Art of SGZ vol.2

Now that Saintly Girls Zone Vol.2 is finally completed and available for purchase, I thought I'd take the chance to share some of the graphic work I did for this release.

A more light novel-esque series by format compared to A Hero Past the 25th, the paperback editions were originally meant to be fully illustrated, as LNs often are. But I soon had to face my personal limitations there. The extra time and effort spent didn't translate well to profitability, so in the end, my dream of an illustrated book series had to be left to the unseen future. Delivering in a timely fashion had to be the priority.

Which is why, Volume 2 doesn't have images and the artwork I originally did for Vol.1 was also removed in the latest update to maintain consistency. If you managed to grab a copy with pictures, then you can congratulate yourself, those might be worth some money one day. Who knows?

But, even without chapter-specific insert illustrations, there is still need for promotional art work, cover images and other graphics, so I wasn't left entirely without work.

I haven't written about the process behind my illustrations before, because it's essentially the same process every digital artist goes through. If you've seen one art tutorial online, then you've seen them all and I've very little left to teach in that regard.

But in case you have no experience and don't know much about drawing digitally, then let me walk you through the workflow behind the cover image of Vol. 2 step by step this once. Even if you have experience, maybe you can take this as a cautionary example. Like, "my god, cutting corners so much should be illegal!"

Let's go!

Everything begins from a rough sketch. I often have no idea what I want when I get started working on a cover and it takes multiple sketches to narrow it down to something presentable. 

But in this case, I had a fairly clear idea all along. It's an arrangement I wanted to do already in 2016 when the story was first published, but I didn't have the skill to make it look nice enough, so I begrudgingly gave up on it.

Now, I tried to do the same idea again and I felt it became nice enough, so I just rolled with it. 

The rough sketch is followed by lineart, which I showed in an earlier post. It's the part I personally enjoy most. Sometimes, when the sketch is bad, I do a rough, sketchier lineart layer first, and then a cleaner, more polished line layer on top of that. But I managed to make this clean enough on the first try.

The next step is shading the characters. I  paint in clearer, deeper shadows first and then add in smoother, lighter tones on top of that. Some artists start with a dark surface and paint in light instead of shadow, but that's too advanced for my brain.

The next step is to add base colors and possible 3D elements and you start to see how it's going to look. Since spring is the theme of the book, I tried to use chiefly warm colors, green, red, gold. And then, after tons and tons of small adjustments, we get the final version as seen on top of the post.

The tough part about art is that there's really no clear point when a picture is "finished". You could tweak them endlessly, there are always ways to further improve the details and colors and everything. It's not a surprise the master painters like Da Vinci could spend over 10 years on a single portrait. But at some point, you just have to accept that it's "fair enough" and let go, unless you want to stay married to that one project for the rest of your life.

I can live with the result. I hope it looks nice in your eyes too.

A 3D render of a dormitory room, which was used in the paperback edition's contents spread.

Well, this project is now successfully done and over with, for which I'm very glad.

The Patreon copy of the book, featured on the previous post, has also been updated with the final, retail version of the script. I hope you enjoyed the story.

Let's see what we come up with next time.

Stay safe and see you soon!