Lauren
I've recently signed up for a character design masterclass on Udemy. As part of it, the class has encouraged me to start drawing and practicing some observational drawing. I decided to grab a model reference image off of Unsplash and use it as the basis of this piece of work.
I tend to rely on heavy uses of outlining and don't really blend my shading normally. This usually means that my work leans towards a more traditional 2d animation style when it comes to shadows, so this piece really challenged me to think about different brushes for textures, how to render skin to make it a little more believable and to give the illusion of subsurface scattering.
initial sketch - I always try to do my initial sketches in light tones, so when I redraw them or refine the sketch more, the refined sketches are darker and more prominent but I can keep the original layer on.
building up the lighting in black and white before moving onto colour. This picture acts as a base for the colour to sit on top of.
Adding colour using a series of separate colour layers with a clipping mask on the underlying black and white render.