After I wrote about the three aspects of being a good artist, digital painter BaddelZie commented:

I’m a long-time fan of their works, so I (politely) grilled them on their art process, and how trying new things improved their art. Hope you enjoy the interview and behind-the-scenes look!

BaddelZie (BZ): I’ll start with some older ones (~ 2-3 years), I was clearly trying too hard to work clean with smooth shading, ‘perfect’ lineart and too afraid to be more bold, especially with lighting (probably one of the biggest changes I’ve had).

BZ: These next ones are from early-mid last year. I was still clinging to my lineart, but I slowly stopped overthinking things and went for more sketchy lineart and somewhat more visible brush strokes, no more working extra clean and not having a lot of fun while doing it. This would probably also be around the time I started playing around more with the lighting.

BZ: Moving on to late last year / earlier this year, my lineart became more like… part of the whole thing, if that makes sense. Still (mostly) there, just not as in-your-face. This worked better with the painterly style I do now, which for me personally is just more fun to do.

BZ: And continuing the trend, this is where I am now. Lineart is gone for the most part, lighting is my new best friend and I’m slowly dipping into more realistic art.

BZ: Small fun fact while I’m at it, I used to work with like 4 billion layers for each piece, basically a new layer for every little thing. Now I do around 90% on a single layer (not including sketches), and I just add new layers for the final boost in shading at the end. This helped me immensely to get away from my earlier clean works, because drawing like this pretty much ensures some ‘mistakes’ (you could even call them happy little accidents). Like traditional painting in a way. Also, I barely use anything other than simple round brushes, but that’s something I’m trying to change at the moment..

Beats: Love the reframing of mistakes. I found that incorporating them adds flavor—when we aim for perfection we often lose the things that make us stand out. That’s why I like to enlarge my sketches/color comps and use those in the final, so I get that sprinkle of randomness.

BZ: As for the lighting, I started playing around with layer modes more and more (I do love my color dodge/burn and similar ones), they’re great for that extra lighting boost without actually changing the actual piece. I guess you could say it was exploration that turned into/led to technical skill?

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Beats: The most impressive thing to me is how imaginative these are. Obviously you cant find lighting like this easily irl, so how do you find references, and how did you build that skill? What resources or artist inspirations helped you as you progressed from lineart to painting?

BZ: Hard to say, most of the time even I don’t know what I’m doing.. I mean for the most part these are still female bodies, so drawing lot’s of naked ladies will help. The rest is just doing what looks right, and not always what is right. If it looks good/realistic enough that’s all I need. I rarely use pose references anymore, it’s usually specific body parts (hands..)

There are some artists I liked to take a closer look at for specific things though. @personalami for fur, @tezy8art (and by extension @cutesexyrobutts I guess) for a more painterly style. I do look at a bunch of art to see how other artists do it, but other than that I basically brute force it until it looks good enough.

For the burning lady up there my thoughts were basically ‘if there’s enough going on noone will notice that I have no idea what I’m doing’.

Most poses I draw are pretty simple, those I usually draw without reference (except for the hands sometimes). For more dynamic poses/angles I would most likely still look for references, whether that’s photos or art.

For inspirations I should probably add, mikeymegamega on youtube was a big one for me when I started out, mainly for anatomy and how to sketch bodies (and is probably one reason I don’t need/use references as much). Marc Brunet / YTartschool is another big one for shading and coloring and the like.

Beats: Thanks for sharing! If there’s any other professional NSFW artist you’d like us to interview, feel free to suggest in the comments! You can find BaddelZie on Twitter.