Ok, I finished all I plan to do on my Katia bass player. (till I get the all done and do one massive full-band image!) If anyone feels like uploading this to the fanart booru, be my guest. I’ll include a link to a high res image at the bottom here that would be best. E621 is fine too. HOLD OFF on that! Kaz has a suggestion to improve the line art and I’d love to see if that will make it better!
I just think I’ve exhausted my supply of inappropriate uploads on the Fanart booru to do it myself. I tried to keep it within Questionable bounds, but I don’t feel like taking the risk myself.
This is not a tutorial, it’s just a blog of what I did and I’m a beginner at these things for sure! But since Photoshop let’s you do layers, here’s all my layers and what they were intended for.
First, of course, Kaz’s original – scanned.
Next, I drew lines over it.
During one of Kaz’s streams, I saw how he was doing it, or at least I thought I did. Of course, he did it like lightning fast but I think I got the gist. I draw a path, curving the path as needed to at least come close to the primary lines.
The lines I drew were much fatter than this layer indicates – I thinned them down later. Once a path is in place, you use Stroke to draw a line over it at the color/size that the current paintbrush is set for. So here’s that stage (again, these lines are thinner than what I started with. I just thought the ending lines were too think so I thinned them down):
Then I put in the solid colors. I used the fill bucket for large areas, but then went over the edges with a small brush so there’s no edge weirdness. That took a long time to say the least. But I learned the necessity of that a while back when doing another color-job some time ago.
That’s where I left it yesterday. This morning I watched some tutorials and looked at the biggest repository of Katia fan art there is. (No silly, not the fanart booru… e621!) For research purposes only of course! Please be gentle – shading is a dark art to me and a lot of it is guesswork, but here’s what I finally came up with. (I tried to keep the shading modest till I get more confident with it)
And then the easy part – found a background ‘stage’ and stuck her in it:
BUT then Kaz suggested a tapering method of improving the line art. This is new and updated here. Mostly lines that end are now tapered rather than hard-ended. Mostly around eyes, mouth and boobies. Also a layer was causing background to be lighter than intended.
And that’s it for Katia. I plan to do the others too of course, and eventually put them all on stage with Katia.
Here’s the promised link to a higher-res version:
QW is next!
bdprequel 
