coyoteclaw11

In your own space, talk about your creative process(es) — anything from the initial inspiration to how you feel after something’s done. Do you struggle with motivation or is it a smooth process? Do you have any tricks up your sleeve to pull out when a fanwork isn’t cooperating? What is your level of planning to pantsing/winging it?

Oooooh!!! This is a fun one <3 I'll be explaining my drawing process ^^

So, first: depending on how familiar I am with the characters/pose I'm trying to draw, I'll often pull together a bunch of reference images and dumb them directly on the canvas for easy reference.

Here I was just kinda winging it with the pose, but I wanted to make sure Rin and Gou looked like themselves, and that they were recognizably wearing Chrom & Lucina's outfits.
Next, (or first) I throw down a sloppy sketch to try and get what's in my head down on the canvas. Posing and composition is always one of the toughest parts, and if I don't lay everything out beforehand, I'll forget what I was going for midway through. This is honestly just to get a rly rough idea of what I want, and I'll often throw in things like a line of action (a line running down the center of the body showing the movement) just to make sure I don't make things too stiff.

Next up is refined sketch #2. The previous step will often result in a lot of rly wild shapes/proportions that I don't rly want haha. Here, I'll try and size things properly, put them in their right places... basically, get an idea of how it will rly look whereas the last one was more about how it felt.

Next, refined sketch #3. Here I go more in on the details, especially for stuff I'm not super confident drawing. What this stage really entails depends:

Super low effort - if this is a doodle for fun, or I'm just noooot feeling the level of effort the others would take, then this stage right here is my "lineart." I'll take the semi refined sketch, draw over it and go straight to coloring from there.
Moderate effort - Again, I'm looking to get lining done asap. In this situation, I would only really add detail to this I have trouble drawing otherwise (like hands, which are often just blobs in the previous stages). I'll often just start lining and when I reach a point I'm having trouble with, I'll go back to the sketch layer and figure it out there.
Effort (tm) - Here's where I diligently layer and layer and layer the sketches to try and figure everything out before even thinking about lining. I hate doing this tbh After a while it ust feels like lining (which I hate doing) so I end up losing any motivation to actually go through and line it... buuuuut if it's a really complex piece way out of my comfort zone that I'm just... really invested in, then I'll do it.

This one's a bit in between the 2nd and 3rd situations. I refined it a bit, then jumped straight into lining.

And here's something that happens a lot. I'll stop, look at my drawing and go: "this isn't working...." and redraw whatever isn't turning out well. It might end up a lot different than what I'd originally planned, but meh the direction I was going in wasn't looking too great anyway
I finish the line art (yada yada super boring) and move on to the really fun part: coloring!! I lay down all my base colors first just in case I hate something & need to change it before I commit to shading.

Then, bada bing bada boom, I have fun with it and just go in on the colors! I tend to throw in a bunch of layer styles (multiply for shading, overlay for... funsies?, luminosity for light/glow/shine). Sometimes I'll even recolor the lineart to fit the drawing better (you can see the lines on the tail are blue, while the torso has brown lines.