February Pin-up - Ikazuchi and Rain Spirit 💧💧💧 (Patreon)

Hey everyone!! It's time for our monthly pin-up post!!  I wanted to thank everyone for the support this month, it's being a particularly difficult one!

 Besides being accostumed to 30-31 day months and health issues going on, I started taking commissions again, and am working on highly detailed pages................ Juggling and managing everything has been pretty hard, but I'm learning with it!!!  

Let's start the step by step!

edit: I added a new extra glowy version!!

• The thumbnail! I wanted a scene that brought the My neighbor Totoro bus stop scene to mind....!   It has the cool big spiritual entity x tinier human that I explored in my project as well and also rain, so! 

The couple would be enjoying themselves, and a little cat would be sheltered from rain by the rain itself...

• Initial sketch pass.... Gosh, the sketches for this pin-up were a bit messy! You'll hear me complain about it more than once in this post...   

 Perhaps I went too early with the structure pass before an actual gesture and mass pass.  See, anatomy and detail are secondary!!! If you don't nail the gesture and mass distribution first, you're in for a lot of work trying to deal with clunkiness!!!! Head's been messy...!!!

• Put up some clothesssss over their BODS! Then again I wanted to make the rain spirit clothes as heavenly and weightless as possible....

• Idealizing the background! Wanted a distinct foreground/middleground/background here... but besides that,  the only elements I wanted to have around was the actual bus stop and nature related ones.

• It's hard to see here, I think, but I adjusted some proportions of their bodies!   See, if I only I did a better sketch, with more patience and attention!!!!!!! And this is the final one.... 

Oh gosh, messy sketches are hell to work with.

• Lineart for the figures!! I hope that clunkiness I cited from working from a messy sketch isn't as apparent as I think it is.....

• Cute little natural foreground!! full of grass and underbrush... Gosh, with Apparition, I've been working mainly with man made environments and I gotta admit I do like drawing natural bgs....

• Background... fierce trees, and you can see canopy in the distance....

• Start of the color sketch! I wanted to know what colors I'd be working from, as to make everything more cohesive palette wise.

• I wanted to have this bright blue background to bring the comic's cover to mind, and the more I thought about it, if I made everything blue I could end up low contrast... so I started experimenting a big with the colors!

 I then thought, maybe a redder background could work nicely, as Ikazuchi has darker skin! Brown and this shade of blue have an interesting contrast dynamic.

• Final color sketch! Hmmmm...! Yeah, the contrast is present here! You can see blue mostly where rain is, which is in the sky and in the spirit. I wanted a continuum of blue here...!

 And of course, the cat is a tux!!! I'm crazy for tuxes....

• FLATS.... I made the spirit even more bright, so he could glow!

• Rendered the background. Wanted to emphasize the depth and difference between planes....

• Primary shadows! I particularly enjoy Ikazuchi's calves........

The spirit's clothes could be more well done, the flow feels purposeless sometimes, the shadows ended up making that a bit apparent.

Shadows are meant to express volume, and if you didn't think the structure through, that will show. Then again, a more careful sketch would surely help!

• Secondary shadows! Here you can see I already picked bluer undertones for the rain spirit's shadows, while kitty and Ikazuchi have redder ones.

• Here only hard shadows are present. I always want to try exploring both hard and soft shadows - it's important to balance both!

• Here the characters are rendered, and I wanted to put not only ACTUAL rain drops (it's raining!!!!) but also fatter drops and streaks of water to emphasize it. 

 Here's how it looked before rendering.... it looks like.... well...y'know LMAO

• Initially I wanted to make a rainbow in the background... but in the end I think that could mess with the composition, and I like the overall color balance the piece has. So I scratched that!

 And that concludes our monthly pin-up post. I'll be opening the voting for the next character on the 1st! (((: