Guest Post: The Art of Lex Chase

Hello, Internet! Welcome back to the Art of Lex Chase. I’m your one and only host, Lex!

Today, I’m sharing a peek behind the curtain of my process. Not really a tutorial so much, but a step by step of what I do. So if you’re not an artist, it might seem a little like voodoo. But if you are, it’s not a tutorial. In fact it’s probably a lot of artists shaking their heads and saying UR DOOIN’ EET WRONGZ.

So over on Facebook, I put out a call that if people comment with an emoji, I’ll make them a 10 to 15 minute freebie sketch with the option of a tip. And comment they have. 60+ comments and still rolling! I have to do them in batches, because I’ll be here for six billion years doing sketches.

One such sketch was for Kim Fielding where here emoji was a skull. Here was the resulting sketch.

Sketched quickly with Papermate Flair pens in my sketchbook. It came out pretty cute. I offered to clean it up for Kim. Make it purty and experiment a bit with it. So using my very scientific scanning method, I snapped a photo on my phone and emailed it to myself.

Then came the line art phase.

*Greek Art Speak Time* I took the sketch into Photoshop and made a new layer and refined the sketch into clean line art. For you non-artists, think of it like tracing paper when you made those maps in Social Studies class. God I loved making those maps. I do not love my teacher yelling at me that I took too much time because I wanted to make them pretty.

And then laid in the basic color!

This is where what we artists call “Flats.” And they’re already wrong. Art people will know why. Non-art people, don’t worry about it. LOL But these are the base colors we’ll be working from. I decided to give my Dead Girl blue hair. Because why not! All of these colors are on their own layers. Remember, “tracing paper.”

Now time to render!

Rendering is where the actual coloring comes in. Where you add the light and the shadow, and various shades. Using a custom brush is how I got that charcoal-like texture. I challenged myself to see how fast I could go with this piece without it looking like a total disaster.

Which leads us to our graaaand finale!

Tah-daaaaaah! With a bit of color correction, and a few final effects such as colorizing her makeup and adding a tattoo, Dead Girl is ready to knock ’em….well…you know…

And that concludes our little tour of my process! I hope you enjoyed it! And if you want to join the emoji sketch fun, comment here! We might need to be FB Buddies first, but hop in! The tip jar is open by the way. Appreciated, but not necessary.

Also! A brand new update! My lovely site lexchase.com is changing web hosts and getting an all new design! I’m doing the deed and moving to Squarespace. I’m shifting the look of my current site to more of an art based one. The blog will still be on the new site, so I’ll be blogging about my crazy life with bipolar disorder, but the art will be front and center. You’ll be able to commission me a hell of a lot easier, buy premade covers, and even buy physical prints! And maaaaaybe I might be looking into doing planner stickers if I can swing it. Where are my planner peeps at?

During the changeover, lexchase.com will kind of be off the map. But hopefully without tooooo much downtime. I’m trying to do the changeover while everyone is partying at GRL and y’know, not Googling me. But look for a formal announcement soon!