Anime Figurine Study Timelapse (Patreon)

Here's the timelapse of the study in hopes of figuring out more about why I like looking at these things so much.

You can see me kinda struggling between trying to capture the color  vs. capture the gentle rendering of models like these.

The high depth of field softness is probably best captured in post production using gaussian blurs or something but nevertheless I tried tracing over some of the edges of the model in places to see if I could soften it in the illustration instead of at the end, and I didn't hate the result.

Every once in a while I  go through the  process of doing a lot of study of certain things I'm curious about, kinda like making Little Bird's Bath into some glorified Ivan Bilibin/Edmund Dulac fanart 😂 I learn  the most when I'm both studying and trying to translate/apply it to another project. That way I'm not just blindly transcribing but also translating or transposing, to use a musical term.

I think what I'll end up doing is trying to apply some of these ideas without the photo realistic rendering to see what they feel like independently--

What does it feel like when you the sort of white wraparound light that occurs on the edges of these models from being photographed in a product sort of way, and translate it into an image made of lineart with flat colors?

What happens when you treat much of the figure with a sort of vague softness and only allow for crispness when it occurs near important facial features?

There's a model like quality that comes from simplifying forms through a filter that basically means you don't get any information smaller than a certain scale, i.e. not adding nostrils or small crevices, only larger, softer forms so even the garments a character wears have a delightful toylike chunky thickness. 

Gloss is a master of this last one and I end up often gazing fondly at their work for this reason: www.patreon.com/Gloss
When you look at their work there's a ton of control over crisp detail but also a limit on how small information is permitted to get. Things just disappear if they get too small and I love that quality.

Enough rambling! Happy Monday, everyone. Thank you for your continued support!

<3 Winton