dad211_process.jpg
Here's a more or less comprehensive documentation of how I made my illustration. A Flutterfriend known as Whiskey Panda told me the way I reiterate my sketches was interesting to him although that's not at all an uncommon practice.

This time around, I bruteforced my one preliminary sketch instead of drawing multiple thumbnails because I was using an erasable pencil. Blessed 2B Mars Lumograph. Freehanded a wonky square, divided it into 4 segments because I had this idea of presenting different seasonal/holiday moments like prison mugshots.(Not because of Barbie, but becauuse of rewatching Run Lola Run the other day.) It's a mere 6x6cm in size. First a cosy bathrobe Discord, then a Hearthswarmin/Christmas one in a box because I didn't want it to look too human and kitsch. New Year's Eve went through wildly different approaches that sucked balls, then I thought of his beard catching fire because he's a bit klutzy and drunk and it'd look like a fuse on fire. Then comes the hangover, originally intended to show most of his body but I preferred to zoom in to just his face and a hand reaching for water, away from the bottles of the previous night.

Then I inked it to have a better idea of whether that busy composition had any hope... and I tore a hole into my sketchbook paper due to a little white out attempt going terribly wrong. And then Friday was already over without a new /dad/... only a sketch I wasn't too confident about. Couldn't sleep, so I spent way too much time mapping colors in a way that calmed this spergy montage thingy down.

On Saturday, I printed out the shitty phone picture of my 6x6cm sketch to fill out about 20x20cm on a DIN A4 sheet, then traced the more cartoony right side of the picture. Blown up in size like that, you still have to put a little thought into your tracing, the doodle was more of a very helpful blurry guideline. When I'm tracing my own damn drawing I had made from sketch, and doing it on a /dad/line, I feel no shame for making my life just a little bit easier to ease me into the tougher parts. Because the two columns on the left needed an actual redraw, though my sketch helped yet again. I did the lineart in pencil, did not ink it.

Instead of tracing my lineart onto yet another sheet of paper (with or without making changes), I photocopied it onto marker paper and filled in the flat colors with markers... at 2 to 3 am. Don't color in the dark/shitty artificial lighting if you can help it. Luckily, it was not a dealbreaker here. When I thought I was done, I sent my friend another picture and spotted that I forgot to color the leg at first, kek. And the ribbon on the little painkiller gift, too.

Finally, I scanned it, then adjusted the colors to resemble the real illustration on paper more. During that process, I unfortunately dimmed down the colors because my tired eyes misjudged the completely normal brightness.

I tend to spend most of two days on a /dad/ OP illustration. Sleeping over the sketch is central.