DaveRapoza

Rei Ayanami - WIP + PSD w/suit texture breakdown

Added 2020-08-06 19:58:46 +0000 UTC

Hey!

So, today I wanted to share the current progress on the Rei Ayanami piece - I spent a good amount of time drawing out Rei/sketching out Unit 00, I'm liking the way the textures/color on Rei's suit and the colors in general are coming along. Over the past few weeks I've been researching a bit more on Yoshiyuki Sadamoto's promo style images(the fully rendered ones), I managed to grab a copy of 'Carmine', his artbook, which was very helpful. For where this style is at right now I'm pretty happy with the mix of the Evangelion look and my general approach. I don't think I lost too much of the essence, but it's not perfect either. I'm hoping that as I move into the rendering process things will come together a bit more cohesively.

As for the actual composition and illustration - I'm placing Rei & Unit 00 among the forest/mountains where Rei does, well, without spoiling anything - this here - one of my favorite scenes. I also like how the environment works with her character as well as the general softness of the colors. Hopefully this will contrast the previous Shinji piece. Although, at this point, I'm feeling there may be a divergence in style between the two, which doesn't really bother me all too much as I felt the last one didn't quite nail what I was looking to accomplish.

Here's a breakdown of how I applied the texture to Rei's suit - each step in this process(which you can see in the PSD), is basically just me using a new multiply layer for each color and building very light colored tones over one another(using the Clip Studio Paint watercolor brush attached to this post set to 30% opacity) and doing this continually. Also - I don't just lay down flat brush strokes over one another, I will erase them as I go by pressing C to turn that watercolor brush into an eraser - this helps blend the brush so it looks a bit smoother.