chomp processs (Patreon)

When starting out a piece I always start out thumbnailing some ideas, I mentioned being picky about drawing my characters because I always try to portray them accurately, it feels wrong and bothers me when I draw them acting or doing something that doesn't fit their personality lol. Chomp's a unique case since she started out as just a character to draw in pin ups and didn't really have a personality, so coming up with stuff for is always a bit harder than the rest

With her comic finally being able to be resumed soon I decided to rough out some ideas that were more on the alluring side, the results being these sketches:

Something worth nothing for these are the color choices, not so long ago I picked up Yoshitaka Amano's The Sky collection, which is a bunch of artwork he made for the og Final Fantasy games, his use of contrasting bright and saturated colors just overwhelmed me, and I wanted to take some cues from his work. I don't think I got quite there but gotta start somewhere lol

Originally the contrast was pushed even further, and the cues taken from Amano's work being much more obvious, like his characteristic way of portraying extremely pale characters. I didn't like how it was coming out so this palette didn't go that far lol

Out of all 3 of the sketches the first one seemed like the most interesting, it felt like it had a good sense of direction of where to lead the eye, while also showcasing a bit of her character, while her personality is more on the playful side her hair will always put people off and scare them, which I think said sketch in particular did better than the other two.
The second one I don't think had that much going for it if anything, I like the colors but everything else I find kinda lacking, it doesn't tell me much about her and while the lighting leads your eye to her face I don't think it's that interesting of a composition, so it got axed pretty quickly.
The last sketch I actually like! I think it shows her playfulness a bit more than the rest, and the extra sets of eyes on her hair would've pushed that creepy factor into the piece, I just didn't give it enough time to cook up some better colors and composition, though I might revisit the idea some other time
With all that explained it was pretty clear that the first sketch was the best out of the 3, so I started cleaning it up.

Halfways through I got a bit concerned about it being too simple, so I was ready to restart with something else, and once again back to the drawing board, but I kept hitting the same roadblocks of not really knowing what to do with her, so I started trying to see which other characters she could fit with, after some doodling on my sketchbook I landed on this! With summer already here I figured I could do something with that theme:

When I'm out of ideas I just grab my sketchbook and doodle mindlessly until I get something down, coloring on paper is a nice change of pace too since your color choices are pretty limited in contrast to digital. While I was happy with this and ready to redo digitally there was another roadblock that stopped me from it, time...
This sketch is from a few days ago, with a couple of deadlines for commissions creeping up I decided to just stick with the original plan and go back to finishing it off

The polishing process is pretty straightforward, since most of the workload was done in the sketch all that was left to do was to refine said aspects.

Some things were heavily simplified for the sake of making things pop, one example being the eyes on her hair, at some point I really wanted to contrast her simple cartoony face with the detailed eyes, but after giving one of them a paint over I realized that the values were just blending pretty badly with her hair, the eye didn't pop out the way I wanted, so I just simply left it with a solid flat colors

On the final version a lot of stuff got cut, such as most of the roses and a pillow that would've been on the left side. I realized that if I left said things in the values of the piece wouldn't pop as much as I wanted to, so the roses were removed, the shading on the upper half of the drawing was darkened while the lower was brightened a bit, and a few petals were scattered around to have them direct you to her face, the focal point of this whole thing

And that's pretty much how this went! Most of the workload tends to be in the sketching phase, if you don't have a solid thumbnail things can quickly fall apart and be tough to fix later on. I like to sketch out small for that reason, it allows me to not get caught in the details and just focus on the general aspects of the drawing

Thanks for reading! I hope this was interesting, if you have any questions about specifics and such feel free to let me know!