Holiday Barbies, art musings, vacation announcement (Patreon)

To no one's shock, I've been thinking about changing art styles again 😩 Or rather, reverting art styles? 

I've been falling out of love with the split-face thing I've been doing. It's been hard to draw real people with it, or characters who don't have a slender face. My more "modern" fashion designs feel out of place with this face too. I was being put off by my own art...again. 

So I was particularly inspired by a very good shoujo manga called Kageki Shoujo to nix the face lines and go back to my old anime art style. Here's my rendition of Millennium Princess Barbie, also known as the 1999 Holiday Barbie. 

I sketched the same Barbie in the split-face style too, and I like the face on the left wayyyy better, personally.

(Side note: I've been dying for an excuse to draw collectible Barbies! Probably my biggest childhood inspo next to Sailor Moon. I really want to do infographics of all my favorite collectible Barbie series similar to the Jobu Tupaki print, but I don't think many people would be interested)

I also tried painting over the Inner Princesses' faces. To be honest, in this case I DID like their faces before the change, but I think these are not bad.

Tbh, I also think my art performs better online without the split-face - my latest stuff to go viral was the EEAAO fanart (side view so no opportunity for split face) and the Pantone looks (which had my old, non split face art as the cover). While I'm sure the content plays a larger factor than the art style, I'm still turned off by the face myself a lot of the time, so this is more out of personal motivation than social media analytics.

Anyways, I'll play around with it. Maybe I'll change my mind. I'm still proud to have come up with this as my "unique" thing and I think it could have some good applications, like in stained glass or storybook-style illustrations, so I still want to keep it in my arsenal no matter what happens!

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By the way, starting next week I'll be in Taiwan for two weeks, for a family "vacation" (in quotes because is it ever really a vacation when you're with family? 🙃) 

I have new art posts planned for both weeks, but just in case they aren't able to be posted because of technical difficulties, wanted to let you know!