Finally! 
After 21 hours spread over a few weeks, I’m finally done with this painting. Phew… It was the biggest project I did so far, and oh boy, do I have some mixed feelings about this 
As usual, to make it crystal clear, this is a study (slightly “remixed”), rather closely based on official game art materials.
But without further ado, here’s my take on Dan Heng, one of the free characters of Honkai Star Rail. He’s a really cool dude (wait, I finally drew a guy! 
), composed and resourceful, and it seems he’ll have quite an impressive story arc in the game soon.
Now, it wouldn’t be me if I didn’t have some thoughts to share about this piece, but don’t feel compelled to read it. I’m partially writing it for my future self 
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General comments
- I made a few attempts in the past to make a “finished” painting, and never really did. For that reason, I’m really happy I managed to complete this one. It was more of a psychological thing rather a technical difficulty.
- As I mentioned, it took 21 hours (as registered by Krita). Main reasons are reworks of stuff like lineart, hair shading, and just rendering it all. I tried a few things and not immediately saw good results. Obviously I wanted to push the quality this time, but the result isn’t even that great. I did learn a few things, of course.
- Opportunity cost - that’s my biggest gripe. I probably could have finished 5-7 drawings or rough paintings in this time. At least now I can move on and I’m very happy about that
- Originality - with that much time and effort invested, it kind of sucks this work isn’t more original (i.e. the composition, pose). I can’t comfortably show it without stressing it’s “heavily inspired”, as otherwise we’re entering plagiarism territory.
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The rough and the composition - I started with official art references and was trying to find a sensible composition. I wanted to have a close up character shot, but also show their weapon. In the end, I settled on something really close to the references and it definitely helped with capturing the character’s likeness and figuring out the shading.
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Techniques
- For the spear prop I couldn’t convincingly nail the perspective, so I modelled it in Blender and imported to Krita with the Blender Layer plugin to draw over the mesh.
- The spear isn’t too faithful to the original, but I tried out something new here. The squiggly patterns were made with Layer Style (stroke), to create a quick lineart. I saw this often in Clip Studio timelapses, and wasn’t sure if Krita had it. It does
- Brushes - for the most part I was using a few standard digital ones as well as a few from David Revoy’s pack. Lineart is done with “Charcoal Pencil Thin”, I found it much easier to work with than G-Pen, which requires masterful control over the lines, while the pencil is more “organic” and forgiving. Most of the textured shading used “Glazing Textured - deevad 23.01”. For clean and uniform shaded areas, I used “Basic-4 Flow Opacity” or the airbrush for local gradients.
- I had a hard time with the hair, redrew it a few times. From the references, I realized it must be done with large, subtle gradients and there’s not much texture. Otherwise it comes out as “dirty”. I started splitting it into large areas to apply gradients, then detailed with lasso regions and big flow/opacity strokes. Layer separation is probably not needed, once you get a Heng of it (get it? “Heng”
). - I agonized over the background for some time… It was supposed to be this stylized maple tree. I ended up drawing a leaf shape and making my own brush from it. Then I just stamped it around until it looked reasonably good.
- During shading I often created new layers, painted in them, erased anything that was overshot, then merged down into the desired layer. I had a lot of layers, basically per material or object, in case I need to do HSV color adjustments.
- The lineart is slightly tinted to not have a pitch-black outlines, especially inside the character’s silhouette. This is done by merging the lineart and simply drawing over it with alpha-lock enabled.
- I noticed that some anime illustrations use post-processing effects, such as chromatic aberration and noise. This time I added a very subtle noise, as that helps reduce the “digital” effect. This is done with a mid-gray filled layer and G-Mic filter Degradations / Add Noise. I applied the effect only to the character, at 50% opacity with grain merge blending. It’s not that visible due to image compression, actually.
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Closing thoughts
- All in all it was a fulfilling experience. Don’t assume you can draw something until you really try it hard. That way I realized I couldn’t shade hair after all
- I’m not all that happy with the detailing and lighting. Cloth folds are totally phoned-in. Colors feel maybe a bit too saturated. Eh, the list goes on and on…
- I really want to explore more ideas and compositions and get more mileage in rather than spend so much time on a single piece, at least at my current experience level. Should be better bang for the buck, if you will.
- All in all it was a fulfilling experience. Don’t assume you can draw something until you really try it hard. That way I realized I couldn’t shade hair after all
OK, this is getting way too long. Sorry for that, and thanks for checking out the thread! 
