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Description
So, using photo stock as the underlayer while drawing is both simple and helpful, if your goal is to have an end product that looks realistic and you're having trouble learning what realistic shapes are. Repeated exposure to real, unedited photos is a great thing. And if it's your first time using a tablet from start to finish with a drawing, having those hard guidelines to trace (or just barely alter) is really... nice.

But if you do it, DON'T do what I just did and skip straight to the flats without doing a lineart first.

I just spent all night fighting to do all this for the first time-- even running to Walmart at 10pm to buy cheap gloves, because I couldn't figure out how to enable palm rejection in GIMP-- and if I had done lineart first, I could be done right now. Instead, since the flats no longer line up perfectly with the original photo, I either have to draw a lineart over the flats (oh god) or break the skin layer into several layers and paint to make edges... which means doing shading and highlights, just to look right... and I can't even paint on a real life canvas, so this is kind of a nightmare. Way, way more than I meant to be tackling with literally my first all-digital art project.

Original character (c) me
Base stock used (c) me

Description
So, using photo stock as the underlayer while drawing is both simple and helpful, if your goal is to have an end product that looks realistic and you're having trouble learning what realistic shapes are. Repeated exposure to real, unedited photos is a great thing. And if it's your first time using a tablet from start to finish with a drawing, having those hard guidelines to trace (or just barely alter) is really... nice.

But if you do it, DON'T do what I just did and skip straight to the flats without doing a lineart first.

I just spent all night fighting to do all this for the first time-- even running to Walmart at 10pm to buy cheap gloves, because I couldn't figure out how to enable palm rejection in GIMP-- and if I had done lineart first, I could be done right now. Instead, since the flats no longer line up perfectly with the original photo, I either have to draw a lineart over the flats (oh god) or break the skin layer into several layers and paint to make edges... which means doing shading and highlights, just to look right... and I can't even paint on a real life canvas, so this is kind of a nightmare. Way, way more than I meant to be tackling with literally my first all-digital art project.

Original character (c) me
Base stock used (c) me