Sometimes you just gotta decide NOPE

So I've been working on an old illustration on and off that was meant for a contest, but was never handed in. However, I got myself stuck on it and I have no idea how to move past it which, I have to admit, is pretty unusual for me. So I decided to just move on from it because I know I can make better stuff from the confusion that came from this illustration.

Originally I had intended to do a black and white undertone and then put color on top, but once I got to the color part I had no idea how to color it. If I followed one color, the drawing suddenly looked bland and took away from the lighting. If I tried multiple colors that process took away some of the ethereal mood of the entire work. If I left the drawing black and white, it wasn't very interesting like that either. I thought about color accents, but...

I got stuck.

I also had issues with drawing stylized vs realism in this work. You can see that the figure's arm is some stylized thing while her hand is extremely realistic. There was some problems with the "lantern" looking like, well, a lantern with a fire brewing inside it and the tone confusion against the dark of the star dress and I think the smoke took away from the stylization I was trying to go for. Maybe if the smoke was more lineart rather than just form...?

However, I am very happy with how the figure's headscarf, star halo, mask, and the designs in the background came out. Haha, so basically I really like the top half of the drawing while the bottom half is just very...confused. I think the main problem that caused all the other issues to pop up was that I failed with lighting and tone direction which is something I have to keep in mind next time.

So, for now with all its mistakes, I'm dropping this illustration even though it pains me to do so (all that tiiiiime). 

Welp, I'll do better next time. 

(BTW, I really like the sketch better than the end drawing and that's painful, too, haha.)

So much fanart...

I haven't posted much lately, so I thought it was time to do a tumblr dump once again. Haha, I've been drawing a lot of fanart lately of Fire Emblem: Awakening again (as well as other things) and I have utterly no regrets indulging in that. It does get in the way of some of my more serious work, but doing whimsical stuff never really hurts to do once in a while. I'll show the original work first, though.

These are the characters in their tentative color schemes and designs for a story I'm writing for fun. Not much to say beyond that really, but it was really nice to just go nuts with drawing clothes without thinking too much forethought. I had fun with making the clothes distinctive from each character.

Below the cut is all the fanart work and a lot of text so click the link if you want to just scroll on through.

Heeeeeyyyyy more sketches!

This is just a short entry for today! I collected all the concept sketches I had so far on Shadow Lady for a clearer view on her development.

On another note, I sent off an earlier version of this that had a duplicating batch of sketches to someone and I was super embarrassed to find that out today. (awkward laughter forever) Soooo always double-check or just don't press that send button until you know you can multiple double digits together or something. Oh maaaan....

Tumblr things

So besides the world-building project, I've been doodling here and there, too.

I decided to submit a demon to Ava's Demon Design Your Demon contest on tumblr. I didn't get to have much time to figure out thumbnails on how I wanted my demon to look, so I just worked from the list of features I had in my head that I knew I wanted to draw and went from there. I'm still surprised it came out as well as it did and I enjoyed coloring this a lot. I'm especially proud of how the hair and the cracks on the dress came out. I originally attempted to have the demon's irises glowing through the thin skin of her closed eyelids, but that was a lot harder to translate into drawing than expected so I simply just made them all normal eyelids with one opened.

But yeah, a description to this demon lady was welcomed for the contest so I'll just retype what I wrote before about her:

"This demoness, while not malicious, has a tendency to see her past and future in rose-colored lens without being aware that neither times are ever perfect (thus the cracks in her otherwise fluffy, elegant form). She always laments that there were/will be better times and is never satisfied with the present enough to be truly happy. She is rather charming and courteous, but that unfortunately only makes it easier to sway her pactmaker into doubting all her choices with insidious criticisms and passive-aggression.

Her name is Melin Mirala, the name adapted from Melinoë (nymph who was known for bringing nightmares and misfortune) and mirage in Mirala for her delusions. Her element would be wind/air, I suppose.

So yeah, she's cheerful, ain't she?"

A friend of mine called her a "blushing bride." She also had sense of unease from all the reddish shards Melin had for limbs and horns. Haha, that was exactly the sort of feeling I was trying for so I'm happy I got it.

Check out the rest of the entries here! They're all so great! (*flaps hands excitedly*)

EDIT: Melin won honorable mention along with other lovely honorable mentions! Woo!

The image above was pretty fun to do. They're all the OCs I made years ago (like middle school years ago) and I had frankly forgotten how they all looked like. So I decided to redraw them from what I little remembered, realized that I remembered absolutely nothing, cheated by looking up old drawings, and redrew them. Haha, so I guess my experimentation was half-shoddy.

Still, I had fun trying to draw my characters as different as possible with the skills I have now and I'm not too displeased by how I did. I tried to implement their personalities in their characteristics and some were more successful than others.

And finally, COMIC! ABOUT POKÉMON! (I'm a very rude person in video games in general, though; spinning around in circles during cutscenes in Assassin's Creed anyone?)

Ideas!

Well, let's start with the hefty parts first:

I keep mentioning here and there of a world-building project I've been working on for my own personal enjoyment as well as something to show for my portfolio. It's basically a remake of the senior thesis I had done a while ago, but with more of the content I wish I could have gone into the first time I had started this.

So here's one of the many characters I've been working on for a bit now. She's still got a ways to go, but this sheet is a good direction towards it. I don't exactly have a name for her yet, so for now we'll just call her Shadow Lady or SL. 

Originally she looked like the person on the top here, but quite a few changes had been made, haha.

So considering that SL's magical attribute are the shadows, I wanted to give her a sort of formless, dark costume to allow her to fit better in the darkness and to represent that mysteriousness as well. She also belongs to the wilder side of the magical world, so I wanted to give her otherwise featureless self a little wildness in the tear of her cloak (as if she had been walking around in the world for many years) and in the haphazard way her clothes under the cloak was put on. 

I liked the idea that when SL used her magic, she would glow from the shadows like how a flicker of the moon would light up the branches of a dark forest on particular places on her body. Her tattoos and the enchantments placed on her clothes would show that glowing etherealness, that she is not quite a normal creature of the earth as she might look from first sight. She also has several raven feathers for summoning/spell purposes on her body and I liked the idea of her having a sheer covering over her dress to give her that wispy appearance.

However, there're still kinks I need to work out (like her facial features and some more work on her clothes....) so she might not even look like this a week from now, haha.