behind the paws!

i thought i'd talk a little about the process of making the paw drawing from an artist's perspective, since it was a fun experiment in a lot of ways!

this post has a lot of images! please don't mind their layout, i don't wanna code a new image layout just for this one post >w>' you can click on them to expand them if you'd like

ok, so, the initial sketch had a lot of line thickness variance, but it was also too rough to try to clean up without spending a lot of time on it, so i did my best to try to preserve the variance while doing a line pass. i don't usually do this, so it was fun to try to figure out where the extra weight made sense vs where it was just a byproduct of struggling with the shape during the sketch phase - interestingly there was a lot of overlap! difficult shapes tend to be the ones that look good highlighted, turns out

pebble's paws, rough sketch pebble's paws, lineart

in terms of shading, i picked a more difficult light source position (above) than i usually do, i thought it'd be fun with the complex shapes to try to figure which parts the light would hit. i also put extra effort into using shading to highlight certain anatomy, specifically the "heels" here. in a lot of art i like i noticed that artists often use shading to highlight details that aren't lined or colored, so i wanted to practice doing that too! i think i'll be trying to do that more in the future. sometimes i like to compare the process of soft shading to like, carving out a statue, and on the pic below you can kinda see what i mean! in essence the process is very similar (erasing out pieces to make shapes come to life). i also put a slight gradient over the shading layer, i figured it'd add a nice touch.

pebble's paws, shaded but without colour

even with all the shading i wanted to make the focus of the drawing pop out more, so i decided to add little shiny highlights that point towards the light source. despite being a really small detail i feel like it adds a lot. cue the meme that's like "horny vs not horny" and the only difference is a few shinies dfgjh

pebble's paws, shaded and with colours pebble's paws, shaded, with colours and added shine

then to add a little warmth i added an orange gradient over top, erased out the spots where light doesn't hit, and set the blending mode to color dodge. it's like barely noticeable, but i feel like shifting the color temperature of the light with this looks neat!

pebble's paws, colour graded to appear warmer pebble's paws, with the colour grading overlay shown at full opacity, like a behind the scenes look

and lastly i added a leather texture overlay, just as a small touch, it's something i noticed other artists using to make their art pop out more so i decided i'd give it a try too

a close-up of pebble's paw, with a leathery texture overlay, showing how it's being applied a close-up of pebble's paw, with the leathery texture now applied, barely visible but adding a nice feel to it

you may notice that the work in progress pics have like, wrinkles above the paw pads - i removed those as a last minute change because they didn't make much sense with the anatomy being digitigrade otherwise. ok that's all! thanks for reading

the full, finished image of pebble's paws, now also with a little bubble showing pebble's blushy expression

LISTENING TO

crywolf

PLAYING

abiotic factor

FEELING

pawtastic

OUTSIDE IT IS

freezing and windy!

more reading

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rain world: the watcher

previous post:
Raising the Hoof

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