Happy New Year! A bit late, but I was playing catch up with some stuff, mainly commissions. As you could see yesterday I finished one yesterday, so I gave myself the day to work on this.
Because of the Robot Master contest, I knew I would not have anything near the 1st or thereafter, so I consciously chose to do something simple from the start, these were the sketches:
Normally as it is tradition I would draw Krea for any holiday, but! This year I would like to put all my efforts related to her on continuing Taifau Cafe. It greatly depresses me and makes me feel like a disappointment that the 2nd chapter is still not out, it eats me like you have no idea... I have slowly been making progress on it, so as a sort of punishment/compromise, if I want to draw Krea it will be in comic form only. It's also a way to force myself to give attention to other characters, Misa has been on my mind lately, there's a short 4ish page comic I want to do with her, so here she is the chosen one to start out the year with.
I wanted her to look a bit uncomfortable or nervous, while her friends and everyone finds her cute, she does not think highly of herself, and feels very uncomfortable whenever she is forced to dress up. Anything more complex than a simple strap dress will make her feel like she should not be dressing like that. Unfortunately Cocoa and others like to use her as their dress up doll!
Anyways, moving on lol.... As usual I print out the sketch and ink over it. I showed Yumi how it was going and she said "she doesn't look that uncomfortable to me, she's doing like, a Nick Wilde face...", I wasn't fully done so I thought I could fix it, but I was wrong...
Now she looked like she was holding in laughter or something, I messed up... time to try again!
Much better now!
In contrast to my recent pieces, this time I wanted to try out watercolor again. Once again simplicity was a goal for this. I wanted to do a collage style again, so textures would be important and thus the choice of watercolor for her hair, the rest I intended to do through washi tapes and such.
I was.... very pleasantly surprised at how she was turning out? lol... For some reason I didn't expect it. It was going WAY too smoothly, something I'm not used to. I kept thinking that at any moment I would screw up! But no... everything was coming together just fine.
I was VERY happy with how she was turning out, I honestly wasn't even sure if I should do the collage aspect of it! She looked really good as is.... But I still went for it anyways. Thankfully my color choices happened to coincidentally match many tapes that I had around. For the darkest parts I used a Black Jack washi tape, given that she's a bit nerdy I thought it would be a fun and fitting touch.
I struggled on the background. Given that 0 planning went into this I wasn't sure what to do with it... So I took pictures of the drawing and some tapes I wanted to use and made a crude mock up lol. I didn't like it. So I looked at how I did the background on the Bunny Claire shikishi from a few years ago and took cues from that.
And she was done! I had a lot of fun with this one. It was an enjoyable stress free process, quite the relief compared to every other time I do traditional lol...
I have been enjoying markers lately because they just feel so freeform, a lot less prep time to use as well, I can just grab them and bam start coloring. In contrast to watercolors, I gotta get water, the brushes, mix paints, wait for it to dry to layer further etc etc.... But I shouldn't completely diss out watercolors, they are much cheaper than Copics! lol, which I'm starting to run out of some colors.....
I hope you enjoyed : )