#so I had to totally redraw her body proportions

[tippenfunkaport]

(Posting this in the dead of night literally just so I stop fiddling with it.)

Some time ago, I saw a picture of Alaina Scott in a confusing bathing suit and wanted to see Glimmer in it. I have since made that happen because I can.

[sour-badger]

Art style challenge: reflection

So, during this very challenging months and 3-4 weeks of social distancing I was stuck. Drawing became boring and I was in state of stale purgatory and it was annoying me. However, my sate of monotony came to a halt whenever I watch “Cheer Up!”, a show/DnD campaign created by Wrapped Lamp that was set in the world of JoJo, but in a bleak setting. It's wonderful, and the characters are brilliant. (This a link of the first episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVF6ShkYqU0 )

As I was watching the show I decided to challenge myself, I have never drawn in Hirohiko Araki’s style before. I have never tried to draw like that because it is a simple but complex approach to illustration that is very hard to draw, let alone replicate, but I tried and I proud of the results. So because of this I set myself some rules:

1. The illustrations must be based on the player/character icons in “Cheer Up”

2. They must look like protagonists that could be in the anime but are not copies of existing Jojo characters. (Because that's cheating)

3. Each illustration must be done within 3 days. (A personal thing for me, I get bored of drawing the same illustration for more than 3 days, if you want try this you don't have to follow this rule)

With these rules, Photoshop and google images by my side I was ready. And this is how it went!

 (I am putting each reference of every character in groups of eyes, face, hair and body because I had to to a lot of research for this style, I have put the main influencers down there were more but are not important)

My process 

At the start of all my attempts I create a beginning sketch of original icons. I am going in blind so doing this shows me how they created it without tracing it, sort of like life drawing. I then made a rough line drawing to see what the design looks like without making it official. I sometimes draw a second outline to figure out the details and then I compose the final line work but I also have the original art, the many characters in Jojo Bizarre Adventure and real life examples at all times. Paint the hair, skin, clothes and then create the shading and then they are done.

The first sketch 

rough line work

The final outline with the shading

I also chose to try not to use part 3 as reference material. I personally dislike  the seasons animation and character design. I don't know what happened in that season but they look terrible. It took me 3 tries to finish Stardust Crusaders and the art work was the main reason.

  The Characters  

Isadora 

Played by jay (Stabbyness)

Isadora was the first character I drew. I chose her because the next live “Cheer Up” episode was in 3 days and with that time I decided to give myself a fighting chance by drawing her first (I find women easier to draw than men).

With Isadora I had to also decide what Jojo season they would be in from the start, I wanted consistency because they are the protagonists. I decided to do a mix of part 4 but was mainly based in part 5. For me I liked the colour shading of part 4 but loved the structure and graphic style of part 5. This made shading and highlights easy and consistent.

Because I had never drew anything like Jojo I had to use multiple characters as a frame of reference, (I did not copy the originals, if I did then there would be no point of doing this challenge in the first place). I thought it would be good to show how many characters I referred to to help with this process.  

Isadora was the easiest to draw out of the 4. She has a traditional female design, her only challenge was her eyes. As the first one this one was done in time and and looked good at the time. However now that I have got the hang of drawing in this style I want to redraw her again to show myself how much I have grown during this challenge.

Characters that i used for art style reference

Eyes: Trish Una, Narancia Ghirga and Yukako Yamagish 

Face: Trish, Erina Pendelten, Yukako

Hair: the whole part 5 crew (I had know idea how draw Jojo hair at this point)

Body: Joylne Jostar, Yukako  

 Donna

Played by Will (bigmovingtarget)

Donna was the hardest overall draw. She is a wonderful character but she does not typical female build. She is a MMA fighter, a tattoo, wears a hoodie and jaw that could cut glass. This created some problems, Araki characters rarely wear hoodies and his female characters are not normally drawn with strong features, they don't ever have a massive tribal tattoo. Also Araki’s female cast have a very small range of hair styles so I had to look at the male cast for inspiration and information because donna is an unusual design!! 

Her tattoo was very difficult and I was in a pickle for the whole first day. The original icon has only a few red marks on her face and the thumbnail of “Cheer Up!” (created by Six) depicts Donna with her back to the camera and looking with side of her face without the tattoo! 

This was driving me crazy.

In the end I had to reference real life tribal tattoos and the famous tattoo  from the movie “Dusk till Drawn”. I like the result. 

