One more thing about that faux-natural media piece and then I promise I’ll shut up about it and get back to making more art.
I’ve tried doing similar tricks in the past for many years. This is the first time I was able to do it and not have to constantly be thinking about how I’d do it. Oh sure, there were technical things to fiddle with, but I feel like I was working from a solid basis of some pre-defined graphic styles that I could quickly modify for the drawing at hand. I really did build a toolkit when I sat there doing Drowning City test stuff; most of my thoughts were entirely about the image and how it was developing, rather than “how can I make it look the way I want it to”. Every technical problem was something I’d solved already, and could grab my solution to without much work.
So yeah. Definitely a level up there.
If I am even moderately diligent about dropping new styles and whatnot into my toolkit as I create them for Drowning City, I should be able to do some pretty damn impressive things when I finish that project. Will the project after that be painterly? Hell if I know. But I bet it’ll be pretty easy to do it that way if I want to.