Pokecember: 19-24

Here are almost a week's worth of Pokécember pictures, plus a general walkthrough of one of the pieces.

19. Fave Alolan form: Alolan Vulpix. This was one of the first Alolan pokemon revealed, and I just loved how it contrasted with the original fire versions of Vulplix and Ninetales. The Alolan Ninetales is just a gorgeous as the Kalos one.

 20. Fave Mega Evolution: Mega Gardevoir. I enjoyed using this psychic-fairy cross, especially later in the game.

21. Fave Z-move: Breakneck Blitz. I haven't played much of Moon yet, so I haven't used many Z-moves. Which means, yeah, this one. I like how I was able to do the dust cloud for this image. I opted not to do any inked lines for the cloud to keep it less solid compared to the Yungoos.

 22. Fave single stage: Furfrou. Big poodle pokemon from XY, but I really liked it. I had some other pokemon that took its spot later in the game, but I liked playing with this normal type for the early parts.

23. Fave starter (25): Froakie. Hey, my fave pokémon is Greninja, and I liked pretty much the whole line, so of course Froakie is my fave starter. I also got a little ahead of the list and jumped a couple days. This means that I did day 25's day on the 23rd, and will have to adjust the next couple of days. Which leads us to day 24 (23), fave legendary.

Fan/Gift Art Walkthrough: Secret Santas

I love creating fan art, and I don't do it enough. I also enjoy creating art for others, which is why I've frequently taken part in fandom secret-santa exchanges, mostly in Portal and Slayers fandoms. This time around, I approached them a little differently.

Normally, when I do a piece of art, I draw it all on one sheet of paper, pretty much going straight through on it. The downsides of that method is loosing the original sketches and being harder to correct if there are errors. This time I opted to use my lightbox and do the final pieces on fresh pages.

Both drawing were drawn on the back of some manga paper that I had, about 10"x14", to avoid the guidelines. As you can see below, I drew the rough lines for each picture in red and blue erasable color pencils.

I then inked each piece on a clean piece. For the Slayers image, I stopped at inking with Copic multiliners. For the overall piece, I drew inspiration at the recipient's request for "Netflix and chill," a more literal interpretation, and Candyland. My idea is that the gang found a visual archive while searching for some treasure and artifacts and have been bingeing on some history vids for the last day or so, only to be surprised by some twist that everyone, except for Gourry, was not expecting. The Candyland ref comes in the form of the figure in the "video." Guess who it is.

For the Portal image, I pushed on to coloring it in Photoshop. I really wanted to make it clear that poor GLaDoS was covered in Christmas lights, which I couldn't pull off in black and white. It really gets across the ridiculousness of the situation.

Fuschia, April Drawing day 30

Just sharing the steps for a marker piece I finished today, but started on the 30th.

Initial colored pencil sketch.

Used a lightbox to trace clean lines with a mechanical pencil.

Inked with G-pen and Deleter Black 5.

Copic markers.

Win with Science

One thing I'm glad I was able to do was to finish the February challenge with a piece I'd been wanting to do for more than a month. I had seen a couple of images in a photo post on a friend's Tumblr which connected Blue Beetle (Jaime Reyes) with Sailor Mercury, who both shared a very scientific attitude (and were blue, but that's a bonus). I really like the pair, and wanted to do a picture based on it. Eventually, I managed to work myself up to doing it, and opted to finish on a high point.

I enjoyed making this piece. I first did some research on how to draw the Blue Beetle armor, which really intimidated me, at first. This eased a little after I gathered some pictures and did some studies. I figured out how to approach the segmented aspect of the armor, the trickiest to me, and how his mask/helmet worked. Here's the rough.

You can see I marked the places where I would fill the blacks. Note, I did draw Mercury's visor, but did not ink it because I'd honestly forgot what that line was for. (I think I had thought it was my mark for the eye line. Simple mistake.)

Initial inks without the graphite sketch.

I think the inking came out very well. I only realized I'd forgotten the visor after I'd inked it and had uploaded the "final" inks. Easily fixed with a couple strokes of the pen. I then took the corrected image into Photoshop and applied a deliberately flat coloring. I eventually opted to have some yellow because it helped act as a contrast to all the blue, and allowed some more color from Beetle to show up.

