27 January 2022

Illustration: Louis swim trunks


 This was another from my now dwindling amount of old photo sessions I am using for drawing inspiration. It was done in 90s for a friend who wanted a career in adult films, so not all the rest of the photos are this family friendly. He was in a swimsuit so I thought it would be good for my athlete series of drawings. Why not? He was a very thin and very pale guy as I think you can see. I did not like the lighting in the photos it was was too harsh and the multiple lights were poorly positioned so I made up a better lighting set up in my head. The hands were a real problem with this one. I did several practice sketches just of the hands and when it came time to do them for real, it still didn't look right so I had to paint over them a few times each until I was happy enough with them.

Drawn in Krita and I used some brushes I hadn't thought of before which helped me make corrections much easier. This was a fast one, it only took about 8 hours of work which is pretty fast for me.

2 comments:

T' said...

This one's pretty good, too. You do yourself the same disservice I do to me; bad lighting on my ref! I bet going over the contours in the bright light was really tough. I don't know how you rely on shape without line. It goes against everything I do! :D Looks cool. Keep using those old photos. They pay off.

Vincent-louis Apruzzese said...

I use the sketch heavily to replace the lines to keep everything in order. Breaking it up into shapes and protecting the alpha channel helps as I get closer to edges as well. One thing I often do at the end is soften the edges of each separate layer manually because it can look too sharp compared to what is going on inside the shape.