Off day: Feels good to be inspired! (Patreon)

TL;DR - Found an artist I liked and had fun researching his characters and designs. It helped me understand what I can do better. The images are the results of my study.

Since I just finished a commission I gave myself a day to play around and decided to use pixiv to actually look at art instead of playing games. I discovered a fairly popular artist that goes by LAM (you probably heard of him?). His use of colors and the crazy stuff he did with eyes and the eyeliner made the images very striking. he mostly does portraits of existing characters such as vtubers but they're all uniquely colored and lit. He also makes great use of accessories. Including adding stickers to the characters faces which I think looks great!

I know it's 2d art and I do 3d but It's still good to draw inspiration. Since I was feeling inspired I cracked open studio and maker despite it being a day off and got to work trying to recreate what I liked about his works. I think it's good practice to reference and study other artists works.

The first one I tried to replicate was the male. This is pretty much as close to a copy of his art as I could get in maker. I believe the character is Vox Akuma? A Vtuber? I didn't know at the time and thought it was an OC of LAM's though. I made some adjustments to my liking while making it which is why it's not quite him but rather looks a bit like a knockoff. I liked the use of makeup and neck accessories on a male character while still having it look fairly masculine. I basically recreated the scene and character as close as I could get to understand if it's possible to get the energy across in studio. 

The next one was me trying to do it without copying it outright. More using his works as reference. So I put together a character I thought looked okay but it didn't really capture the vibe. So I opened up LAMs pixiv again and saw a character with black and white hair. After changing the colors to black and white (originally it was just black) I really liked the energy she was giving off. So I continued working on her, taking inspiration from stickers and hair accessories which I severely underused in previous characters. 

A huge part of his eye-catching looks is quite literally in the eyes. The Eyeline is very chaotic almost, with an insane amount of detail put into the iris. So I busted out the drawing tablet and actually drew some eyes. the iris was made from scratch and the Eyeline was edited from an existing one. 

I think she really captures the energy and style. I'm absolutely in love with the eyes and will probably be doing more eye-focused art studies in the future to refine this discovery.

Sorry for nerding out here! I didn't mean for this to become a text wall. I'll edit a TL:DR at the top!

When I feel the need to learn how to do something, I break out into a study/research session. So I think this was a good use of my time and future characters I make should look a bit more striking and take advantage of colors and accessories more than before.

One of the things I love the most about art is the research and development of artistic skills so this chaotic mess above is actually fun for me.

I'll also be starting on the next animation commission tonight I just had to get all this studying out of my system!