SensibleReverie

Right, so I actually started this drawing way back in June somewhere, but it was put on hold for another drawing and then some other things got in the way and I finally got around to finishing. The idea here is that she is supposed to be some sort of futuristic knight-like character. So like that armor plating and what not isn’t really metal, it would be a super-advanced, strong, and lightweight future material. And like the chain mail of old, the fabric is also protective. Also futuristic and absurdly light and tough. In a move to introduce just a bit of a mystical element there is also some subtle water themes at play. The sea-grean coloration, wavy lines on some of the trim, and (look closely) the markings on the belt and neck insignia. Read on for the boring technical details.

Since I interrupted this project midway through the development of some of the techniques gets a little convoluted, but here it goes. First, the lining. I had originally planned to use the scanned linart straight up with only minimal corrections in a effort to speed up the process. I had already laid down the base colors and the first layer of shading when I decided that this just wasn’t going to work and went back to redo the line art. I didn’t want to go back and just draw in vector lines so I went ahead and tried to draw over the lines with my tablet. It was the first time my Wacom and I really saw eye to eye and (with a little copy and paste where I really needed symmetry) it worked out well. I would do the same with the drawing for the 4th. In case you doubt the improvements, here’s the new outline over layed over the cleaned up scan (black = new, red = scan):

A large improvement I’m sure you’ll agree.

Shortly after finishing the reline work I went of to work on the aforementioned other project. I worked on this a little bit in July; got most of the shading worked out. Alas I had a busy month in August and didn’t get anything else done, but I finally got around to finishing it this weekend. I used more or less the same coloring techniques as I had for the 4th of July project, so the shading is a little softer than most of the stuff I’ve worked on. I also went a little easier on the shading than I normally tend to; I think I usually overdue the darkest level of shading and glare so I tried something different.