Foreword
Thanks so much for purchasing this tutorial — I’ve spent a
long time figuring out what to include and what to exclude so
as to keep this both concise and informative. Inside you’ll find
my thought processes behind many of the paintings that I
completed in the autumn of 2017. This was an important and
transformative point in my life artistically. As such, I had much
in the way of experimentation in order to find my style.
Teaching
I love teaching illustration and have had the opportunity to
teach a variety of students. I taught illustration courses at
Woonsocket High School, co-taught a preclinical medical
illustration course at Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown
University, and founded illustration clubs at Lexington High
School and Brown University.
Best Viewed as ePUB
This content is best viewed as an ePUB file through Apple
Books or through an ePUB reader. There are numerous image
galleries in this book that you can swipe through in order to
see my illustrations in various stages. If you were to read this
as a PDF, you’ll see only one image in each stack. It’s still
readable, but not nearly as interactive.
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Cat Girl:
Process Overview
I’m going to begin by describing my general process
when approaching these Autumn paintings. Then, I’ll
delve into each painting individually.
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Sketch Layer
I always start each painting with a
sketch. I am not comfortable going
straight into brush-strokes and shapes,
so what I do is create a simple sketch
first, such as the one shown below.
look. I’m really careful at this stage as
well, and I make sure that there are few
to no mistakes. I’ve found that it is
much harder to fix something the further
along you are in a digital painting,
especially if you are an artist who takes
advantage of numerous layers.
Blocking Out Colors
I’ll lower the sketch’s opacity to
somewhere between 10-15% and begin
blocking out the colors with a new layer
using a brush I named Fill Outline.
Lower the opacity of your sketch.
This is mainly to establish the
composition and for me to get a feeling
for how the overall painting is going to
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To use this brush, draw around the
outline of your object. Then, using
Procreate’s bucket tool, drag the color
from the top right directly into the the
outlined space. This saves you time
from having to paint the entire color
block. I’ve shown how to use this brush
in the images to the right.
Now that you’ve blocked in one part of
your illustration, it’s time to block
everything else out. This stage of the
painting process may take you a while,
but I urge you to be patient with it. As
you block out each part, feel free to lock
the layer and start painting textures
within them.
Adding Lines Again
Lighting
After this stage of the painting, I create a
new layer and create new lines that are
clean and smooth, setting the layer
blending mode to either multiply or
linear burn. I make sure to never draw
a line on the outline of an object, though
this part is entirely personal preference.
See what I mean below. It’s subtle.
Now I move onto my favorite part of
each of these paintings — lighting. The
way I used to approach lighting for
these painting was to use pure white rim
lighting. I usually set these layers to the
add blend mode or the normal blend
mode. Then, I’d duplicate this white rim
lighting layer and Gaussian Blur it by
15-20% and set it to around 30%
opacity. This way, your strong light has a
halo around it that glows.
Line layer turned off.
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Rim lighting before duplicated blurred layer.
While painting lights, I have my subject
selected so that I don’t paint outside of
the lines.
Finally, I’ll add overlay layers to correct
the colors and to find a mood that I
resonate with... and that’s it! This is a
simplified version of my process. You
can dissect the specifics by looking
through my original files.
Current Mood:
Process Specifics
Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s delve into the
specifics for how I made certain decisions, from the
beginning until the end. We’ll use Current Mood as a
case study. Warning — not as many fun images here.
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Beginning a Painting
Before beginning a painting, I gather inspiration by researching
references from sites such as Pinterest or by documenting
things from daily life. Inspiration is often fleeting, so it’s
important to capture these moments as quickly as you can. For
this painting, I expanded on a feeling that I was feeling
throughout the day and collected various pose references.
Important Considerations
When starting a sketch, I keep in mind the fundamentals of
perspective, form, value, anatomy, and composition, and later,
when painting, color theory and lighting.
But even before considering these fundamentals, I consider
storytelling, and in my opinion, this is the key to differentiating
a successful or unsuccessful piece of art. While technical
prowess might win the hearts of some viewers, it ignores a
subset of viewers who would simply be satisfied with a feeling.
