Procreate cosplay photoref study #1

Was leaning towards a weekday-based posting schedule for this Patreon, but maybe not, as I just spent the last hour or so this morning messing around with the Procreate iOS app. In my ongoing attempt to familiarize myself with working digitally, used the marker-like “medium hard airbrush” to crank out a sketch based on an Instagram cosplayer’s fantasy outfit, as screencapped below:

And here’s the sketch on its own:

Lordy loo, fantasy/RPG costumes are a g-d nightmare of fine detail. Imagine drawing a whole g-d adventuring party like this! (Aaaaaand I just noticed the stray brush squiggle left over her sleeve and blouse, next to that bandolier buckle. Oh, well.) As I’m presently nosing around the idea of at least writing and maaaaaaybe drawing a fantasy-skewed project or two, thought I’d mess around with some cosplay sketches; this detail level is kinda sobering, gotta say. (Well, at least the main heroine of kinda-sorta project Hushed Half-Elf doesn’t stay fully dressed for long.)

Anyhoo, just hoping to import a few new ideas for clothing folds and shading into the ol’ database, as my default visual riffs along those lines have come to feel rote, stale, repetitive. (Which is why I’ve been life-drawing off and on since late 2016, in fact.) And now, back to drawing another Empowered vol. 12 page, which will be happily free of belts and buckles and stitching—well, on Emp’s supersuit, at least.

UPDATE: Below is a screen cap of the Procreate brush settings, in case you’re curious. Some helpful young digital artists showed me how to tweak this brush a wee bit to approximate the art app MediBang Paint’s oddly misnamed “pencil” brush, which I do adore for drawing roughs digitally. (Sorry if the grainy-ass image is tough to read; this Patreon app is no friend to the screencap, for reasons unclear to me.)