League Battlegrounds. A black-and-white only challenge. Time lapse: https://youtu.be/3Yqja_OsZK4

Hey look, something that I’m okay with. Normally I hate line drawings but I found myself pretty driven into this one as it went on. I often tell myself I suck at line art, so much so that I started associating “drawing” with “line art,” which led to constantly assuring myself that I couldn’t draw. That’s my go-to reason for being depressed: working ages only to find out there’s a barrier I can’t get past. I looked at line art as if it were in its own category, separate from drawing and painting, so I haven’t tried to adapt a different approach to it for the longest time. The result is forcing myself to draw in a way I don’t feel is fun or appealing at all. A 1-3px hard brush is the least satisfying thing to me, strangely.  For this drawing I slowed down, took some time to think and worked through it as if it were another drawing/painting.

The difficult parts were figuring how to fade the characters more in the background without using gradients, as well as getting rid of detail clutter. I looked for references in places I normally wouldn’t, such as marvel comics and woodblock prints, and only remembered the thick-thin line thing (in the sky behind the “clouds) much later, which I think looks much, much better than crosshatching. Lulu and Kindred are the best.

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