INTRO

Hey folks! My name is David Navia, and I'm an illustrator from Colombia, South America. I've been using CSP for more than two years and find it wonderful, especially because of its powerful tools for character lineart, coloring, and perspective. I wish you enjoy this tips-and-tricks article about my cyberpunk acrobat girls flying over a futuristic cityscape.

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POSING

As a way to help me find inspiration, I decided to have a quick look on Pinterest for images of acrobats with dynamic poses. I might not share the original pictures in here, due to potential copyright issues, but I encourage you to search for "underwater mecha" images and have a blast! The photo refrences I picked, hepled me a lot to find great character expression and as a strating point from which to tell a story.

Based on the photos (and not drawing on top of them) I proceeded to make gesture drawings to describe the lines of action.

BODY GEOMETRIC STRUCTURE

On top of my action lines, I made mannequin-like geometric constructions to have a solid structure on which to build up all any further details. I paid a lot of attention to the main axes and the directions of the different parts of the body. Although this highly systematic method might not feel as fluid and expressive as direct gesture drawing, I consider it a wonderful procedure for solving complex images that require precision, such as this illustration.

CYBERPUNK CHARACTER DESIGN

Once the geometric construction was done I was ready to bring more flavor to my characters by adding a nice looking outfit.. but... hold on, "which kind of outfit would that be?" I asked myself. Then, I decided to give a try to the idea of combining two influences for the design: First, human anatomy itself! (without hesitation, a true masterpiece of nature); and second, high-tech robotics (a common feature in all cyberpunk creations). I realized, then, that I wanted to design my flying girls as cyborgs, in order to express an interesting mixture between the cleaness of hight-tech and the expression of organic personality.

I always practice anatomy drawing for one hour on a daily basis, because...you know.. I love it and want to keep improving every single day of my life. But, even if I've already achieved to memorize, up to a certain point, the main muscles of the body, I consider it's never a bad idea to grab some fresh reference when you need to analyze the specificities of muscles and try to figure out how each form starts and ends and connects with the other ones. This allowed me to appreciate the body in terms of its mechanics and approach it as a high-tech jigsaw puzzle built up of unique parts to be assembled.

By analyzing the main muscle shapes, my next challenge was to draw how they would look in the specific angle of the poses.

I spent almost a whole day designing such pieces while aiming for balance between metallic pieces, and bare skin parts. The most difficult task to me, was to describe those forms with precision and their respective connections.

The process here took 2 different passes: a first rough-to-defined line, and a pre-clean drawing.

CLEAN-UP TRICK

Whenever I need to clean up lineart, I use a CSP feature that I really love and has helped me to speed up my everyday workflow. I'm talking about vector layers and vector eraser. After finishing my pre-clean drawing in a raster layer, I decided to add a vector layer on top of it. I used the G-Pen tool to do my lineart, and then, whenever I wanted to erase stroke residues, I just had to do a quick, simple sweep of my Vector eraser tool to get rid of the imperfections without needing to spend extra minutes to have precision as in a traditional raster layer.

COLOR BASE & LOCAL COLORS

To quickly fill up the lineart with an underneath base color, I set my line layer as reference layer, and created a layer below, then, I used the Enclose anf fill tool (GG) and it worked amazingly! I highly recommend to use this tool for whenever you want to fill shapes with flat color at the speed of light.

After that, I Ctrl-clicked the thumbnail of my base color layer, which created a precise selection of the shape. With the selection active, I created a folder, which I named "Color" and clicked on "Create layer mask". Inside this new masked folder I made tons of different color layers, one for each separate piece. The previous in order to make every layer fit inside the main color shape.

Also, here's a quick trick that I always use to accelerate my color technique:

I created an action in Window>Auto action, with only two steps: Fill and Deselect. I assigned the action to the F10 key, and then, in my drawing tablet properties, assigned F10 to my pen right-click button.

 

SHADING & LIGHTING

After setting up all the local colors, I created a multiply layer on top of them and sketched a basic shading shape to help me have a clear idea about the light direction and the way it interacted with the characters volume. Then, I made two other layers in Screen blending mode to depict light coming from two directions: form the right a paleblue hue and from the left a warm magenta.

Additionally, I added layers in "Add glow" blending mode, with the soft Airbrush tool to further describe my lighting.

BACKGROUND DRAWING

Initially, I made a rough linework to suggest background perspective, and then cleaned it up by using the Oil paint brush and the incredibly amazing CSP Perspective ruler. This feature allows you to correct your strokes as you draw on the canvas and make them fit on a specific perspective with extreme precision and ease.

To set up a specific perspective you just need to go to: Ruler (U) > Perspective ruler > Process > Add vanishing point, and then click and drag until you get the rotation of your choice. You may click and drag again for as many additional vanishing points you want to include.

By having my 3-point perspective ruler turned on, I made a layer on top and drew a basic topology grid to depict the BG main shapes, which in this case consisted of a futuriscitc city with really tall buildings seen from above, with a long freeway crossing the canvas diagonally. Then, in an another layer, I made more precise shapes to make my set-dressing. In terms of color, I intentionally added magentas and blues, all over the place to make the background communicate with the characters in a relatively limited palette.

At this point, I felt that the BG still needed an extra touch of detail to make the city look more cyberpunk. So, I resolved to add more neon signs on the walls, and some font characters of my own design that resembled the iconic japanese Katakana. I also made some minimalistic-design cars with mainly dark flat colors and neon lights on top of them to give a hint of people living and interacting in the city and bring more life to it.

 

BACKGROUND ADJUSTMENTS

The scenery looked way more complete and believable by then, and I just made a few adjusmtents on the overall lighting in order to obtain more contrast favouring the flying girls, which, of course, were my focal point. I also decided to apply Radial blur and Gaussian blur to the overall background to lessen importance to it and help the viewers eyes focus much more on my characters. I also ajdusted the levels to darken the scenery a lot and slightly painted on top of the background to make it darker near the margins and lighter right beneath the girls.

FINAL EFFECTS

Finally, I decided to add just a few post production touches to enhance the overall image quality.

First, I created a new empty layer and went to Filter > Render > Perlin noise, set the scale to 5 and hit OK. After that, I set the noisy layer to Overlay blending mode, which gave my illustration a subtle extra touch of detail and visual richness.

Additionally, I emulated a chromatic aberration effect to make colors have a slight touch of surprise and vividness. To do so, I duplicated my image 2 extra times. For the first copy I went to Edit > Tonal correction > Level correction, and chose the Red channel and dragged the right output marker all the way to the left. I did the same procedure with the second copy, but affecting the blue channel instead. I made a raster layer filled up with black beneath the 2 copies and turned the copies to Screen blending mode, then I moved the top layer just a few pixels from its original position, and... boom!! Here you are, chromatic aberration!

And last, but not least, I merged all visible layers to a new layer and went to Filter > Sharpen > Sharpen (only once), which helped me regain contrast on the overall image and focus the character lineart detail a little more.

Wow! that was quite a lot! I feel happy that I made it up to this point, and I'm even happier that you arrived here. I wish you enjoyed it and that I turned out to be helpful for you! Remember to keep practicing and enjoying your artworks! And see you in the next one, cyberfolks!