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As requested I'll be making one of these.

It should work in most blendy art programs, maybe not Photoshop, probably not GIMP.

I'll be using Pin's commission as an example.

I fail at explaining everything I do because a lot of it is more of feeling than technique, especially in faces.

the size of my canvas in this pic is 3000 by 3000 pixels

Step 1: blobs

Always know or at least have a clear idea of what you're painting before you start painting in this style lol. If you make up stuff half way through, chances are it'll look weird.

Don't use lines as much as possible. Lines are for when you don't know what something's going to be.
If you're texturing cloth or rock or something using lines, that's different, but black outlines are for cartoons only.
This is done in layers of color.

use high opacity as much as possible.
low opacity is really blurry.
Avoid using the blurr tool.



start with 100% opacity
first I put down the BG color, eyeballing as much to the color of the photo which was a really dark yellowy black.
After that I put some full black on teh bottom of the pic to contrast with the lady going to be there.

After that, I made the blob of grey pink lady. She's part grey because it's a dark lighting.
I eyeballed her form to the best of my ability and moved her where I wanted her on the canvas
I cannot explain how I did her shape accurately, it's a good sense for feeling the picture's contours and bringing it over. It's a honed skill.

Once lady was done, I used 1-3% opacity and painted in the red-orange dark horizony color streaks in. That'll end up being some of the light coming off the city.
lag made those take forever.

Step 2: Sketching

Ok so after doing that, you should use 25% opacity or as high as you can control to detail some of the face and clothes in. I use 36%.
Use a hard brush, airbrush will blurr the pic to hell at this point.
Also go back and reshape your blob person shape if you have to. I end up finding I was 75-80% accurate most the time and have to change around proportions.
I had to fix the face and boobs and knee in this one.

do the hair after your face is done, and do the hair on a new layer in case you have to redraw it. Best to do the head and chest on one layer, and the other skin on another, and then another for the clothes, that way it's easier to keep track.
Save constantly.
Once you get the person sketched out, then do the BG

It's better that you don't use splotches, because you'll need about a dozen colors and in the next part it's easier to just pull colors form what you've already painted.
It's easiest to eyeball colors and pick them fast (which is why I hate PS) because you'll probably be changing colors every minute when we get to a further step.
I don't suggest pulling colors from your reference, because you don't want it to look like you painted over it, and you can probably make your pic look better blending colors together without using the already blended colors in the picture on yours.



it looks pixelly because the resize did a weird job on it....
I have some zoomed in pics so you can see what I mean by working in areas of color.



It's all blobs.


Don't waste your time smoothing out the edges or putting a perfect scale of color everywhere, you'll fix that later and if you do it now you'll blend it into mush and make it harder on yourself.
Pick the large areas of shadow on the pic, and work with those as well as middle colors... I used maybe about 4-5 on the face, and 3-4 on the neck.
You don't have to use the same colors all over the body, because different parts of skin have different colors.

I use airbrush for the hair, since the hair strands you can see through, airbrush is good to start with.