Wraith's Feet Up -- Patron Exclusive July 2020 (Patreon)

Apex Legends has such cool character designs, so it's no surprise that once I did that first Wattson piece for a commission, I got flooded with requests to do a piece of Wraith -- so, here it is.

This piece was started on the 19th of last month, a day after the Jill Valentine piece was released. I wanted to get a head start, and I had pretty much decided I was going to do Wraith. I started out just scribbling out the pose, and I'm pretty proud of the fact that this is one of the few recent pieces where I didn't use a pose reference. It presented some challenges; I'm not officially trained in drawing anatomy, so everything I've drawn is just the result of lots of self-learning, and trial and error; consequentially, the fact that I was able to pull off this pose was satisfying.

For fanart, if I can, I try to get reference images of the character from 3D models, where they have the model shown off from front, back, and side angles. For this, I pretty much used one reference image for Wraith, and after the body sketch was done, I just slowly added the layers of the costume, trying to be as accurate as possible. Drawing other people's character designs can be tough, especially since I have to lay out in my head, what the costume will look like in unusual poses, at unusual angles. This involves quite a bit of trial and error at first, which I try and do in the sketch stage; I'll sketch out some part of the costume, only to realize that it needs to be proportional to some other piece of the costume in some specific way; I'll then select it out and move, transform, or scale it in some way, or I'll have to start from scratch. Very tough stuff.

I'm really pleased with the progress I'm making on the sock variants. I've been incorporating a couple of new tricks to make it look a bit more realistic, so hopefully you all like it.

Let me know what you think in the comments below! Thanks so much for your support, which made this piece possible! More announcements coming soon.

~ES