Her hoodie was also an unusual problem because I couldn't find a single character in the cast sporting a hoodie at the time of drawing her. So I wanted to draw her with a hoodie that the cast would wear. So when I was looking at fashion editorials I found Billie Eilish wearing the perfect hoodie and had to try to replicate it. (Elle 2019 interview, just incase you want to find it. Its the red coat!!) I also referenced part 1 and part 2 for her body because the those characters where drawn to fight, they are not frail and fawn like in appearance and think that is perfect donna. 

Characters that i used for art style reference

Eyes: Josuke Higashikata, Yukako, Lisa Lisa and Gyro Zeppeli 

Face: Gyro, Jolyne and Lisa Lisa 

Hair: Enrico, Yoshka Kira, Caesar Anthonio Zeppeli and Koichi Hirose

Body: Lisa Lisa, Gyro, Leone Abbacchio and Jolyne

Jack 

Played by Christian

Jack was easy to draw because he looked like a Jojo character. Like Isadora, Jack has a typical male design for Jojo. This meant I had a pool of reference material for him and had finished him in 2 days, the only real problems where his hat, stubble and jewellery. Lucky most of Araki’s cast have jewellery and chains and Jotaro Kujo has hair as a hat! Jack was heavily based on Jotaro Kujo but I made sure that he wasn't a copy! 

Stubble...stubble doesn't exist in Jojo.

Jojo’s Bizzarre Adventure has magnificent beards or clean shaven men, and sometimes they have facial hair. This was the main issue with this character because with stubble you don't have Jack.  So I had to take the beard of Joseph JoStar and looking at real life stubble finally got his lovely 9 o'clock shadow that we have now. 

 Characters that i used for art style reference

Eyes: Joseph Jostar (part 2), Jonathan Jostar 

Face: Leone, Jotaro Kujo and Burno Bucciarti 

Hair: Jotaro and Robert E. O. Speedwagon

Body: a mix of the cast of part 5 with a little bit of Johnny Jostar (like Isadora)

This one was the start of really using real life as a reference. Although really started using them in Donna illustration, drawing men has always been a challenge for me so drawing from real life actually made it more like Araki’s style. I realised that Jojo art style is based in realistic body proportions. I honestly think that this looks better than the other 2 because of the life drawing I had to do.

JJ

Played by Arimnaes

This was the last Icon I had to draw. I left this one last because I needed the practice to give this guy any chance of working. 

his face and body were not the issue because most of the main casts (in their respective seasons) have similar features but slightly different body heights and proportions. However, JJ’s hair was a difficult.

 In my research I found a total of 2 characters that could have his ethnic style  or texture for his hair. They were Enrico Pucci and Muhammad Avdol, and no one else. This ended in failure because their hairstyles are wacky and imaginative and JJ’s dreads just flat out don't exist in the Jojo universe. If they have his hairstyle then I must of missed it because I wasted a whole day solely on research!!!  Anyway, after that that I looked at male braiding and box braiding to figure out the hair line. Although I had the hair problem with Enrico I personally loved his design, he was drawn with an attitude and I thought it worked for JJ.  

Characters that i used for art style reference

Eyes: Enrico, Bruno, Joseph, Gyro and Giono Giovanna

Face: Enrico, Muhammed Avdol, Johnny and Bruno

Hair: Giono and Josuke, 

Body: Enrico, Bruno and Caesar 

Reflection 

Although the process was difficult, I had fun drawing these characters and have gained new techniques in drawing that I struggled in the past. I can draw stylised shading, tattoos, clothes and male characters better than I could before. I also learnt that I can draw surprisingly quickly and had finished both Isadora and jack in 2 days. After this challenge i also gains a new appreciation for Araki and the show Cheer Up and the number of literal hours it must of taken them to create an immersive show. 

However now I have to find something else to do whilst being stuck indoors!

[bluebeads-art]

Zasha Revisit - July 8th, 2017 [My DeviantArt]

Behold, a flamboyant lesbian.

I was in a bit of an art funk with my other projects, so I redrew an old character design from 2007 to shake things up a bit. Her name’s Zasha. Like Sasha, only with a Z, because 12 year old me was totally creative with names.

Drawing characters bending forward/foreshortened torsos is my artist Achilles heel. How’d I do? I’m really trying to draw more dynamic poses lately.

I intended to have this be a one time revisit of this character, but now I’m incredibly tempted to keep her. I want to vary her body type a bit if I do though, because right now she’s pretty same-y to the rest of my human cast of OCs. Zasha’s a sporty type, so it might be time for me to finally learn how to draw some friggin muscles. She’s beauty, she’s grace, she’ll suplex your face into the ground.

This is the old design I was redrawing. Zasha had designs after this one, but I liked this one best. Drawn on February 22nd, 2007.

