Hello again, I know it has been a few weeks since I last posted, but those weeks absent were not in vain! Aside from working on my website and social media accounts I also have plenty of work to show. If you’ve been following me online you probably have seen the works I’m discussing already, but fear not; this will be a deeper dive into those works along with a sneak peek of a sketch I’m working on.
You don't have to explain yourself, just tell me what you've been working on.
Well, along with my art I’ve been trying to update my website and social media accounts. (By which I mean making accounts and adding links to everything on my website and accounts and trying to up my SEO score) There’s still things I have to do but it’s an ongoing process, one that I know will be worth it in the end when I have; a super awesome website, social media pages that look super nice and presentable, and all of them are within easy access to each other. Aside from that I’ve done a couple pictures including another character design rotation that I will be happy to explain in further detail later in this blogpost. But first we have this drawing of Beck I made which was a remake of an old sketch I did in my sketchbook. I think of all the original character drawings I made so far this is the first one that isn’t just flat colors other than my profile picture.
I definitely want to try and do more complex shading and colors in my illustrations. I’ve been trying to find some tutorials on that but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t having any trouble doing so. I think part of it is that there’s just so many tutorials out there and still being new to digital art means that I’m having difficulty knowing where to start. I’ve tried practicing my linework to mixed results but the most progress I’ve seen with it has definitely just been with my hand get steadier as I practice more and more.
Nice! What else do you got?
I made a character design turnaround for my third OC Michelle! She’s still pretty faithful to her earlier depictions in my previous illustrations but this time she has a pink belt to match her shoes. I was worried about how the mesh sleeves would turn out but all I really had to do was lower the opacity and color over it. So basically I panicked internally only for the thing I was worried about to have a very easy solution; very on brand for me if we’re being honest. While all the character’s I’ve made so far have aspects of myself reflected in their designs, Michelle takes the most inspiration from a specific part of my life compared to Beck and Gabe: My teen years.
While not a teenager herself a lot of her interests and personality traits are taken from how I was as a teen, albeit through a lens of looking back fondly but not idealistically as an adult rather than trying to be as accurate to my actual teen self as possible looks and personality wise. The cringe is too much lol.
The process... how I got from an idea to a character.
Despite my teen years playing a big inspiration in the final design my initial conception of her character actually was inspired by the thumbnail of a YouTube video I was recommended on horror games with PS1 styled graphics.
The girl behind the woman in the thumbnail was a character in one of the games mentioned. They added what looks like red eye shadow to her in the thumbnail compared to how the picture actually looks and I kinda liked how it looked and thought it would be fun to make an alternative looking character. I’ve always liked alt fashion but never really did much with it art-wise. Fun fact, I actually looked up the original photo and she literally has the same hairstyle as Michelle in the full photo, that was entirely a coincidence.
I actually did a surprising amount of sketches trying to get the face right as simple as it looked, the hardest part was the head shape. I wanted her to have a rounded face but the more cartoonish style combined with a soft jaw meant that my first few attempts her head looked like a sphere. It was surprisingly difficult to get it to taper the way I wanted to but once I did I was able to do it pretty much no problem. Now that I had her appearance down it was time to design her clothes.
The fashion aspect of it all.
If it wasn’t made obvious by the character design turnaround I didn’t give her any crazy alternative makeup. Part of this was because when I was coming up with her design it was for an animation project for one of my classes. Obviously being new to animation I wanted to simplify the design so it would be easier to animate. It was at this point her design turned from simply being “alternative” to more of a reflection of my interests as a teenager, her clothes basically being the result of asking myself “when I was a teenager, what would I thought would have been cool to wear if I was a girl?” I was listening to A LOT of Hole during my high school years if you want to get a good idea of what my mental state was back then, so of course I had to use Courtney Love as a sort of fashion influence for a character inspired by my teenage interests.
Michelle’s outfit is essentially a more modest and casual take on what Courtney Love wore in the music video for Celebrity Skin. I even color picked the pink guitar for her belt and shoes. I feel like if you were to tie specific fashion influences to the type’s of clothes Michelle would wear it would probably be a mix of Courtney Love and Alice Glass inspired looks. (I never listened to Crystal Castles but I thought Alice’s outfits looked cool, especially the colored leggings) I always loved when characters in games and media wore different clothes and I do plan to design other outfits for her and the other characters I’ve drawn that aren’t necessarily based off of one specific outfit.
Wow, you had even more to say this time compared to your last one.
Yeah… honestly there was a lot of stuff I could have brought up when mentioning my previous designs that I just didn’t. I definitely think part of it was just being exhausted from just graduating. But like I said with my drawing I’m developing a stamina that’s allowing me to do more without getting exhausted. What started as a requirement for a college class on making a website has turned into something I genuinely enjoy doing, not only that but it’s becoming less taxing mentally as I practice and get better at it. Honestly the next time I draw my other OC’s again I’m probably going to go more in depth with them as well since I’m now getting more comfortable with writing and discussing what I’m passionate about. I do need to buy a grammar book though, I use way too many commas and periods.