Doodle Roundup - Lovely Baby lore and other designs (Patreon)

Hey everyone! Lately the scribbling has been quite scarce as I work on both Weekend With Yuka and Red Muscle ch8. I've been collecting a handful of doodles as I get back into RM and a lot of it has been design work to figure out some looks to draw some pages! I'll try to talk about them in order:

the first 3 images are me figuring out the character's in Scarlet's favorite anime, Lovely Baby. She's been a part of the series since page 1 and she's evolved a lot by the time Camille cosplayed her in ch4. Ch8 has a scene where Edgar and Scarlet first meet and eventually nerd out about lovely baby, talking about their favorite characters and moments. lovely baby was always supposed to be a cutie honey inspired parody of magical girl anime and the oversexualized designs of stuff like trigger/gainax, using a baby motif that really push the ridiculousness of trying to make things sexy that don't need to be.

I wrote up a real synopsis for what the show is supposed to be recently to get a sense of what Edgar and Scarlet would be talking about. The basic idea is that Lovely Baby (who's real name I didn't think up yet) is a transforming magical girl using the power of innocence/youth to battle evil magicians who harness the negative energy of stress and social pressures of working adults, transforming it into villainous henchmen to terrorize citizens and grow stronger. Lovely Baby maintains her identity as a secret by living a life as a cold, no frills coordinator in an office so as to not expose her true nature to prevent secret attacks from the villains. She has a cool teammate/mentor with androgynous sex appeal who works alongside her both in the office and in battle, transforming into an archer named Cupid. I think having them get into some sexual encounters or having like a weird friends with benefits kind of thing could be worth exploring (which is image 3) but nothing is set in stone yet! There's also a handful of side things like a guy at the office that has a crush on Lovely Baby's office persona (seeing through the cold act after seeing her break character and do something cute/kind) and an evil Lovely Baby clone that is created out of LB's personal fears and negative energy. Lots of cheesy 80s magical girl anime tropes and ideas! I don't have plans for showing off everything that I've listed above but knowing that it's there gives me more to work with if I ever want to have scarlet and edgar watch it on tv or something.

after that I have a few mindless scribbles of ren, scarlet in her underwear and a few chibi scarlets exploring a style that could be fun for silly panels where a childish look can work for comedic effect. Scarlet's hips seem to be getting bigger and bigger but I've finally just been able to get them at a size that I've wanted from the beginning and had a hard time drawing! She was always supposed to be a thick lil thing.

The next image is designs for a flashback that is the opening scene of ch8. as I said earlier, the chapter shows how Scarlet and Edgar met and this is what they're wearing when scarlet goes in for an interview. Edgar's mess of an outfit will make more sense by ch10 i think but the idea is that when he and Ricki were together she bought him a lot of clothes. when they broke up he tried to detach from the image of himself that Ricki crafted of him by dressing himself and he has no taste or knowledge of what goes well together.

The image after are some Ula outfits I wanted to explore, since Ula is maybe my least visually explored character in the series. I never really had a strong sense of what her wardrobe was like beyond some fashionnova looking things but I think I put most of my characters in clothes you could find on there, haha. Ula won't show up again until ch11 (and no new outfits until maybe even later like ch13??) but taking the time out to draw her is still fun.

The last 2 images are for ch9, where Scarlet finally gets to go spend the night at Camille's like she planned before she had her encounter with flip flops and Ula. Camille is a cosplayer so of course when Scarlet goes over Camille dresses her up in a costume. the bottom row was using actual characters or costumes to try to get a feel for something scarlet would look good in or make sense for her to dress up as, and the top row were my designs for made up designs that are fictional characters within the Red Muscle world. I'm going to use the very first one on the top left in the actual comic, which is kind of inspired by Lum from Urusei Yatsura (and there's some cave woman elements too which are fun). The final image is Scarlet in high school on her school's volleyball team, since she has a moment with Camille talking about her high school life and not having any friends to talk anime and comics with.

That's all I've got for you this time! hopefully it wont be too long before another update. I have plans to make some bookmarks of my characters so hopefully I'll have started something there that I can show soon. See you next update!