How I render

On the art side of the internet, specifically digital art, there are a lot of people constantly asking “how do you render”, “what programs do you use”, and “what brushes do you use”. As your fellow internet dweller and resident artist, I am here to tell you how rendered this drawing.

First of all, here are the brushes that I have used in this piece:

All of these brushes are free and easy to use. This is not sponsored. 

Moving on to the actual drawing process. I am going to start this with a completed sketch I did not start sketching and it automatically turned out like this. I have gone through many initial posing sketches and how I wanted them to be composed. I also used the liquify tool to move around some pieces. 

I use the HB pencil brush on Procreate since it is easy for me to control and it has a very different texture than what I color with. I usually start all my sketches with red and tweak it until I am happy. After I am satisfied with the sketch, I turn on the alpha lock and fill the layer with a brown color. I use it to be able to see my colors more clearly and also because it can act like line art.

Usually, at this point, I would change my brush to whatever brush I plan to work with for most of the drawing. I prefer the sharp render brush from the Jingsketch basics brush pack since it has an interesting shape and a fun texture but it is also quite easy to control.  

Afterward, I make a new layer and turn on the multiply blend mode and start filling in my base colors. As you can see, in this particular drawing, I also decided to map out the shadows and highlights. Usually, I don’t do that but in this drawing I wanted the coloring process to be a little bit faster. 

The multiply layer makes it so that the colors underneath get darker based on the color that was placed on top, think of it like a watercolor painting. 

Once I am done with the base colors, I add another layer. This layer will be what I do everything on. I like to start with my background, if there is any since the character is going to cover the background anyways so might as well work from back to front. 

I like to color drop and just mess around with the colors a bit at this stage like slightly shifting the hue and saturation but nothing drastic. The background in this drawing is meant to be softer since it is not the main focal point, this is also why it lacks details.

Once I am done with the background, I started working on the character. Again, because I have already mapped out the shadows and highlights in the sketch, I was able just to color-drop most of this. I try to tighten up the shape of the character while also keeping them soft since the actual drawing was supposed to feel quite soft. Overall, it is just painting and repainting over different parts and using the round render brush to blur parts that needed to be blurred.

I like to blur out the edges of shadows so it blends more and shows a better sense of depth. Sometimes I do add another layer for the blush and then just merge it down after but usually, that is because I forgot to do the blush earlier. 

Now that I have finished the main coloring of the piece, I like to add another multiply layer. This is so that I can create just a bit more contrast and make the character stand out a little bit more. It also helps create a feeling of being somewhat 3D even though the character is clearly drawn on an iPad at 11 pm.

Now, these next few steps vary based off each drawing. For this particular drawing, I wanted the light to be streaming in from the window. 

Is this me being lazy and not wanting to draw the outside or did I actually believe the outside was this bright? We will never know.

To achieve this effect, I created a layer with the add blend mode. This blend mode, to my understanding, makes things brighter and more “glowy”. I just drew some squiggles in the window and a bit of the bed and just used gaussian blur to soften it. 

For the mirror effect, I created another layer and used a hard brush to just draw lines across the image, not going over the left wall because that is not part of the mirror. The diagonal lines had varying opacities since light is not always equally distributed. I turned the opacity down to 50% since I didn’t want the mirror to look too distracting.

Now, these last 2 images may look very similar but I assure you they are not. At this point, I thought that my drawing looked too dead and I wanted it to be more vibrant, and what better way to do that than:

An overlay layer!

The overlay layer makes parts darker or brighter (depending on the value that you use) and brighter based on saturation. I used a gray-pink-like color and filled the whole layer with that color. The gray is the value, since I tried to keep it as close to the middle as possible, it did not change the actual value of the image too much but the pink color made the drawing more vibrant. The pink also aids it to look more cohesive as the colors all have a common pink undertone. 

This last layer was another overlay later, this time because I wanted to change the value and saturation of certain areas. I wanted the focus of the drawing to be the face of the character so I purposefully made the top right window area more bright and saturated and the bottom left a bit darker. The contrast between the light of the window and the black hair makes the viewer’s eyes drawn immediately toward that area and hence, the face. 

And that’s the end! In case anyone is wondering, it took me 1hr 47mins to complete this drawing and honestly as of now, this is the best rendering process for me. It is efficient and fast and saves me the hassle of doing line art and separating each color onto its own layer. I will be posting this drawing this week so stay tuned for that!