For example, Pascal Campion is an artist who doesn’t focus
all of his efforts on technical skill but is a masterful storyteller.
And he is undeniably one of the most successful artists out
there.
I’m not the most technically skilled. There are plenty of artists
out there who are more technically skilled than I am, and my
simple process outlined above is really all I followed to create
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these 8 paintings. It’s painfully simple, and with regards to
technical skill, could be easily mastered in no time.
So to capture my audience, I think about the emotional
qualities that I want to evoke in my viewers. For every artist, it’s
very important to hone in on a single emotion. For my painting,
Current Mood, the emotion I wanted to convey was tension.
How do you capture tension? I considered a few things here,
namely body language, external appearance, visual metaphors,
and lighting. Let’s dive into each of these.
Body Language: I wanted the body language here to be very
tight. An open body language shows relaxation and a sense of
comfort, but a closed body language would indicate something
brewing internally.
External Appearance: Her outfit is multicolored, both blue
and pink, with mismatched shoes. I wanted this visual cue to
signal an internal conflict that might have been taking place. It’s
rare to see mismatched clothing like this, and in a subtle way, I
wanted it to evoke a sense of ambivalence.
Visual Metaphors: She is small. Extremely small.
Insignificantly small. She’s sitting on top of a leaf, and this was
meant to showcase her internal state of mind — insignificance.
Lighting: The lighting here is blindingly bright on her. For most
people, this would be uncomfortable, so I wanted the lighting
to also play a role in my storytelling, creating discomfort.
Fundamentals
Now that we have storytelling out of the way, I begin to
consider the fundamentals. Here’s what was going through my
head when I began sketching Current Mood.
Perspective: While perspective was not the focus, I wanted to
create the sense of a micro-environment, so I decided early on
to blur out the background, like a camera’s macro lens.
Form: This style itself is very flat, so my consideration of form
was limited to the rim-lighting, simple shadows, and textured
brushstrokes. The textured brushstrokes on her shirt, for
example, followed the form I wanted to create.
Value: I wanted my values to pop. High contrast. From the
onset, I decided that I’d have bright light juxtaposed with a dim
background and subject. Sunset would be perfect for this.
Anatomy: The anatomy here is stylized, but based on a
reference that came from real life.
Composition: Composition is about balancing the different
elements on the page. I had placed my subject on the left side
of the page, but the right felt empty. To address this... I simply
drew leaves. This is a very underwhelming solution, but it is
truly all I did here. I kept it simple, so the focus was on the girl.
Color Theory: I had imagined greens and yellows flooding the
painting. The picture would be warm, and the hues that would
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stand out would be the ones that contrasted heavily with the
overly green background — namely the pink and the blue. By
having these hues on my subject, the viewer’s eyes would be
drawn to her.
Lighting: As stated earlier, I wanted to create a blinding light
that would shine on her profile to create discomfort.
Rendering Considerations
From here on, by following the process I outlined earlier, it was
easy to begin this painting and take it all the way to the end.
But here are few things I also considered to make it go from
90% to 100% — and these are some things that you should
remember in every painting to make the rendering believable.
Light Halos: When strong light hits your eyes, it’s often
surrounded by an intensely saturated ring of color. I utilized a
technique called the Overlay Glow, shown below, to
demonstrate this. By having a saturated ring of color around a
bright area, your eyes instinctively squint as if hard light were
hitting them.
Subsurface Scattering: Ever shine a flashlight through your
fingers and see bright red? In the world of rendering, this
phenomenon is called subsurface scattering. By having a
bright light shine on a surface of an object, the reverse surface
of the object will glow with intense saturation. In this painting,
the green leaves reveal a subsurface underbelly of bright
yellow-green. It’s beautiful, and I used it everywhere.
Specific Techniques
Multiply layers were used for shadows.
Overlay layers gave the lighting much
more life. The overlay layers served to
create a light halo as well as establish
subsurface scattering.
