New Character: Ankoku

Hey Everyone! Welcome back!

This week has been a bit all over the place for me. But despite all that, I did manage to get a character design done, and am planning out a few more, mainly where positions are concerned, since I'm doing my best to get used to different actions again.

The first thing I did was a female character who I call Ankoku. The name one of the words for Shadow, specifically word associated with gloom, blackness, darkness or obscurity. The character themselves has the power over a type of shadow magic, allowing them to create 'solid shadows' that can be used in a variety of ways. The dress that they wear is one of these in the story she is used in, though she does eventually change to a normal black dress.

Her hair style originally belonged to Mizuki in the Pandora Comic, but as said comic is getting a style update, including eventual hair style change, I saw no reason not to recycle it to here.

The image of Ankoku was actually done entirely digitally, which is somewhat new for me. I admittedly do prefer to use a regular pencil/pen and paper for my base sketches. However, I thought that, especially if anyone ever wants sketched digital commissions, I should get the hang of doing that as well. 

Where digital sketches are concerned, I did it more in bits than I might do it when drawing it traditionally, starting with a skeleton of lines and circles, then a basic body shape, then adding the clothing and hair to it, before finally adding the details that would become the final base sketch for me to work from. The final sketch ended up looking like this:

As you can see, its…..well, very rough as I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to do with it. Not to mention her head looks a bit broken.

(note that this is actually a collection of the sketches on all layers put together. I thought you guys might be interested to see some of my thought process that I went through, which is why this sketch in particular looks so all over the place, rather than a final sketch that would be exactly what I would refine into the true line art. Especially when you compare it to what I end up with when I finish. Hope this helps to see a tiny glimps into my very strange little mind! :D)

Thankfully, with it being digital, I could work on it a bit more, adjusting the head position, etc. What I ended up doing was actually completing the head on its own before the rest of the sketch. With that done, I then adjusted the head position, so that it no longer looked broken on her neck. That done, I then continued with the rest of the digital art, deciding what to do with the right arm that I had been struggling with and finally ended up with this complete image:

As usual, the full, higher definition image is over on me DA page, so go check it out there :)

All in all, Ankoku herself came out pretty well, though, admittedly, her dress could have been better. I wasn't entirely sure if I wanted the dress to be made of her shadows or if it was a normal dress. In the end, I went with 'normal dress' until I could decide how better to show the 'shadow' aspect to it. Though it did leave her dress very….uh….floaty? Lets just say its really light material and she spun around really fast! Lol

As mentioned, I have been working on a few other things, mainly positions and the likes, but next week I should have even more character designs to show you guys. I hope that you'll enjoy!

Until next time!

Tara