Five Nesting Dolls - Process

1. In Clip Studio, I draw rough thumbnail to get the basic concept down.

2. Rough sketch. I make a formal sketch to work out the layout, pose, and proportions. I start getting some of the details roughed out. I used symmetry rulers to plan the general shape of the sissy and the doll shapes.

3. Final sketch. I  sketch the fine details for the character. I use separate layers in multiple folders for the various props and the character which makes it easier to plan, especially when so many of the parts overlap. If you look closely, you can see that I draw some parts that I know will be completely hidden behind others, particularly the basic body shape, to make sure it will all make sense together. Keeping them on separate layers also makes it easier to shift the positions of individual features when final details on foreground features might change the layout needs. To help with the perspective of the dolls, I made reference grid of circles. First, I made a bunch of concentric circles. Then I drew two lines disappearing to the vanisinh point. Then I distorted the circles so that the transformation box matched up with the lines on either side. That gave me the rings for the join between the tops and bottoms of the dolls. For bottom, I copied the first set of perspective rings, then simply scaled them non-uniformly using the vanising point as the origin for the scaling. Although I planned to move the dolls around, I needed to sketch them all together so I could be sure that they would fit properly.

4. Inking. I scale the canvas up to four times the size and use a variable-width inking brush for the character and a constant-width brush for hard things on vector layers. I use lots of different layers for different parts, which makes it easier to overdraw and erase as needed. Planning for the line coloring later, I try to use a different vector layer for each part that would be differently colored as linework such as one each for the character's skin, one for everything that will have black linework, etc. For the eyehole POV frame, I used a symmetry ruler on a raster layer, painted most of it in with a solid round brush, then used my sketching pencil to make a blurry, rough but soft edge. For the dolls, I only inked the edges, not the artwork.

5. Color blocking. I set the folder containing all the different inked vector layers as the reference layer. Then I made new raster layers underneath and started filling in the flat colors. Sometimes I used a round pen, sometimes the collor fill bucket, usually with the fill set to follow only the reference layer, stopping at the middle of a vector. I also painted in the doll's face paint.

6. I painted each doll using the rough India ink brush so it would look painterly with obvious brush strokes, adding just a few spots of simple airbrushing for highlights. I used a symmetry brush for most of it.

7. Form shading. I create a dark brown solid color layer (linear burn) and start painting in the basic form shading with a soft airbrush. I always start with shading at full and then use the airbush set to clear to paint away the shading, painting with light. For the hair, I used color burn for richer shading and start with a pointy airbrush to stroke in the curve of the hair in waving crescents, then go back with a soft airbrush for to soften locks of hair in the middle. I also added a pale yellow layer set to screen to airbrush in some soft highlights in key places.

8. Cast shadows. I make a new blue layer set to multiply and start painting in the cast shadows with soft brush, using a smaller brush in places where the object casting the shadow is closer to the thing the shadow is on.

9. Backlight. On a new fill layer set to screen, I used a desaturate solid color painted with a soft airbrush in the mask. When I combine it with the form shading, backlighting really makes the characters pop. I don't use any backlight on non-reflective objects. For some objects, I only use a backlight on shadowed side. For the most reflective objects, I add a forelight on the primary light side as well. On the hair, I used the fingertip tool to streak in the shape of the hairs.

10. Shiny. For the shine on the hair, I used a white overlay layer to add a soft, saturate glow to the hair, then I started the shiny streaks with thin strokes with a variable-width brush, then used a smude tool to add detail and softness to the tips, then use an airbrush to add a soft glow to groups of streaks, then use an airbrush to fade the tops and bottoms of streak groups, and finally use a soft round brush to erase a few streaks in the middle of each group. After painting all the shine, I use the cast shadow layer to make a selection and delete the shine from anywhere covered by shadow. For the latex, I used a soft round brush to add large areas of faint shine and a variable with hard brush to add spots and streaks of brighter shine along the edges of the faint shine, softening both with an eraser airbrush.

11. For the natural blush, I add in a raster layer and airbrush red just on the skin for the cheeks and places where bone is near the surface of the skin. I used the same approach for make-up.

12. Colored linework. Since the linework is still all vectors in Clip Studio, I simply selected the vectors and changed their color to whatever colored linework I needed, sampling from each section and then shifting the color to be more saturate and dark, more or less depending on how hard or soft I want each thing to feel. The hardest things I keep black. Then I collapsed all of the linework into raster layers, locked the pixel transparency, and used an eraser to fix up any places where different color linework crossed over each other or a multiply brush where the shadows were deep enough to require darker linework.

13. Eyelashes are done with a simple raster layer painted with a black variable-width pen. Then I lock the pixel transparency for that layer and use a soft pen to paint in grey streaks for texture and then soften the look with a few strokes of a black soft airbrush. Then I tinted the tips of the sissy's eyelashes with color to make them extra fancy.

14. Finally, I arranged the various doll parts around the sissy, adding ground and surface cast shadows where needed. For the full sequence, this involved making flattened copies of the doll parts so I could move them to a second position while keeping the original in the on-the-sissy position for different stages in the sequence. For the shadows, I just copied the shape of each section and skewed all of the shadows for all of the parts, each on its own layer, at the same and at the same angle so that they would look as if they are all lit by a single distant light source. For the shadows that cast onto surfaces, I copied the shape and then used mesh distortion to match the bumpy curves of the dolls.