Multiply Layers
work. Therefore, I just settled with a
multiply layer and called it a day.
Overlay Layers
Unlike with the process overview earlier,
I really wanted to capture a warm light
here. Because of that, I decided that
after creating my initial lighting layer, I
would create an overlay on top of it
and paint a very saturated orange color.
You can immediately see how using this
overlay layer adds subtle yet powerful
features to the lighting. It acts as a glow
for the light source, and it also acts as a
subsurface element for the subject’s
hair.
There are many ways to use overlay
layers, but I’d urge you not to overdo
this blending mode as it’s very easy to
get carried away with it. It’s one of digital
art’s biggest weapons for lighting.
Below, I’ve cropped out a section of the
painting that showcases the multiply
shadow layer.
Basically, I decided to use a multiply
layer here because I had already painted
some details on the character’s shirt.
Painting over it with a normal layer
would mean that I’d need to paint the
details again, giving myself twice the
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Before adding the orange overlay glow layer.
Halloween Red
Halloween Red was done in celebration of Halloween. I
had spend many afternoons this fall in the anatomy lab
at Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and
was ready to draw some of the things I had seen.
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Subtle Differences
With Halloween Red, I also deviated from my process overview.
With this painting, I did the following differently — I used
multiply layers pretty heavily for the shadows on her face, I
used soft light and color burn layers to correct the color, and I
used normal layers for overpainting. Multiply layers and color
corrections are straightforward, but what is an overpainting?
Overpainting
When you’ve already used twenty to thirty layers and suddenly
find something wrong with your painting, what do you do?
An overpaint layer! It’s essentially a fancy way of referring to a
painting on a normal layer to manually fix mistakes.
The risky part about using this technique is that you’re
essentially committing all of your previous layers as final.
Because, if you were to change a layer underneath your
overpaint layer, you would mess with how your layers blend. Or
at least, it becomes more of a painful to to fix previous layers.
This type of normal layer goes back to how we would paint
with traditional media, manually. Nothing wrong with it, but I
usually only pull it out when I’ve messed up a step from before.
In this painting, I overpaint her eyelashes and the lighting seen
on the rim of the hole in her head.
Flat colors.
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Where Am I?
This painting followed the process overview pretty
precisely. There was hardly any variation, and the
completion time of around 2 hours here is indicative of
the comfort zone that I had created for myself.
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Subtle Differences
In this painting, I followed the process that I had created for
myself to the best of my ability. In the end, I think this painting
represents the process in its truest form, as I had hardly any
variation with how I approached and finished this painting. In
terms of one subtle difference, it would be in the way that I
focused more on the detailing stage than I would have normally
in another painting.
Following a Formula
While following a formula is certainly an easy thing do, one
drawback is that it turns off your creative thinking in certain
areas. I admit, when following my process down to every step,
I was definitely not as stimulated as when I’m forced to figure
out every step on my own.
However, I would urge you to follow my process once or twice
to see if you like the results that you get from painting this way.
If you enjoy the general style from these illustrations, this
process is likely the easiest way to achieve it. Then, put your
own spin on it. If something seems to not vibe well with how
you create art, change it. You can turn my process into your
own process.
Ultimately, there is a reason that I don’t exactly paint like this
anymore. Once I had figured out the process, painting felt a
little formulaic, and this may be something you struggle with as
well.
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Flat colors.
Dreamy
This painting also followed my overview process very
closely. Because of that, I was able to finish it in around
2 hours, from initial sketch to final render.
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Subtle Differences
I was very indecisive with this painting. While attempting to
follow my process, there were numerous times when I asked
myself whether I wanted to change something in the painting.
In that way, this painting deviated in a way that made me think
about how I wanted to approach these paintings.
Being Flexible
Scroll through the images to the right, all the way to the end.
Do you see the sketch? The sketch had a very different feeling
than what ended up being captured in my finished illustration.
Because of that, I wanted to discuss the necessity of being
flexible. Somewhere along my painting, during the color
blocking stage, I didn’t want to paint the background that I had
envisioned from before. Instead of going back and sketching
everything out again, I just began creating new color blocks
and seeing how they fit in the composition.
