Prier +commentary lol (Patreon)

Another commission! I decided to post this one separately from the rest because since La Pucelle's art was made by Ryoji Nomura, an artist that I really love! I decided to use it as an excuse to study his work, so I'll take the chance to go a bit into it lol

The most surprising aspect of it all was how natural it was for me to adapt to his work, being mostly inspired by game artists from that time (PS1-early PS2) it makes sense, the tools I use are pretty simple (default brush with a texture lol) and so were the ones used back then. Pay close attention and you'll notice that a good amount of those works were made with just the round brush!

Limitations were important, normally I'd render a bit more than I did in here, mainly for Prier herself, but a lot of Ryoji's works were simple in their pallettes as well, blending 2-3 tones for each color. It was tough to limit myself lol, but it just emphasizes the importance of good color choices and shape blocking, you don't need more than that!

Also, eyes were usually never shaded lol, and if they were the shadow was never too heavy, it was difficult to leave it as is lol.... Another difficult aspect that is very particular to me is the roundness of the face, normally I'd make it even more circular with fat cheeks, but I couldn't get away with it this time lol, getting the right shape and proportions is hard!

While I think I did a good enough job capturing his style when drawing her (you can be the judge of that lol), I don't think the same could be said for the background. It was based off of a piece of concept art found within a little artbook that came with the game, I can't find scans of it online unfortunately, so you'll just have to take my word for it lol. 

I think the background in particular was a missed opportunity since in retrospective a day time scene would've been a better study subject, Ryoji excels at that! I love the vibrant colors he uses, the last 2 examples in the following set are some of my favorites:

The other thumbnail sketch I had made for this actually had a daytime setting, maybe I should rework it and finish it someday with all of these things in consideration...

Overall though it was refreshing to work within some limitations, even if they weren't anything super crazy, still gots lot to learn tho! And hopefully this text dump also helps you, I don't get to gush enough about artists I love lol

If you're interested in more of Ryoji's work Danbooru hosts a good ammount of it! This link in particular directs you to his work on the Marl Kingdom series, which is where all of these examples come from. You can find his more modern work over on Twitter!