Castlevania Nocturne Frozen Shade: Lighting and Painterly Study

    One of my goals for the longest time was to actually finish my artwork. For various reasons I'venever quite been satisfied with my approach and workflow. What a strange thing, then, that a show I only kind of liked would be my muse for a few days.

    Continuing on from my pervious study of the Revolutionary Guard Captain come Captain of the Night Creatures, I had a bunch of leftover sketches from studies from stills of the show, and it jostled some things for consideration:

• Backrounds, however simple are an environment for the character
• Atmosphere affects lighting, from light sources to where the shadows fall  
• Surface scattering of light on shiny surfaces tend to send that light everywhere

    With all that to consider and keep in mind, an essential part to figuring out the colouring, an area of design I've always been rather self-conscious about, was to pay attention to how that affects the tones of the piece. Usually, I'd go for a flat greyscale, but though the values were always okay with that method, they never really popped.

    

    Glimpsing the backgrounds and where they intersected with the character gave me an idea of how to pursue these things, both on a technical level, but also on how to convey this on a design level. Which is a fancy way of saying I sort of have an idea of how to organize my layers in Clip Studio Paint:

1. Lineart Colour [Clip to Lower Layer]
2. Lineart: Usually vector line ink [Select and apply Layer Mask]
3. Rendering Values:
1. Screen (Highlights)
2. Colour Dodge (Secondary Highlights, used for atmospheric color and reflected light)
3. Multiply (Coloured shadows)
4. Multiply (Base Greyscale, usually 75-50% monochrome)
4. Flat Colours [Doubles as silhouette, contained within boundaries of Layer Mask]

    Outside of this, freewheeling with the backround was sort of cutting my teeth with very basic painting with some soft brushes. Happy little clouds, leaves of grass.

    I still have a way to go, but I had some fun with drawing her. You could say that she's pretty...cool...