Below is the original script, written in my notes, that would become my video on speed-painting Denji from Chainsaw man

This is Denji. This is me. This is Denji dressed as me. This is me dressed as Denji. This is Denji’s dog. This is me dressed like me, and this is Denji dressed like Denji.

We’ll be drawing him today.

This video is in response to numerous questions I’ve received over the years, namely “How do you draw?” It’s a common question for any artist, usually accompanied by the typical “lots of practice” and “sometimes not well,” responses. I figured I’d give a more substantial answer, however, and offer you guys and gals a peak behind the curtain. So here it is! Not only my complete drawing process, but how I set out to draw the gnarliest Chainsaw Man poster in the world.

SKETCHING

Starting with several layers of sketches, I knew going into this project I wanted to really convey Denji’s ferocity, so I opted for a striking pose and more realistic approach to his overall design. You can see as I get started with my pen here that I’m not committed to the huge protruding spikes nestled among his sawblades, so in my redesign I chose to forego the spikes entirely and keep a grounded look to his weaponry.

FIRST INK PASS

I’ve learned from past projects that when it comes to tracing over detailed references like weapons, it’s best to skip the sketching phase all together and go straight to inking, which is what I’m doing here. I took several of my own photographs of chainsaws at the angles I knew I’d need and brought them into Sketchbook for tracing. I also knew this would end up being one of my larger portraits, so I didn’t want to hold back with details; a decision that paid off in the final piece.

Despite my best efforts, the angle of his face blade didn’t quite line up with my sketch, so I did have to warp and segment my tracing layer to accommodate. Luckily I didn’t lose much of the layer’s fidelity while doing this, and it gave me a chance to accentuate some of the line weight along the silhouette once everything was in place.

I noticed the backline of Denji’s visor grills didn’t align, so I did go back to the sketch layers to draw a guideline so I could reconstruct those grills properly. This tends to happen, especially with machinery, weaponry, or vehicles, which are commonly cited as the most difficult subjects to animate and often draw given their rigid shapes. I probably could’ve gotten away with leaving the visor as is, but once I noticed it definitely began to bug me and I knew I had to correct it for my own sanity. It also doesn’t help that I originally sketched Denji with only three grill slots when he has four, so if you’re ever drawing him in the future, do make a note of that.

Flipping your canvas is a great tip I learned only recently, and here you can see it served me greatly when I discovered yet another visor issue, that being the grills on the far side of his head too low for the perspective we’re drawing at.

I made my final touch-ups to the sawblade and trimmed the line art around it before merging the two layers together. I’ve definitely caused myself trouble in the past by failing to trim surrounding line art and then merging two incongruent sections atop of each other, which can create rather ugly tangents if not straight-up overwriting your previous work. You can see here I did miss trimming a little bit and had to redraw part of the chain.

Now, even though this is still just my first ink pass and I don’t normally add any line weight or block out my shadows, I did thicken and scrub over some blade details for the sake of coloring, which we’ll get to in a bit.

I went a little overboard with the details while drawing Denji’s arm, probably because I got excited about drawing veins and fingers. Hands are unironically once of my favorite things to draw, especially when I have good reference, but this is still a first pass so I risked complicating my coloring process since this is the layer I use to select my flat areas.

You’ll notice here on a separate layer for the second sawblade, I do trace over Denji’s hand; this is because I knew I wanted to widen the blade’s guide bar compared to the reference images I took, so I left myself some extra material to work with. And once the position looks good, I erase the extra and thicken that silhouette again.

You’ll see I go back to messing around with potentially adding the spikes along the sawblades, at least for the forearms, before copying the chain I’ve already traced and moving onto what’s probably my favorite part of the poster, that being the blades just starting to emerge from Denji’s other arm. And here I do compromise on the decision to add spikes or stay realistic and go for both with a bit of edgy exaggeration for the topmost plates. I’m not going to lie, adding the stretching and yet-torn skin around the burgeoning blades was one of the most disgusting and somehow satisfying parts of the whole piece.

