Earlier this year I received my copy of Allison Theus' incredible art book, Mostly Monsters, a collection of creature designs of hers from the last several years. Allison is one of the most influential creature designers in helping me figure out the way I wanted to approach creatures and that is I think really evident in the above piece. I'll do a big appreciation post at some point for creature designers whose work I really love, but that's not what I wanna talk about. I'm actually here to talk about the finishing process I used here and on my piece "Spending Jyura's Dream" because it's a pretty simple process that I can throw onto line drawings that I don't really want to colour, but that gives them a nice effect imo.
This process is done entirely on my ipad in Procreate, and I'd be happy to go into my design and drawing process at a later date.
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Here's my base drawing, with a basic light grey fill:
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I used some watercolour brushes to put together a background fill. I've applied some of Procreate's in-built halftone effects to it after the fact.
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Using only slightly darker of a grey I applied a basic set of shadows to the piece. I brightened up the centre of the image using a massive spraypaint blast in the middle. This is creating those spatter effects as you get towards the outside of the image.
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I duplicate the shadow layer and then convert that layer into halftone.
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Now's where the fun effects start. After applying a soft vignette shadow layer, I copy the whole canvas and paste the merged image on top.
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I go into the gradient map settings and I start playing around with those (a lot of the defaults are great). Just apply that shit to the whole canvas and reduce opacity to desired effect.
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To finish, I apply some chromatic aberration to the whole thing. Procreate has 2 settings for this, perspective (which uses a center point and the aberration moves outward from that) and displace (which displaces the colour evenly through the whole image in the direction you swipe). I use perspective such that it only creates aberrations towards the edges of the canvas.
