A lil bit about my art process
Welcome to De Art Habit
Hi!
I’m finally writing something for my newsletter. Welcome to De Art Habit, I’m Nikita, though I mostly go by n_nikute in online spaces. This newsletter is called De Art Habit because I’m hoping it helps me to make more art honestly.
For my first newsletter, I figured I’ll show you a bit of my process for my art pieces. I love reading about other artists’ processes and routines so I thought I’ll share mine too. It isn’t very different from others I have seen but maybe I’ll have something in here you might want to try or relate to.
It all starts with the idea. I have more ideas than I do time or energy so I pick the one shouting at me the most and get started. Many of my ideas are from really old sketches in my sketchbook.
The piece we are talking about today is my Skater Girl piece from last year. Summer 2024, I was taking roller skating lessons, I bought these nice pairs of lilac Sure-Grip Boardwalk skates and was ready to be moon- walking (moon-skating) in them but I sucked so I painted this instead.
I did a couple thumbnails to see what I was feeling for the composition in my sketchbook. Thumbnails are great to just test out ideas, I use to just sketch & erase & repeat until I got what I wanted then work from there but that gets frustrating and it is inefficient. People been saying that thumbnails were great for brainstorming and I was slow to implement them but now I don’t know what I’ll do without them.
For this piece in particular I made some thumbnails for the colours and lighting as well.I loooooved all of this these but at the time it was summer and I wanted to invoke that in the piece so I went with the more summery brighter colours. I may revisit it some day sorta wished I just did the one with the moon instead.
Before I made those lighting and colour thumbnails, I took a photo of the thumbnail I liked the best from my sketchbook and brought it into Procreate. I redrew the sketch and added more details, then I did the colour thumbnails you see above. Once I decided on the colours, I gathered some references for things I don’t draw often like the roller skates and the skate park. I used Pureref for this but easily a blank page in your art software of choice or a folder would do. I like Pureref because you could just drag the references you found onto a board and save it. Very easy, very convenient.
From here it’s just hours of me chipping away at it from sketch to fully painted in Procreate. I then added the base colour, shadows, mid-tones and started rendering it out. My last steps were highlights, details and the background.
I could get more detailed than this so let me know if that’s something yall would be interesting in.
Thanks for reading.