March Pin-up - Zangief (Patreon)

 Hey everyone!! It's time for our monthly pin-up post!! Thanks again everyone for the support.

 Time for our red cyclone!!!!

 Let's start the step by step, shall we?

• For the composition I honestly wanted something fun, and to play a tiny bit with the absurd.... Zangief wrestles bears, and I wanted to make him chilling with one! For some reason drawing a literal animal bear was kinda therapeutic.

• After the sketch pass a basic structure pass. I usually have a hard time with bears overall, but it was a breeze here...? Maybe because Zangief is nice and that helped me out a bit. Besides that, he's hyuuuuge and wide so it was nice experience figuring out his proportions!!

• Building up his head! I honestly love when Zangief is making strong, silly expressions.... so of course I'd have to do one!!! In retrospect, I should have done what I initially thought - bringing up a hand mirror to use as reference!! 

 Gotta find my hand mirror. It's specially useful for expressions (you see the expression on the mirror and feel the stretch yourself, which helps a lot pushing the expression even more) and HANDS................

• I thought making him tilting his head could look cool. With the whole composition it felt he's a bit deranged, which is different of his usual quirky self so I corrected that!

• Corrected everything needed and flipped the image! Honestly it brings Zangief more to eyes (as we tend to read images from left to right!)

 I'm usually really critical regarding final sketches, but honestly zangief is almost bare naked and I admit I have drawn him before, besides studying capcom art of him numerous times... so I'll let it go.... this once!!!

• Basic lineart!!! Two fuzzy bears!!!!

• I wanted to position the background elements like this at first. It's very different from the thumbnail sketch right! turns out the buildings look very very strange placed like that, as if they were falling. The lack of stylistic context cues and the funny imaginary perspective all merged into a very strange looking first bulding. I was quick to scrap this one out!

• Final lineart!! weighted lines.... cutesy architectural motifs.... 

• Wanted to play with red in this piece! It's Zangief's moniker so I wanted to push it an extra mile. Last month's piece was like this but blue, so it's very interesting using a completely opposite color.

• Flats!! See how somehow, everything is converging to red.

• Messed out a bit with the background! Wanted to render some snow in the scene to make this strange reunion a bit more strange.

• Primary shadows!!!

• Secondary ones here. Makes everything pop!

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