Colour Balance

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Here’s the finished-for-now Juri:

Juri - complete

Now with added stripe!

Kind of hurried it towards the end, I always have a tendency to do that! I’ll probably have a few more tweaks to make later, but I think I ought to get my ideas moving for my next picture.

On my monitor this looks more subdued and less pink than it does in real life. I will have to play around with the colour balance in Photoshop and check it out on some other monitors… I’ll probably also do some other digital tweaks like clean up the fuzzy edges of the circles. I’ll learn to paint more tidily with practice, I swear!

Juri, continued…

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Juri Flies

It's coming together now!

This was why I was redrawing the image with pencils – it’s going to be a watercolour painting. Here’s most of the flat colours down and some areas in a near complete state – I will probably leave those until the image is closer to completion. Uncompleted bits include most of the purples and pinks. These will get deepened with progressive layers of pigment. I’ve also yet to start trying to detail her face.

It’s kind of interesting to note that when I work digitally I feel as though I should start the image with some pencil scratchings to get into the groove. Similarly, when I want to do a painting or drawing I often want to play around digitally to get a feel for the image. Really I think it’s all about finding a happy medium 🙂

I am easily alarmed.

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This morning I was hurrying to my bus stop via a narrow alley when I was quite shocked to realise there was something very big and very black sitting on the fence next to me. A huge, fluffed up crow.

But maybe it wasn’t that huge, maybe it just seemed that way because it was above me, or because it was all fluffed up. At work today I drafted the below two pictures, playing with two different view points.

Crow from above

Gah!

Crow from low angle - sketch

"Oh, hi"

I didn’t have time to finish the second one before my lunch break ended, but I also thought I could handle a lower view better. So I redid it when I finished work.

Crow from below - take 2

Revised and inked.

I think I like the expression in the first one a bit better. I also lost the shape of the bird when I inked it (It was a bit sleeker and I kinda wanted it to hint at the silhouette of a falcon because at one point when I looked at the crow I thought it was a member of the falco family!)

The damn bird was at my bus stop again when I got home this evening. It flew around lazily, taunting me as I scurried to my car…

A Compositional Sketch

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Maybe this will become a fully fledged picture?

The goal here was to have some interesting action with the character but to not lead the viewer’s eye ‘out’ of the image, rather, have their eye land back in the focal points of the image.

Juri Kicks

Ready to inflict some inJURIes. Hurr Hurr.

To be honest, I like the way that outstretched leg looks… even though it leads the eye out of the picture frame. I had experimented with tipping her toes to bring the flow of the image back towards the middle but that made the foot look a little odd. So, forcing the viewer’s eye back onto the image might not be the right approach. What do you think?

Pink

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Character development and design:

EDIT: Very first draft added.

First Draft

The first draft - all I had in mind was the pose

Final Pencil Sketch

"Huh?"

Colour Test

Basic colour decisions - lots of pink!

I wanted to make her a blonde bimbo but apparently being cliche is dull.

As thoughtful as can be

Lots of charm, not so much going on upstairs...

Missing one image here actually, I’ll edit it in later if I can find it.

On Your Shoulders

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A quickish sketch done on my very speccy new toy.

On Your Shoulders

Whee!

Drawing faces from low angles is tricky – in some ways the cartoon style amplifies the trickiness because direct photo reference isn’t as useful. Also I did kind of change gears halfway through so the face styles are different.

I really like her foot on the right… but I ruined it when I connected it to her leg. A few hits and misses throughout this picture – all part of a learning experience.