hello hello dear children!

a whole while ago i participated in the art contest of felycitaz, where you could choose a lineart one of the participants of the last contest created... and man i was so so tempted to do several...

so this was then the lineart i chose to colour in, in the end.... idk i just like faces i guess and was in the mood to paint more than just random warm-up shapes, watercolour sketches and environment doodles >w<"

anyways, first things first: the prep work. since this was a jpg uploaded to wattpad, the quality obviously isn't the best. and since i desperately wanted to colour the lineart in some places, i decided to go ahead and try to sandwich the jpg and this version, where i selected and cut out all the white parts, over the colouring, so i still can do my fun colour stuff, whilst also not needing to face the issues of some detailed lines having been deleted together with the background.

so for now: my canvas looked like this:

very exciting, i know, but it's an important step, to know where i started off from.

from now on, i was able to colour it in, issue is, i didn't know how. you see, it's pretty obvious, that this lineart wasn't meant to be the lineart of an illustration or a character portrait of a specific oc. there is no focal point, no expression, no energy within the entire piece, which is why i persume it was a study for the facial anatomy, and then later on a rendering practice.

and that made things rather difficult to figure out how to give the lineart some more life, so i just went with what the drawing offered.

first things first, i decided on the colours. i didn't have a big plan at the beginning and figured most stuff out later on, so just have this wonderful skin WIP, since this step looks just fucking hilarious xD

the extreme symmetry balances the picture out perfectly, which is known to give pieces rather eerie and unsettling feeling. so i decided to lean into that concept. but i would need to contrast it with something fluid and natural in the background... probably also very chaotic, as the piece would not look unsettling, but rather just straight up boring, if i didn't add some sense of movement in there.

since this is a deadface in the sense of expressions, i decided to play into that. emphasize how perfect and emotionless the appearance is. and even though i was pretty torn between some sort of undead creature or a robot, i decided to go with the undead version.

because of the black tattoos, i decided to make the eyes nearly completely black, finally giving the piece a point of interest, that doesn't lead the eye away from the drawing, really pulling the viewer into the center and slowly spiraling outwards, before falling back into the center, through mostly white, silver, light gold and pastel blue/turquoise tones.

i also added some deep shadows in the eye sockets, since i still was playing with the idea, whether or not to add the glowing suggestion of a skull in there.
i also tried my very best to make the face look fairly natural, taking quite a while to get a face shape i was happy with and finally hiding that deadface through some shadows and highlights, now making it seem like a rather cocky-villain-type of expression, you know?

I also decided to make her irises a bright red... which proved to be a bit of a struggle with the given lineart, but after i decided that i could just hide the slightly crooked look and the inwards-slanted irises in the black sclera.. things got easier and i felt stupid for not having that idea earlier >w<"

i also decided here, to make the subsurface-scattering appear cold and more blue than actually red or orange, as it would be natural for normal skin. that really helped in pulling the skin away from a more natural pale skin-tone, and push the whole thing in a more grey, dead and cold direction.
I also thought that this would be quite a bit better with my plans for the background, as that would be casting some rather extreme, red rim lighting onto the whole scene, making her entire design, except for the eyes, completely contrasting to the rest of the piece.

then it came to the background... i messed around with some textures, enhanced the effect i got on the face with deeper shadows, coloured lineart and essentially just more detail and contrast.

for the background itself... that was a struggle... essentially i just did a random something and it ended up looking kinda cool??

either way, after i essentially had all my elements in place, i could finally move on to making the whole think look more deliberate and coheisive. i pushes all the values over in the red, added that red rim-lighting and ambience lighting, before adding several overlays to give the whole thing some more grip and a colder, more stone-like feel.

so yeah....

not all too sure what i could be left to say over here, so i guess i'll just leave it with that ^-^"
i most certainly had a lot of fun with this one... just sitting down, slowly working on the colours over the course of five days, treating it like a fun little side-project to all the main-things i had going on around it.
man... i for sure don't think painting really suits my style, but it sure is fun and i do indeed find it quite a lot easier than cell-shading... especially when it's this "fake" painting, where you already have the structures and lines everywhere and you don't need to chisel away at the details, on top of a rough sketch of shapes.

either way, i hope you guys liked this rather different piece >w<