Line work and sculpting

Thudray

For the majority of my art career, I’ve used mainly line work as the concept as well as the finished product for all my pieces. I would say I’m pretty good at it, with a single squiggle you can infer a lot of detail without having to render a surface. If you look at the drawing above, you can see some lines on his inner thigh that imply folds in the clothing. I didn’t have to render a shadow or highlight to do this. Line art is so great at being a framework, and its also great to be the final product, see comics/illustration/everythingElse.

Recently however, I’ve been wanting to add the second layer of rendering, digital painting. With digital painting, you don’t really use line art in the final product. There are styles that do, and when I’m comfortable with them, Ill probably try that out as well. But now I want to be able to sculpt with the brush, define a surface with values and color, using line art as the underlying guide.

I’ve bought some video tutorials on digital painting, and It’s honestly been kicking my butt. Color is such a new thing for me, and if I’m honest, Ive just been doing paint by numbers for the majority of my career.

Let’s see where this awkwardness takes me.