SECOND INK PASS

And now begins our second pass. A tedious but nevertheless necessary step, here I go over the entire canvas on another layer and block out my hard shading and textures. I do this on a separate layer so as not to overcomplicate the coloring process, and it allows me to render the artwork like a contemporary comic’s page with the harsh lighting and classic shading techniques I love so much.

Shameless plug number one: if you haven’t guessed based on the advertisement footer and some random doodles scattered throughout the timelapse, this artwork was drawn live on Twitch. I do my best to go live whenever it comes time to draw, so if you want to see that for yourself you can join us Tuesdays and Thursdays for those special occasions.

Shameless plug number two: here I use a custom chain brush from my personal brush pack, which I end up using to shade the tendons in Denji’s neck as well as several background elements, and if you’re a fellow Autodesk Sketchbook user you can pick this pack up for yourself over on Gumroad. All links down below, of course.

All right then, back to the poster.

Denji was looking a little chicken-legged, so I adjusted the line art to match the perspective. You’ll also see I frequently drop the opacity of my second pass so I can determine how best to compliment the line art and find which shapes work best with it.

Along the jaw, I really wanted to achieve a burnished metal look in the texturing, so this is one of the few times I switched to a painter’s brush to match that effect.

Here you see me making use of those custom chain brushes for the neck tendons. I wasn’t sure how this would look in the final product, but once everything came together it ended up being one of my favorite details.

I couldn’t figure out how much shading to block out on the neck. Initially I wanted to preserve as much complexity in the tendrils as I could, but I realized this detracted from the attention you give to Denji’s face, which is the centerpiece of the composition, so I was constantly painting over my line art to ensure a viewer’s eye didn’t linger too long on his neck. I definitely spent way too long on trying to find the perfect balance of light and dark and should’ve just left this for when it came time to color and render. A mistake I made sure to learn from.

Moving on from the face, I began adding strokes to the rest of the body. At first I wanted to go overboard like with his head and sawblades, but I decided most of the shading, especially on his shirt, would benefit most from soft atmospheric lighting and less hard contrast, so I held myself back while finishing up the second pass.

FLATS

And now onto masking and flats! I find this brief step one of the most satisfying. By selecting the area around my line art and inverting the selection I get a nice clean mask under the whole drawing, which is necessary for future clipping masks where we do full-body lighting, shading, and silhouetting. I always choose a dark color for the base mask to help conceal any coloring gaps between the line art and flats, and it makes coloring easier if I can match the mask color to the character’s overall color scheme or a particular color on their person. In this case, I experimented with shades of blue and green for Denji’s pants before deciding to go with a straightforward gray, since I could also use that color for the base of his chainsaws.

Flats, or flat colors, are the unshaded portions of hue underlying all rendering. I get my flat shapes just by area selecting within my line art, which is why making sure I have uncluttered line art is so important on that first ink pass, and why I do my hard shading and texturing on another layer. Even so, you can see me going back with the lasso tool and cleaning up my selected areas before filling it in with the bucket.

At this point it’s not uncommon for me to bounce between steps, like going back to clean up my second pass and line art when I realized it’ll cause problems for coloring and rendering.

(You’ll notice here we changed the stream layout for the holidays.)

Now here I struggled with what I consider to be one of the hardest aspects of illustrating a character redesign, that being the color choice for details that don’t exist in the original image. The lip and border around the mouth here aren’t elements present in Denji’s manga or anime design, so I had to find a color that highlighted those new elements without clashing against the other colors in the scheme. This can be pretty challenging at times, and those of you who’ve heard about my RWBY redesigns, especially Pyrrha Nikos, know this was a significant problem I faced with that project as well.

The other important note about color schemes is that less is more. Using fewer colors through the illustration helps with cohesiveness, an example of which you can see when I reused the maroon of the neck tendrils for the ripcord string.

Afterwards I sketched in several blood elements to help give an idea of what the final image might look like. I knew I wanted to do two variations of this design, one with and one without blood, so while this layer didn’t end up in either of the final renders, it did serve as groundwork for me to base my rendering decisions around.