By allowing myself to be freely creative in this aspect, the
painting benefited, and I personally had a lot more fun painting.
I love how Procreate saves the video process in the original
Procreate file. Because you have access to them, try going
through the video playback for this illustration. You’ll catch
many of my indecisions in the process — fun fact, she originally
had white hair.
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Flat colors.
Train Friends
This painting was difficult to nail down, and in the end, I
had to do a lot of things differently to get it to a point
where I’d be happy posting it up.
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Subtle Differences
With Train Friends, I deviated from the
process overview in two ways — I paid
special attention to the train window to
make it convincing glass, and I also
used an overpaint method to fix
mistakes I noticed after already posting
it on Instagram.
Illustrated below are the differences in
the window with and without this
texture. It’s supposed to be a small
difference, but I wanted to paint the
believability of a window with just a few
brush strokes.
Train Window
How can we tell that a surface is glass?
Especially from inside looking out, such
that the reflections aren’t there? In my
opinion, people can tell if glass is glass
from the subtle surface textures that
we’re able to perceive on the glass
surface. Otherwise, without these subtle
textures, people everywhere would be
walking into glass windows left and
right.
I added a subtle texture with a
Procreate stock brush called Flicks.
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Without window texture.
Overpainting
In a similar vein in earlier illustrations, I
added an overpaint layer at the very end
in order to fix some things like the
subject’s legs and the shading in certain
areas. You can see the differences
between the two versions, before and
after the overpaint, on the right. Can you
spot the differences?
Before overpaint.
Reunion
Reunion, which is an homage to a very sweet film that
many of you have watched, was an extremely fun
painting for me to complete. The entire time, I listened to
anime soundtracks, which really got me in the mood.
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Subtle Differences
This painting generally followed my process, but there were a
few differences — first, I overpainted towards the end, and
second, I focused a lot on the lighting for this painting, and I
think there are a few things to be learned from the lighting.
Lighting
For this piece, the lighting was something that I struggled with.
With the style that I had developed before, there was really only
the use of white light. Here, however, the background was
clearly a sunset.
First, I used a multiply layer to establish the shadows. I made
sure that both subjects were dark enough so that a bright light
would produce a nice contrast, and I made sure that the
multiply layer’s color matched with the background.
Then, I decided on a new blending mode, add, to paint the
illuminated areas. I painted in the illuminated areas after
selecting my blocked out colors so that I wouldn’t paint outside
the edges. Selecting your boundaries is crucial in saving
yourself time from repainting edges.
I constantly adjusted the colors of my shadow and light layers
in order to find the most natural lighting. As you can see, with a
combination of multiply and add layers, your characters can
go from out-of-place to fitting naturally within the background.
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Flat colors.
Lunch
This painting was done after I had just created a new
brush called Flat Painting, so I took a chance and
explored a few ways that I could push this painting
forward.
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Subtle Differences
This painting started off very differently. There was supposed to
be a second person in it — a boy. And then the boy became a
tiger. And then the tiger became a donut. It would have been
amazing to paint the tiger, but I was on a time-crunch that day,
so I settled with the donut. Something I did different this time
was how I approached painting textures with my Flat Painting
brush.
Texturing
After you block out your colors, leaving the colors flat and
lifeless almost seems like a crime — at least to me, personally. I
know there are plenty of artists who love utilizing flat colors and
have them work really well for them.
After I created each of my flat color blocks, I locked each layer.
This way, I could paint within these areas without going outside
their boundaries. Then, I begin painting in textures. A brush
that I had just created, Flat Painting, was perfectly textured for
what I wanted to go for.
These texture were very subtle, as you can tell from the images
to the right. The way I painted them was 50% random, as I just
wanted some interesting visual changes across my subject to
keep the viewer engaged.
Flat colors with textures.
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Thank you!
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Check out the other products that I’ve
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Send me an email with your thoughts or
any questions to jingsketch@gmail.com.
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