CUT Illustration Process

This was BY FAR one of the most difficult pieces I've ever had to figure out. I cannot even stress how frustrating it initially was to get the composition right, but I pushed through and in the end I can gladly say I'm really proud of how it turned out! Would've posted it here earlier but I wanted to avoid spoilers. This description is going to be really long sorry--illustrations have just been so elusive to me lately, it's part of the reason why I made the last two animatics. It's hard to explain, but essentially I believe it has to do with making the switch from drawing for a comic to drawing a standalone piece. With comic art you have to dumb down a lot of details, nothing can really be perfect but honestly that's one of the things I love most about it! I feel a lot of people are so caught up in making the art as pretty as possible that they tend to look past the beauty in imperfection. I feel this to be especially the case in terms of backgrounds, I purposefully like to make my backgrounds imperfect in terms of perspective and stuff because that imperfection actually hides those flaws! Being too neat can actually make faulty perspective stand out a lot more in my experience--no hate to creators who still enjoy that kind of look or anything, I've just found that for me personally a looser look puts less pressure on it looking 'correct.' An artist I like called vewn makes some great work that perfectly illustrates what I mean; the perspective is purposefully skewed and that becomes the appeal.

Sorry, went on a tangent there! Back to the piece--I first started with just, so many sketches. It probably took me a good few hours just scribbling nonsense before I began getting the hang of things, a lot of them I actually deleted because they were chicken scratch. I've been listening to the song "Cut" by Sweet Pill nonstop lately, as in almost every day for a month 💀 Something about it just really inspired me regarding the werewolf transformation and all, it has the perfect vibe and everything and just, augh, it's such a cool song. I had to draw something inspired by it or I was gonna explode. The initial struggles I had with finding a composition were just a matter of "these all feel like things I've done before." It all looked like the previous "Lycanthropy" illustration I'd made, and I really wanted this to be different. The final product was honestly not what I had expected to make at all, and I love that! I want to draw more stuff that's difficult to conceptualize but pays off in full, it's really satisfying and encouraged rapid improvement. The first sketches were some standard 'wolf-towering-over-scared-Leo' poses, and the further I got the less inclined I was to include human-form Leo at all. It was just getting too cluttered and didn't make a whole lot of sense, I was attached to him being there at first so it was a little tough but it worked out for the better. I also worked to avoid any ripping motifs since I'd done that previously also, which was hard since the song is called Cut lol. Eventually I settled on maybe the wolf having some blood on its claws? I thought experimenting with a bright pop of red on a dark background would be cool, and I played around with the wolf sketch until it went from the wolf over Leo, to just the wolf with its head lowered, to the wolf standing upright and staring straight into the camera. I also thought that warping the perspective of the trees to frame the wolf would work out well, having to do with what I was talking about before.

I've basically completely abandoned clean lineart by this point, I feel it only limits the potential of what I'm able to create and at this point I don't even attempt to clean the sketch much since I know I'm going to layer over it anyway. I blocked out the base colors for the sketch I picked, using Leo's night-time color palette which is shown in a handful of episodes, including of course the most recent one! I then played with the lighting a lot, this effect was something I discovered while working on EP12. A lot of the rendering done on the wolf is produced with the Hard Mix blend mode, and I've found out if you try air-brushing two opposing saturated colors together they stay off each-other rather than making a new color (sorry, it's hard to put into words hah). Essentially it creates this very natural-looking automatic lighting, at least to me, and with a few tweaks it can look really cool and produce a lot of interesting results. In EP12 I mixed yellows, blues and reds together, and I tried to emulate that same effect here (but with even more detail)! The blue light on the arms really helped contrast the red blood, especially considering red lighting makes up a lot of the wolf's chest and mane. I laid out the lighting and then went on to make a base background layer, color-picking from episodes and then mixing colors with the wolf's lighting to get some purples and greens that matched well. Not sure if a lot of other people do this but that's how I usually figure out colors, I just eyeball two I like and keep mixing them with my blend tool, putting those new colors in between. You can see how I did this with the blood on the ground too, those purples in-between are a result of mixing the bright red and the green-blue grass in the back. This is also how I determined all the colors in those dang trees, whew those were tough for a minute there. I had to work to prevent them from competing with the wolf, it was important I dulled down some of the brighter parts so the eye focuses primarily on the blood--there was initially more yellow but it was way too bright so I opted for pinks and dark blues instead. Playing with negative space is also always fun, just adding in black where I can and using it to avoid anything blending together too much. Lighting the moon was also satisfying, I just used one of my default round brushes for that.

Once everything was finally blocked out, I worked on touching up a lot of the flaws and little details all on one layer. The last three versions just show the subtle changes I made that most people probably wouldn't notice (but I always notice). The wolf's face was way too pointy for a period and I had to hammer that back on model, I want to keep Leo's wolf form somewhat rounded at the muzzle to resemble the shape of his face. I also had to fix his weird little hands, they were way too bird-like for a period idk what was going on there lol but I went over 'em and got them back on model without too much trouble. I ended with fixing the last of some very subtle details like getting his eyes to match in shape and such, just little things that bother me if I don't correct them. And with that it was finally done! I've had this on the back-burner for a while waiting for EP12 to come out so that's partially why there were so many steps, the initial draft only took me about five hours but all the subsequent edits after the fact kept me working on it for weeks lol, I'm really glad I was able to make this how I wanted and I'm just super excited for what's to come! I can really tell that drawing a comic is helping me improve a lot, and I'm learning new things about art I never would have otherwise. If you've read this far, thanks so much, I really appreciate it! I know I talk a lot, it's a bit of a problem lol. But I can't wait to see what else is in store, and I can't wait to show people! <3