Right click and hit “open in new tab” if you want to see this image without Tumblr stretching it to disgusting proportions.

Slightly over 10 years of artistic improvement, yippie-kai-yay.

90% of my characters in 2007 had fingerless gloves. Also, man, I drew small back then. And had poor font and cropping choices.

[lattice-heart]

Let My Body Do The Work (In Progress)

(i’m so fucking clever har har)

Progress shots and rough process outline for this beautiful monster. This is the biggest digital art project I’ve tackled yet.  

Tablet: Ugee M708.

Program: Corel Painter 2017.

Process under the cut, ‘cause this got long.

1. Prepping references! Screengrab from the original music video. Hot 1/5th of a Harmony is super tiny in comparison to Hot Construction Worker, whereas Dex and Nursey are canonically the same height, so I’ll have to adjust it so it looks like Nursey’s legs are bent more than hers. (Sexily, naturally. Good excuse to accentuate the Hockey Booty.) I also did a bunch of googling and saved several reference photos for both of them, looking for skin color, eye color, muscles/build and anything I could find that looked like this particular position. I also got several different options for Nursey’s hair. [rereading the story for info, screencapping, and image research: ~1 hour] [total layer count: 0]

2. REALLY rough sketching feat. a cut + paste rotation job on both heads so I could get them looking in each other’s eyes. I was also trying out methods of making him look crouched down more than she was so I could keep the original positioning while staying true to canonical character details! Also, before you draw a single damn thing, save your work with an actually useful file name and in an actually useful location, and save/back up often. (sketch #1) [rough sketch -- this was NOT the first version. ~45 minutes.] [total layer count: 4]

3. Outlines and flat color. They each have their own layer for this. Things are finally starting to resemble...anything.  (sketch #2 and sketch #3.) Outlines done with the Scratchboard tool, 2px. [outline + flat color: ~4 hours total. I am working on increasing accuracy in my drawing right now, so I really took my time studying my references and redrawing anything I wasn’t 100% happy with. I usually do headshot drawings, not full body shots, so balancing proportions took some time as well. If I did these types of drawings more, I definitely would have not need as much time.] [total layer count: 6]

4. Lights and Shadows. This section is only for depth and dimension, not details such as flushing skin, freckles, tattoos, etc. Corel Painter has a function that allows you to preserve transparencies, so I selected, copied, and pasted as a new layer each section, turned on “preserve transparency”, and then painted my lights and darks. This way, I didn’t have to worry about spending a lot of time cleaning up the edges where I got overzealous with my paint job. Lights and shadows painted with the Detail Airbrush. I don’t preserve transparency on things that need rough edges to look real, like hair. Some lights and shadows on skin were softened with the Effects > Motion > Soften function. [lights and shadows -- 3 hours] [layer count -- 28]

5. Detail work/background. This is adding in all the details to make it realistic -- freckles, eyelashes, flushed skin from being around attractive people, but also things like stitching detail and buttons on clothing. This also where I can go back and touch up anything from the previous sections that doesn’t look right at the end -- if they don’t look greased up enough, if someone’s hair needs more texture, if shadows aren’t deep enough, a transition isn’t smoothed out enough, etc. Depth and shadows with airbrushes, linework with Scratchboard Tool, freckles with the Spatter Water 2 brush from the Digital Watercolor category and the stroke jitter turned all the way up, blushing and other skin color details with Coarse Water 2 brush from the Digital Watercolor category, [details -- 30 minutes, a lot of the detail I wanted already was done in lineart or shadow light. Also, I hate backgrounds. Remember, perfection is the enemy of good.] [That reminder was probably more for me than you, but that doesn’t make it less true.] [layer count -- 32]

6. Watermark, one last once-over and save. Don’t forget to watermark your stuff, it breaks my heart when art theft happens to people. [watermark etc -- ??] [final layer count -- 33]

7. Share it!! Write your blog post or email, put in all the appropriate links, provide credit where due if you had assistance or inspiration, cross-link to other social media platforms it’s shared on, etc. This was not a commission, but if it was, this is where I would invoice somebody if it was a payment upon completion commission.

8. Celebrate! This might mean alcohol. This might mean a nap. This might mean obsessively refreshing your blog a hundred times over the course of the evening to see if anyone has liked or reblogged or commented on it. You do you.

Total hours logged overall: ~9 hours, 15 minutes.

[Please note that I am self taught and absolutely still learning, and someone who drew stuff of this complexity all the time would probably not take nearly as long to do all this. But hey, this is a realistic look at a non-professional artist taking a stab at a full on digital painting and listening to too much Fifth Harmony in the process.]