Sneak Peek!

Sneak peek!

I finished my cross-post of Falling into Darkness, and thus finished sharing all the illustrations from that one. But I've got something else waiting to start posting to AO3, and it does, in fact, have one single illustration.

Obviously done much more simply. Instead of an attempt at a somewhat comic-style coloring job, I wanted this one to just be sketchy lines and a rough watercolor job, hence the lack of shading.

Stay tuned for an announcement of when I post the first chapter!

It's Monday, and you know what that means! Chapter 12 is now up, and yes, Knuckles is back! And pink!

It's Friday preview time!

After that breather (and low point), we're back to another fight scene! (Why did I do this to myself back when I was writing the thing?)

First up, a fun angle for a nicely dynamic shot. I went a bit stylized with the background, rather than going for more realistic colors for the moment the scene depicts (since it is neither at sunrise nor sunset, and this shot lacks trees). I had to mess around with it a bit extra until I was happy with the background. The horizon line was originally a little too stark.

As for the other... Knuckles is pink. and maybe needs to glow more but I need to stop messing with it and just call it done.

So I decided to start posting now, rather than wait another week. I mean, the whole story is written and proofread already anyway, so it's not like I need to build a buffer for this one.

This is not in the same continuity as the previous Sonic fic I posted, just as fair warning. It's part of its own series instead.

And here's the (sole) illustration again, for those who may not have seen it over the weekend, or who want to see it again. :D

What's this? Monday's chapter?

Yes! And a bit of a banger if you ask me, but that would be because it's the peak of the story's action. There's two chapters to go after this, but this is where most of the plot comes to a head.

Enjoy!

Hey look, previews! ::jazz hands::

It's a three-fer this week! Um...with maybe some surprises in store, for anyone who hasn't read the story before, so enjoy, I guess, and no, I'm not offering huge explanations here because that'd be...y'know, spoilers.

But hey, there's one with the in-mind version of Sonic turning a mite yellow, and I'm pretty happy with that one. (Though I realized after the fact that, unlike the other two pictures I did of Sonic in his head, this one I forgot to use the rougher shading brush and instead used the same one as on all the other illustrations. Oh well. It's still fine.)

Then one in a forest scene that almost ended up too muddy because I messed with it too much before I caught it and dialed it back. Also realizing that I drew Rotor's Season 1 design, but gave him a bit more of an Archie color scheme, and I'm okay with this. (I do not like his Season 2 design.) The odd mat shape is mostly due to the way I did the lineart. It was not a square, and I didn't feel like forcing it.

And then the third picture, the one illustration from this entire series that took me the longest. I spent far too much time on playing with this one, but honestly, I think it was worth it. I'm really happy with the lighting effects on it, and unlike the second picture, I don't feel like the time spent on messing with it further was wasted (I didn't have to undo anything unlike some of the muddy shading on the forest scene). I did have to go back and up the saturation on Knuckles a tad because it came out too yellow/desaturated, but that was about it.

And hey, Knux is pink again. Hm.

It's the last previews for Falling Into Darkness!

Important note before I go into some details on the pictures: I will, in general, not be doing this for other fanfics I post. The main reason I did this series of illustrations was as something of a treat for finally crossposting this 10-20-year-old story to my AO3 account. I don't really plan to draw a ton of illustrations for other fics I do.

That being said, I may do occasional images that will be posted with future stories on AO3 (I have a quick one for the first chapter of the next fic I plan on posting, for one), and if I do other fanart, related to a fic or not, I still plan to post art here.

But I'm glad for all the kind comments and everyone enjoying this series of illustrations with me. :D You guys are awesome.

With that, description-stuff (including more behind-the-scenes than usual) below the cut. 'Tis long; be forewarned.

First up, arguably the easiest illustration to do in the whole set. It's a silhouette, so the foreground wasn't really an issue (other than trying to get the edge glow just right, and I still don't think I quite managed but I'm definitely telling myself not to mess with it any further). The background was already painted for the second illustration in the whole set:

I just fixed up the paths and the treetops and added a little lookout stand to the building on the right, now that Sonic and Sally weren't blocking those spots. After all, it's supposed to be the same view anyway, so I figured I'd make it easy on myself and not have to completely repaint the scene.

The second image employs some little cheats here and there. Here's the original sketch from my sketchbook for comparison:

Very loose, lacking detail. Straight lines are more like suggestions. The robots are spiky blobs. I have a literal note next to a stick figure and a hollow shape telling me to get some references. There's the barest hint of the alcoves the robots are standing in.

I didn't show this level of behind-the-scenes off with other illustrations in this series (though I suppose if anyone's ever interested, I could do a process post about how I worked on these), but one of the first things I did with this series of illustrations was sift through the roughly fifty individual sketches I'd drawn to illustrate various parts of the story (not counting redraws of portions), ranging from vague shapes to much more detailed drawings, to narrow it down to the ones I was actually going to finish for this project. I ended up with 27 total images, including the two I'm previewing today, focusing on having at least one but no more than three images per chapter.

Once I'd determined which sketches, like the above, were going to become a finished piece, I then went through each and every one of them in Photoshop with a sketch pencil brush and filled out the sketches to a point where I could reliably ink them. That meant things like swapping out figures that didn't work with redraws of them or making size adjustments, like so:

The first image is the second illustration, and you can see I redid Sonic because his initial pose didn't work. The redraw was actually a pose of him I did to draw his post-Mobianization robotic elements from the end of the story, but the stance was actually good for what I needed, so I Photoshopped it in and then sketched the rest of the replacement drawing digitally. The second image is Sally watching Knuckles walk away, and you can see that I changed her left arm, and also reproportioned her body prior to inking (bigger head, smaller body).

And for pieces like the final one in this illustration series, I sketched in all the details that were missing from the initial sketch (which, as I said, was pretty barebones; in my defense, it was the last one I drew, and by that point I was pretty tired of drawing robot hedgehogs so Sonic was something of a stick figure in most of the last chapters' sketches).

And here's where one of the cheats comes into play. I drew one robot hedgehog. Specifically the one you see the most of, near the tip of Robotnik's cape by the drafting table. I drew it on its own layer in Potoshop, then copied and pasted it into all of the other holding bays, erasing parts that wouldn't be visible as I went along. I also went and found those references I needed for Robotnik and Snively and drew the two of them properly.

And then, because I much prefer physical pen-to-paper inking over digital (my tablet is not one of the fancy screen ones, and I've yet to really get comfortable digitally inking with it, despite owning it for nigh on twenty years), I colored all of the sketches red, assembled them in groups on letter-sized images, and printed them out onto cardstock (my preferred medium when I'm going to be traditionally inking). I inked them with my various inking pens (some Sakura Microns, some Faber-Castell PITT pens), scanned each sheet back into my computer, and cleaned up the lines in Photoshop (the reason for the red printout was to make it a bit smoother removing the sketch from the inked lines, though it wasn't as clean as I would've liked; oh well).

That left us with the above. Because I inked them each by hand individually, the robots don't look copy-pasted, because it was the underlying sketch that had been, not the ink work. The tables and holding bays also have straighter lines thanks to using a proper ruler for those (though I didn't concern myself too much with things like perspective and right angles), and after drawing the straight line, I went back freehand over spots to give them a bit of that hand-inked wobble.

From there it was a matter of laying down the flats in Photoshop, then shading, adding effects, etc. I like the cold yellow light I've got on the robots, and the overall shading on the yellow cape. Also that sense of satisfaction when I called this one done, because it was the last one. Huzzah.

I'll see you on Monday for the last chapter!