I plan to do more of this with the other Inner Senshi/Scouts. I've got one I'm pretty sure about, but the other two throw me a little bit. Hopefully, I'll figure something out.

Kiss the Girl

I have always been a big Disney animation fan, and I expect I will be for some time. Yeah, I will often agree on the digs and flaws of Disney as a company, but its animated films hold a special place for me. Not all are hits, but they generally do a good job with crafting and telling their stories. I've seen Tangled, and I enjoyed it. But this isn't about Tangled, this goes back a ways to another feature, The Little Mermaid, and how I managed to mix it with another animated property I love, Princess Tutu.


Those who follow this blog may notice that a lot of my fanart tends to be from the anime series, Princess Tutu, and part of the reason for this is I'm a co-moderator of a fan group of the series over at DeviantArt. This means we often come up with activities for the group to participate in, including monthly contests. That, and I really like the series. Becky, my fellow moderator, and I had decided early in the year to close out the club's year with a contest where the theme was a crossover with the Disney animated films, so I've had most of the year to consider what I wanted to do. Early in the summer, I made a list of potential ideas for both the announcement image and as a possible entry, including the image to the side of Femio as Emperor Kuzco that was used as part of the announcement image. That list included a lot of ideas that I thought were clever or cute, and a few that were what I felt were "obvious," ones that I expected a number of others would do or consider. Prominent among them were the "Princess" films and fairy tale inspired films, such as Cinderella, Snow White, and, most apparent to me, The Little Mermaid.

For a long time, I did not want to do an "obvious" film and characters, and The Little Mermaid had a lot that increased the chances of it being used by a number of other entrants. The two leads are both redheads, after a prince, not really human, and can't explicitly state their respective loves. So, in my attempt to avoid doing TLM, I considered others on my list and a few new ones, such as flower-loving Freya as the Sprite from the "Firebird Suite" in Fantasia 2000, a young Fakir as Winnie the Pooh's Christopher Robin or as Mowgli with Mister Cat as Bageera, and Uzura and Edel as Pinnochio and the Blue Fairy respectively from Pinnochio. But I couldn't shake my initial idea; thematically and visually, having Ahiru and Fakir as Ariel and Eric just worked, and I loved the "Kiss the Girl" scene. I eventually caved and started working on it.

I did a number of studies, and found a couple of images of the scene online for reference. Thankfully, I have the DVD of the film, so I used that a lot. Amusingly enough, I actually spent a few days fretting over adapting Ahiru's hair from the anime design, which shifts the bangs to the other side whenever she turns her head, which doesn't quite work with Disney animation. Then I realized I only needed to do one angle, so I got over it and worked on getting it to look right.

The images were drawn with a green Colerase pencil, then refined with a graphite pencil, and traced on a cleaner, larger piece of paper to get the boat in a better size. I then inked it and scanned it into my computer for digital coloring. The figures and boat were done separately from Flounder and the other fish because I wanted to be able to easily scale and move the parts so they were placed right.

Then came the fun part, doing the background. This was my favorite part of the piece, and the one I enjoyed doing the most. I believe I learned a little while doing this, and it's one of the few times I've actually attempted a background for a stand-a-lone illustration.

Next came the figures and the boat. One thing I was glad to learn is this scene was one that had flat coloring on the figures, i.e. no shading to have to emulate. I had to make color adjustments because the source scene is actually rather dark and not all that colorful. I opted to include Fakir and Ahiru's colors for them (green and yellow) instead of the original's colors because I wanted it to be them. This was a bigger decision for Ahiru, and I did briefly have dress and bow Ariel's blues, but it was agreed upon on Twitter that the yellows and oranges worked much better and fit Ahiru's character. The fish were easy,  and the adjustments I made was to lower the saturation in the later stages.

Lastly came the effects, and it was my least favorite part. The fireflies were easy to do, and I had no problem doing that. It was the sprays and water lines that were a pain. I got something I was all right with, and the image was done.

Sailor Spider

Sketchoholic is an art resource site that emphasizes contests as part of its toolbox for motivating artists to draw. I was alerted to one contest by my friend, Autumn, via Twitter. I checked it out, and the combination that popped into my head was Spider-man and Sailor Moon. I just loved the idea of a sailor scout/senshi with elements of Spidey's costume. And it was crack enough to make me jump on it.