RENDERING

Speaking of which, now begins our final step: rendering. Before we even touch Denji, however, we need to go in and get our background setup. I’ve gotten into the habit of doing this so I know the exact hue I need for atmospheric shadows and bounce light, the two things that really bring the whole piece together and sell the realism. Going with a bluish-green to contrast the orange of Denji’s face, I used those custom chains again to quickly add some designs in the back.

Okay, now onto Denji. If you’ve seen me draw before, you know I love my cotton-ball brush to quickly get some gritty texture down. Between that and your standard airbrush, I layered down various shades of sky-blue and green, getting darker in creases and folds to mimic ambient occlusion. The lasso tool also comes in clutch here to help illustrate hard lines and folds in the shirt. Despite that, I wasn’t as precise with my selections as I should’ve been, so you can see I do have to clean up the texture that spilled over onto the skin flats…that’s a weird sentence…

Anyway, while I do use a soft eraser to feather out and lighten some areas, keep in mind this is all still on the same layer and we’re only adding or subtracting shadow on top of the flats, so you can see how far even a little bit of shading can go.

Ah, now we move on to what’s arguably the hardest part of any portrait: drawing skin. While I’m not exempt from the inherent difficulty, I enjoy this part of the process because it allows for so much experimentation. Compared to my other works, I took a very different approach and drew a lighting map: that is, a flat indication of where the bulk of the shadows and highlights will appear, which helps prevent any banding by random brush strokes. My guidelines ended up looking a lot like traditional cell-shading this time around, which tempted me to draw another variation of Denji with cell-shading, but no! I had to stay focused! Can’t lose sight of the finish line now. If you want me to go back and render a cell-shaded variant, however, let me know. I’m still tempted.

Unlike the rest of the piece, I do all shading and lighting for skin on a single layer, that way it’s easy to keep everything I need in once place and also allow me to quickly overwrite and blend different strokes, which happens a lot. I made sure to add plenty of blush as well since I knew Denji’s skin along with his head was really the only warm color throughout the composition. I know many artists prefer the round brush when it comes to skin (looking at you, Ross Tran), but I do all of my rendering with the airbrush, and add highlights with a custom freckle brush at the end. (I do actually love the round brush and have been using it more lately; please don’t hurt me)

Moving on to the main attraction, I stretched some texture over the facial saw to match the perspective and began with the face. The color I used for shading was much darker and nearly red compared to the straight orange of the base flat, which I didn’t expect I’d have to draw with to get the result I wanted, but after a bit of messing around with the layer’s mode and opacity, I eventually settled on this muddled burn effect which gave me a lot of wiggle room in case I had to mess with it later, which, believe me, I did.

Rendering his smile was so much fun. I haven’t drawn teeth in a long time, and they have some very unique properties, like a slight transparency by the tip which usually looks blue. You’ll notice I actually cut out the hard shading of the smile and paste it on another layer to minimize the opacity so I can focus on those aforementioned fun colors. I’ll be honest, I don’t think I’ve had this many layers dedicated to line art before.

I spent way more time on Denji’s chest than I thought I’d have to. I kept finding myself working around the sternum line, and honestly I should’ve just erased it and airbrushed the whole chest, but I didn’t want to leave such a huge portion of the piece without any line art, even if it was painted over. Eventually I worked around my stubbornness and painted something decent, so I moved on.

I felt a strange sense of responsibility to draw the fingernails well, because I don’t know if you guys and gals noticed, but in the anime, everyone’s fingernails have three or four color passes on them, which is an unnecessary level of detail–Mappa, why is there this much detail?–anyway, I felt I had a duty to live up to the precedent the Studio set.

Also, can’t lie, the banding on the knuckles of the outstretched hand was horrendous, so I made sure to fix that. This is also when I disabled the blood layer to have a clearer silhouette of Denji’s arm.

Now onto lighting. Starting with the head, since I knew I wanted a stark top-down light, I used a similar color-burn effect as the shading, this time to up the contrast and give the shell a more metallic texture and reflectiveness. I’m pretty sure I painted on the same layer for the shirt because I liked the contrast, and continued using my soft eraser to feather the edges.

