Two For One!

Hey everyone! Welcome back!

Last week I promised two portraits I was working on instead of just one, and I aim to deliver! So, this time I worked on two of my younger characters, Magetsu Shinta and Tatsumaki Shinobu. However, one of these pictures I decided to use as an experiment on a style I've only used twice, both times for non-human characters. I wanted to see how it would look if used on a person instead.

But first, to look at my regular style one.

So the character I decided to use my usual style with was Mangetsu Shinta, the male of the two sketches I showed at the end of last week's post. And this is what I ended up doing with that base sketch:

(Or for a higher resolution one, check out here)

So, Shinta actually came out pretty well. I think the way his hair, especially, came out well. It was pretty simple, but with enough detail that it didn't look awkward as it could have done. I think the bit I wasn't happy about was possibly the shadows around the neck. I just couldn't get this to work properly. But otherwise, Shinta was really interesting to do. I also tried to put more detail into the headband's (well, neckerchief in this case) metal plate to look a tad more metallic. It wasn't.....quite there, but I thought it was probably a good start. I definitely made note to work on that a bit more for the next pic.

Speaking of next pic, the portrait of Shinobu I did end up looking at the metal plate a bit more, but more than that, Shinobu was the one I decided to try the no line art approach to. Well, I say no line art, but rather....minimal, I guess? Only around the eyes had any line art on the end)

Anyway, so this is how my experiment turned out:

(And for Higher Resolution, click here)

So, I have some mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, it came out a lot better than expected for a complete experiment - the metal plate came out pretty well! But some of the parts of it I think needed a little different approaches to them, such as the eyes, which are still a little more 'line art' than the rest. I think though, that for complete guess work, though it did come out well. But I certainly has a lot of work to go to make it a bit more polished.

Tutorials ahoy?

But if I can get it right, that does mean a new art form I can play around with. I'm sure I'll be revisiting this type of art again.

One thing I've noticed lately is a lot of my art has been very.....portrait-y of late. So, I think I'll be having a look at doing some full body pics to test out different poses and possible dynamic looking movements, if only to get into the practice for some action scenes in Dreamwalkers. So, that is what you have to look forwards to, along with my continuing portrait project. Wish me luck!

Until next time!

Tara