Hello everyone! Long time no see. I've been busy with Art Fight attacks, and I finally got permission to post the process for one. I'm excited, because this comic took me about three days between 4th of July celebrations and work. I want to thank Yisang, the owner of Valerian, for posting him and giving me such a fun piece to draw! If you read this, THANK YOU!! I'm going to walk everyone through the process and let you all watch the comic come to life. I'm also going to be more casual in this post so I can get back to drawing attacks, but also, because why not? Let's all chill today.
So I had planned this out in my head, then with references, but I forgot to screenshot that. Whoops. So trust me when I say there's more to come. I started by drawing the Ferrari 499p and Valerian's headshot, so it looked like we were seeing his view from inside the car. He's technically not facing the right way as his car is later, but the symmetry of them "looking at each other" is much better in my opinion.
First I drew out my base. I learned to draw with bases on Deviant Art (for my not chronically online readers, bases are art poses meant to be colored over or traced like a coloring book). This means I tend to want a base before I add details.
I had added most of the details by now. I forgot his barbed wire, hair clip, barcode, and beauty mark at this point, but they're added later. The colors help me figure out which piece is where. The hair, clothing, body, etc, are always on a separate layer for me. Then I don't have to worry about drawing over my base layers.
Next came Zelina, my character. For followers of the blog, this is Fox's mother! I drew in the Z28 first, then her. I didn't screenshot more than this, because I can't remember to be consistent.
For some reason the quality on this screenshot is deteriorated, but after cleaning up extra lines, I had blocked in Valerian and Zelina! I personally don't do line art; this is it. I clean my sketches to look like line art. I hated line art so much I just stopped doing it. I felt happier with my art when I did this way.
Now it's time for the middle few panels that set the scene of a busy race track. Fox and Castiel are here to cheer Zelina on. For whatever reason, I didn't take screenshots of working on Andres and Themis. You'll see them later. Andres is Valerian's boyfriend, and Themis is a wild card. I wanted each racer to have two people rooting for them. Not only is this fun, but it gets me extra points. Since I can't count the cars as "characters" which is where the points are at, some simple character doodles will do.
Man, that Ferrari was really a trip to draw 2 1/2 times. Up to this point, I'd only ever drawn Camaros (and one Firebird, which shares a body with the Camaro), so an Italian hyper car was an exploration for me. I started to see the alien UFO shapes in it, and I'm not sure if that was why Yisang chose the 499p, but I love it either way. Anyone who knows racing is asking themselves:
"Hold on, this is a hypercar and a muscle car. They're not supposed to race together." And to that I say, go watch Cars 2. If Disney can disregard racing logic for the sake of fun, so can I. Sorry I couldn't pull a Ford VS Ferrari reference though, I've always had a General Motors bias.
Last was to sketch in the ending. Canonically, there's no winner. I didn't decide, because it's much more fun to let the audience decide. For me, I say they both tied, but go home and tell their people that they won. Again, the Ferrari was a trip to draw. It has so many extra things that I wasn't really sure what to do with. The Z28's angle is slightly off, but I was working off imperfect references and a time limit.
Choosing what details to keep on Valerian's suit was hard, because there are a lot more than shown in this piece. I decided on the NAPA, Sprint, Monster, and Toyota logo, even though I wasn't sure why Toyota was sponsoring a Ferrari driver. I just like Toyotas sometimes. (Hondas are my favorites though). I also felt the cat getting taken by the UFO was so funny, I really had to draw it on there. The checkers/barcode on the sleeves were important, the space belt, Ferrari obviously, the victory belt (which just says "Vic," and that makes me laugh), along with the planets on his pants. I felt like that captured the energy of the outfit the best.
After two days, this was my progress. I forgot to turn the grid off, for some reason, but I had gotten all my sketches in, and would clean anything up by morning. It was 12AM when I took this screenshot, and I had worked/visited family from this point forward. All of the missing things had been added by this point. I added some notes for myself and went to sleep. You can see Andres and Themis hiding under the 1.
The next morning, I used a sparkle/dot brush to add in the crowds. I didn't wanna draw out each dot in the crowd, but also wanted to highlight the cheerleaders. As an English major, I had to add some symbolism. That's when Zelina and Valerian are standing in front of each other's crowds. Zelina's are blue and green, and Valerian's are purple, pink, and blue. This was just for fun.
Not sure why all my screenshots are horrible quality from this day. I see I also forgot to screenshot my work on the racers in their cars only. I promise I fix the railing near Fox and Castiel later, haha. I wanted to race to take place at night, because that's more fun. I also wanted to add highlights to cars, which I tend to to instead of shading them. It makes them pop more. I used a layer at about 50% for the windshields, which desaturated the characters some. As you can see my lines are black now, which I do by marking "protect alpha" on the line layer (sometimes called alpha lock) and using the square tool to color only the lines black. That's that the protect alpha is for. Saves me the time and pain of scribbling everything in.
In this screenshot, I've colored Andres and Themis (I love Andres' silly screaming face), the cars, and part of Zelina. You can see this is where I said: "I need to take a screen shot, it's been a while since I did that." I also had to pause for dinner.
Once again, went for less shading on the cars, more adding highlights. For any characters that don't belong to me, I always color pick right from a reference. When I shade, I just take a tone below it, which I do my best to do accurately. If my reference has a color for the shading, I use that of course. The shadows under the cars are just a watercolor brush. The headlights glow because I copied the lights color layer (Yes, I put them on a separate layer for this) and make a Gaussian Blur. Then I duplicate the blurred layer til I have a glow I like. I learned this trick on YouTube somewhere like, a million years ago. FireAlpaca, my art program has limited capabilities, but it's free and runs great on my MacBook Pro. I like it's simplicity.
Here I color Valerian in all his color glory. There's so much more detail in the final piece than you can see in this screenshot, and I did my best to match the colors to the correct details! Some stuff was just impossible to color perfectly, and some of it was my ADHD brain. I'd forgotten my medication yesterday, haha.
And the final piece! I signed everything and added the lettering, and was very happy with how it turned out. I also added a multiply layer with some blue to make sure the whole thing looked like it was happening at night.
I had so much fun with this piece. It was something new to try and I'm just excited I pulled it off to some of the degree I had it in my head. It always looks better in my head.
Have a good day everyone!
-Rosetta 💖
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