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@windup-estinien said:

may be wording this weird but like…how do you take a sketch (with lines) and turn it into a line less piece? it’s something I’ve been struggling with

Well…I must confess, I rarely do this actually ghknghjghj My actual process for working linelessly is… i just dont use any lines sobs

Personally I started working linelessly because I have very limited energy and working with lines would leave me with no energy to colour anything.. so I just dropped the lines altogether—thats why whenever you see me posting stuff with lines its almost always uncoloured. From the way the question is phrased (taking a lined drawing and making it lineless), I feel that taking a similar approach would be a good step, so try foregoing lines altogether.

When working without lines, you have to rely on value to create clearly defined shape & form. You need to reframe your thinking a little—while there are no lines here, there is a clearly defined edge by the value difference from her hair & where I've place the shadow. You're not drawing lines, but defining shapes through value difference!

If I run an edge detection filter it creates this. By placing shadows strategically to define the form, there’s no need for me to draw any lines because your brain fills those in for me!

I did actually work with a sketch for the portraits I did recently, you can see that without lines to define any dimension on the flat colours, the distinction between forms is completely lost

it’s through the lighting that I then define everything clearly!

In any case, it’s much easier to take a sketch and make it lineless if you already have experience working linelessly in the first place, so my advice would be to practice drawing without a sketch at all and focusing just on defining shapes and edges through value contrast.