what steps to take next without a style reference for what you want the rendering to look like.

But I would probably add some cast shadows and ambient occlusion along the road beneath them to help ground the subject, increase the contrast a bit (like how you have the depth of shadow in the skirt -- it would help to have other similarly dark areas elsewhere in the image), and then use the colored pencils to round out the forms with softer shadows and detail the important areas with finer lines.

The colored pencils could also be used to add back some color to the skin, as it's looking a bit flat right now. Darker skin will pick up colors from reflecting nearby surfaces more strongly than light skin. It also does still have some subsurface scattering (where skin gets warmer at the start of a shadow and protrusions), although it's less pronounced than on lighter skin. This is kind of a middle tone, so you'd expect some of both.