choko & milk process (Patreon)

This drawing ended up being pretty straight forward once I decided an idea I liked, but I thought the brainstorming process for it would be interesting enough to talk about!

For starters the decision of pairing those 2 up, like I've said they're very recent characters so their personality and such is pretty vague, with some general ideas here and there about what sort of people they are. They haven't even been drawn together prior to this, but both of em having the common ground of having been drawn in pin ups did spark an idea of em hanging together. Maybe they're models of some sort and take photo shoots together? So the first drafts reflect that:

While I think these sketches are fine and could probably be polished into something better I didn't like how much they relied on being alluring, I didn't want them to be these 1 note sexy characters, so they got scrapped pretty quickly. Although I liked what the first one had going for it and the intimate feeling of the 2nd, so I took those in mind for the next set of drafts:

I was much happier with what came out of this 2nd set! They started feeling more like actual people hanging together rather than just posing for the camera, which is something I try to avoid, I think capturing moments in character's lives is way more interesting! 

The first sketch of them at the pool was what inspired the little comic that I shared on the WIP post earlier this month (unfortunately delayed a bit alongside the swimsuit pic, I bite more than I can chew a lot <: ) ), a non spoken rule for Choko is that her hat must be on at all times for whatever reason, which led my brain to think of funny scenarios of how others around her would react to that, thus developing their relationship further. I don't consider myself a competent writer at all, so I tend to doodle whatever my brain comes up with and that's how I develop my characters and stories.

While the last sketch from that set is also nice, I wanted to make the 3rd one first, maybe have them as a before/after set of drawings, gives me more incentive to get to that one sooner lol. The 2nd sketch is also nice, and I think shows off a good ammount of personality out of that trio, but that'll come out at a much later date.

After the sketch was chosen the color layouts and pretty much was just cleaned up into being the drawing it is now. The big change out from the rough draft was the way they're interacting, before it seemed like Choko was leaning in for a kiss or something, but I changed it so the situation is more vague.
Are they a couple? Are they just having a sleep over? Is this another photoshoot? I don't really know the answers either, but I prefer that, I think it makes characters feel more lively when you can ask all sort of questions from a given drawing. I also prefer to not specify some things, it feels that I learn more about my characters the more I draw them which is a lot of fun! And it makes me more attached to them.
These 2 started out as no personality pretty faces, especially Choko, I intentionally made her out to be a "mascot" type of character to just draw whenever I feel like with no real personality, but the more I've been drawing her the faster she's been moving up the ranks to be one of my fav OCs, she's a lot of fun! 

And that's about it for this post! The actual development of the drawing itself was really straight forward and simple, the fun for this one was all the thought process of figuring out who these characters are and how do I want to portray them.

Thank you for reading and for your continuous support! I hope you enjoy