It just takes a lot of practice dedicated specifically to that honestly! 1-2 hour drawings are the bulk of the commission work I get, so I’ve been working at them for a little over a year now.

As you work you begin to find shortcuts and techniques to do things more quickly. I’ve cut out lineart completely by sketching cleanly and using my sketch lines as lineart rather than inking over a sketch on a separate layer. I do this even for cleaner drawings as well. For flats it helps to make sure you have no gaps in your lineart so you can select the area outside of your lineart and invert and flood fill the selection, saves way more time than manually filling your lineart. Take advantage of learning all your blending modes for layers too, as they’re a big help with color schemes.

Becoming facile just takes repeating something over and over and over. You begin to learn the way things look and it starts taking less and less effort/time to get something to look right. Hell I struggled even getting a decent character drawing on a flat background when I started doing this.

If you start doing timed drawings for practice, you’ll improve! I started out doing the 69min challenges for HxH, and it evolved into me taking on 1-2 hour drawings for commission work. If you’re in a fandom, hunt around for a 69min group on twitter and take part in it! Outside of that, you can just do it for fun on your own.

I use a canon pixma pro-1, and it does really nice prints, but it does come with very high running costs. Ink is $300-350 per set and I’ve replaced it twice in a year with somewhat light-moderate use. It will also purge ink in a cleaning cycle when left sitting for more than a week (increasing amounts the longer it sits), and this is true of all of canon’s pixma pro printers. There are smaller ones, the pro-10 and pro-100, which are cheaper and have fewer, smaller ink tanks.

I haven’t minded it, it’s worth it for me to not have to deal with printing services and I use it frequently enough that it’s not an issue, but it does come with its own set of cons that you should be aware of before you go for the pixma pro line (or any higher end printer, really). If you can cover the costs and will use it enough, it’s worth owning, but for lighter usage, I’d recommend looking at their other lines so you don’t deal with it literally spitting your money into a waste tank when left unused.

Sure! I’m not following many right now but the ones I do follow are A+ quality. All of them have been sources of inspiration.

etherealvistaslobo-de-lunaexpressions-of-naturejohnandwolfvisitheworld

I’m not sure how to answer other than practice! I used to have an extremely difficult time selecting colors, everything would just come out like mud and none of the colors worked together. Honestly it’s a lot of just.. developing your eye for color and experimenting and finding out what works and what doesn’t.

As for setting color schemes, I just pick whatever I think would suit the mood or feel for the picture. I’m very fond of heavy shadows and intense lights. Try finding some good scenery blogs to get ideas, god knows I’d never make it if I didn’t have decent sources of photography to look at to understand how light works and the way different lighting effects the colors of the environment because I don’t leave my house much haha. The things I focus most on are a dominant color and atmospheric perspective. Most of my drawings have a very obvious dominant color, and I’ll choose colors that will relate well to that dominant color. Subtle variations of saturation and value of the same color can have some really nice effects and color relativity is your BFF when learning to use color. One helpful thing I do a lot with one/two hour scenes is coloring something in its base/normal lighting colors and using a layer over the top on either multiply, screen, luminosity, etc (whichever looks best and suits the image, you just have to experiment) with whatever the dominant color is. This is helpful for colors that are difficult to adjust to a contrasting lighting color (like greens always stump me). Also take advantage of laying a flat color and using the hue/saturation slider to adjust it and see how it looks at different saturations, values, hues, etc. The selective color adjustment tool in photoshop is a big help if you need some last minute adjustments.

Gah this is getting rambly because I’m not sure how to explain or help since it’s just something I’ve had to learn slowly over time and haven’t felt confident with until.. probably just this past year. But I hope any of this is helpful!

Thank you, that means a lot!! I have drawn cheadle once quite a while ago

Sadly and weirdly I’ve never drawn pitou even though they’re one of my favorite characters! I need to change that sometime. There are so many good HxH characters that I neglect haha, I have a list a mile long of characters that I adore but never give any love.