After the top lighting was mostly complete, everything was coming together nicely. I changed color to the background green and upped the value for bounce light, which I applied under his raised arm and along the edges of his pants.

COMPOSITING

Now we move onto final compositing. This is another favorite practice of mine to help bring everything together cohesively, and it starts with mimicking some lens overexposure on his head and shirt. I got to go all out with my airbrush which was a ton of fun, and this not only adds a realistic effect but also softens some of the line art.

Ah, highlights: everyone’s favorite detail. You can see me now going over the skin with that freckle brush I mentioned early, using pure white to highlight his pores and sweat. And after that I go up to his eye to add some depth to his iris, a sharp highlight, and reflectiveness along the waterline and lacrimal caruncle. I also swapped back to the lighting layer to add some specks to the metal.

EFFECTS

Onto final effects, and this is one of my favorite elements, I selected the area of Denji’s face behind the sawblade to paint a yellowish glow, as I’d image you’d see it from his undamaged eye. Fun to draw, but my initial selection wasn’t the cleanest so you can see I had to brush up between the saw teeth.

A little color dodge never anybody; and I added some lighting effects to the background to help sell the top-lighting. I also increased the contrast by the bottom of the frame to help draw the eye upwards to Denji’s face.

And that concludes our illustration of Chainsaw Man! At least the Safe For Life version.

NSFL

I added several elements off-screen, like the border-frame and Denji’s reflection in his own sawblade, and what you’re watching now is a separate stream a week later when I came back to draw the Not Safe For Life version.

Now normally I’d sketch and ink where the blood would go and fill and render it like any other element, but I decided to go the experimental route again. Similar to a light-map, I drew guidelines for where the blood and spittle would coalesce and drip from Denji’s body, then selected those areas in rough tear-drop and splatter shapes to fill in with a crimson base which I’d then drop the opacity of. You’ll notice I used the rule of three’s throughout this process: typically, for shape economy, you want to have a small, medium, and large shape grouped together: I did the same here, only with groups of short, long, and very long strands of spittle and liquid. This helps organize what’s otherwise a naturally chaotic element and helps keep the viewer’s eye from getting overwhelmed. I also copied my hard shading layer above my blood flats to keep the blood from looking like it was painted on over an already finished piece, since, you know, that’s exactly what it was.

A quick shading and lighting pass, and after some highlights I thought I’d be done. It still looked really flat, however, so I grabbed my ink pen and blocked in shadows to make the blood feel like it was really clinging to crevices and folds. I just traced my line art from below, and after some bounce light I was much happier with the results. If there’s anything I learned from this poster, it’s that I’m seriously out of shape when it comes to drawing blood.

I thought bruises would make a good addition, especially around where the sawblades emerge, so a few brushes of purple and yellow and ta-da: he’s all banged up. Speaking of bruises and blood, I forgot to add veins to the original piece, so I made sure to go around with blue and maroon to give the skin some extra depth.

And finally, since we’d come this far anyway, I added splotches and stains to Denji’s clothes. I have several good brushes for this, most of which come with Sketchbook by default, and they don’t see the light of day nearly often enough, so it felt nice to bring them out.

Sidenote: never underestimate your pencil tool. I use it all the time for texture, like here, where it was perfect for drawing strands of cloth that’ve been extra-soaked in gobily-gunk.

A few final details, and voila! Our Not Safe For Life Chainsaw Man poster is finally complete. All in all, illustrating both versions of this poster took me about eight hours, nearly all of which were streamed live over on Twitch. If you dig these designs as much as I do, you can head over to my website or Etsy store where both posters are available to purchase in all their full 4K glory. And if you’ve made it all the way to the end of this video, thank you. I know several of you have been requesting a video like this for a while, and I hope it finally answers all or at least most of your questions regarding my process and design philosophy.

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Until next time, I hope you have a wonderful day, and I appreciate your support like you wouldn’t believe.

God Bless You.