Cannibal Queen Illustration Process

This one was pretty funky to work with! Ever since I started the comic I've just been pushing myself a lot harder to create art I'm really proud of. I always jinx it though, just give it a few months and this will probably look old to me lol. But yet again, more song inspo (Cannibal Queen by Miniature Tigers). At this point I'm not sure if I could even create illustrations without music haha, I really never have clear ideas or motivation until I get obsessed with a song. This one was pretty interesting--the unedited drawing just felt like it was missing something, I liked it but I guess there just wasn't enough contrast? It felt more like something I'd add on to a proper illustration rather than the main one. When in doubt the first thing I do is slap a luminosity layer onto my art lol, it just brings out a lot of new color combos I probably couldn't have made up myself. The problem with that though is I only want it to affect certain areas of the drawing, mainly the brighter colors. So I went in and erased portions of the luminosity layer so the black wasn't washed out, and after that just incorporated further details, mainly with the heart's veins and such.

I also brought back the bright yellow to emphasize the eye. I played with more blend modes for a while until I settled on three I liked, which was hard since there were so many possibilities! It really did feel like traditional printmaking in a way, I absolutely despise making stencils in real life but I enjoy all the different versions you can make of the same piece with that medium! I have a hard time with traditional art (mainly anything having to do with paint) in general because it's kind of a sensory nightmare for me lol, I've always preferred digital because there's no mess, so this was a good compromise. I do love sketching though, I'll probably share some old sketchbooks here at some point just gotta mentally prepare myself because they're really old (and I have to figure out where I put some of 'em) 😂

Lastly I just included some extra silly doodles, these were overall pretty fun to work on! The wolf-silhouette-thing used to be so neatly drawn when looking back on old art lol, I feel like I really just threw that to the wind. A net-good considering the chaos is part of its charm IMO, plus it's only gotten more fun to draw! The last slide is just for the sake of the joke btw lol Leo would never actually imagine that because he hates that thing's guts! ✌️😙