This was my first page of sketches to get a feel for what to keep. Drawn from my memory of how the two looked. The next page is a mix of quick studies of Spider-man's costume. It's very iconic, and I think this is my first time ever drawing anything Spider-man related, so I needed reference. Damn that webbing on the costume. One thing I wish I could have had on my final costume is the webbing between his arms and body, but there weren't enough elements from the sailor senshi uniform to connect to.

 Next, the pencil sketch. I did some thumbnails of her swinging from her webbing from different angles and the classic Sailor Moon post-transformation pose, but my favorite was a simple pose of her braced on a wall. It's a very Spidey kind of pose, and a way to show how she has at least the adhering power. Largely went with the animated version of Sailor Moon, first season, hence lack of hair pens. Included an appropriately different version of her Moon Healing Rod.

And this is the final version. I colored it vibrant colors, then lowered the saturation because I liked how it looks. We'll see how I do in the contest.

April Drawing: Days 13 and 15

I did draw for days 9-11, but they were mostly sketches and scratch work. I have missed two days, which isn't too bad, all things considered.


Day 13: This was my birthday, a rather laid back affair. I got the inspiration for this piece from an episode of Nova about the history of the telescope.


Day 15: I've got progress for this one. The idea came from today's prompt over at the April Drawing LJ community: Draw a superhero. This could be an existing one or an original character. As it happens, I occasionally get really interested in a piece of entertainment, and this time I'm interested in DC Comics' Power Girl. She's just so much fun and I like characters who have fun and don't take themselves too seriously.

I started with a quick pen sketch done during my office hours while waiting for my students to show up. The pose is pretty simple and straight forward, and captured what I intended to do. I used it for the basis of the polished drawing.

The messy messy drawing. I am a messy artist, preferring to get things down and then refine, especially if it's going to on to being inked. Because I usually go to a lightbox and a clean piece of paper, the drawing can be this messy so long as they aren't too dark. Then I go over with a softer lead to make the final lines stand out.

Final inks. Done with Copic SP Multiliners. I like them, but I need to work on using them and probably play around with the brushpen because the biggest drawback of them is the lack of line variety you get with the multiliners. I like getting some variety with smoothness. I got that here, but had to do it with multiple strokes and my hand isn't all that steady. Need to ink more.

I'll probably color this tomorrow.

"Drosselmeyer" Walkthrough

Just a walkthrough of piece of fanart done to illustrate a prompt for Club-Tutu over at DeviantArt. It's a character spotlight, and the first character we're looking at is Drosselmeyer. I wanted to do a piece that showed off how cruel he can be, but never directly, and how much he enjoys seeing people suffer. I had done some more advanced thumbnails, but I ignored them and went with a very simple close-up of Drosselmeyer doing the bad guy steepled hands.

It went pretty easily. I simply looked at some designs materials I had on my computer and went from there. The hardest part was figuring out how to do the hands. Quick Google search and search on dA found nothing. Thank gods for a webcam; if you can't find it, make it.

First rough pencil sketch

Inks (Copic multiliner)

Finished colors (PS CS3)

"Somewhere That's Green" Walkthrough

Today's entry is a walkthrough of a piece of fanart I did for the fan community Club-Tutu's January contest. The theme, Broadway Musicals. Briefly, entrants had to take an existing musical (Broadway or off-Broadway, only requirement it be based on a live theater production), and show how it would look with the cast of Princess Tutu as the actors. After toying with a list of musicals that would be easily recognizable and fun (which I plan to return to in the future), I settled on Little Shop of Horrors, and quickly turned to using Rue and Autor for the starring roles.

I had to work out which scenes I wanted to do that included Audrey II in the scene, and while the play does have a lot of scenes with Seymour and Audrey interacting in front of Twoee, I wanted one with punch. The reprise of "Somewhere that's Green" seemed best. Below are the initial rough pen sketches I did to design the pair and set up the scene. A rare case of first sketch coming out best.

After that, I moved to the rough pencils. Followed by the inks (not shown). I fine tuned the look of Audrey II thanks to some photos I found online, and figured out the vines. I think Audrey II pretty much makes the image. Autor, as usual, drove me nuts. Rue wasn't much trouble.

And below is the final piece, colored in PS CS3. The coloring of raven!Audrey II is based on the raven flowers evil!Mytho created to tempt Freya in episode 16, "The Maiden's Prayer," which were a kind of purple-pink.