Mission Commission! Pt 1

Hey everyone! Welcome back!

For any of you who might have missed my last post (and for everyone reading them anyway), Happy New Year! I hope that 2018 has been treating everyone well so far :)

I'm still suffering a little from that flu that's been going around, though its mostly just settled on my chest now. Not particularly fun to hack up a lung every half hour or so, but it's a lot better than it was, so I'm not going to complain!

Instead of listening to me going on about my health (since that's not what you're here for, I bet) I'll jump into what today's blog is all about. Well, as you may or may not recall, I had done a couple of paid commissions just before Christmas that were for a gift for a son and daughter. I held off on actually showing anything about it on the off-chance that said son and daughter might see the image before it was given as a gift. Then after that was the welcoming the new year, reflecting on the old post I did last time. But now Christmas and New Year have passed us by and the prezzies have all been given out, its now time that I can actually show you all what I was up to all this time!

Since they were fairly big projects, I thought it might be best to split them into two halves, so I could focus on each of them properly. That said, lets start off with the first of the duo!

So, for this particular piece, I had initially been asked to draw a manga styled version of the client's son. I believe I showed off the sketches of the son that I drew from front view, which ended up acting more as warm up/practice since after this I was instead asked to draw a two character picture based on pre-existing canon art. There was a poster for Accel World vs Sword Art Online that has the characters of Kirito and Kuroyukihime back to back. What I was asked to do was essentially that image, but replacing Kirito for the client's son wearing the same outfit as Kirito. Now, since I'm hardly going to cheat by just copy and pasting a new face onto the poster, this meant that I needed to draw my version of this poster without just tracing most of it. In fact, while my reference was on the computer, I drew the base sketch by hand, as I tend to prefer doing, given the choice, while attempting to blend the style used in the poster with my own art style, resulting in this:

I enjoyed trying to draw Kuroyukihime. If nothing else her outfit is rather different from what I usually draw characters in. The Son was admittedly a little more difficult to draw as I only had a vague picture of him that was showing him from side view which appeared to have been taken while he was distracted by something, so I had to do my best to work with his hair style and try to get it to match the hair types that would match the picture's style. Most of this would be done through the shading process, but I still needed to get my base as close as possible for that to work.

From there, once I got the ok from the client, I began the digital version:

Sorry, once again, for my terrible photography skills. I think I need to work out how to do a proper screen shot for this. Ah well....no use crying over spilt milk. So for here, I needed to work out where certain parts of the foreground would sit, including the flash of light that separated the two halves along with the placement of the butterflies - don't worry, they don't just end up staying white. At that point in time they were placeholders for me so I wouldn't have to confuse myself with the placements. I did, after this point, do some slight edits to Kuroyukihime, mainly because of her stance. As you see here, she does seem to be standing at an odd angle, which sort of made her look pregnant. Whoopsy! So I adjusted how she was standing somewhat so she no longer looked like she had a horrible spine defect. Weirdly, it was easier to see that mistake at the actual line art point than the initial sketch, though it was easier to correct thanks to working on layers and not having to completely erase something to correct it. With that done, I could work on the final piece itself.

I'll eventually be putting the true finished piece on Deviant Art, but for now I do have my photograph of the finished thing that I used as a 'are you happy with this' picture for the client before the finished product made its way into its new owners hands:

As you can see, no more accidentally pregnant Kuroyukihime. lol. Actually, doing her side of the picture was pretty fun, especially experimenting with the background/foreground effects. If nothing else, it's certainly good practice if I ever get around to doing a comic or image based around some kind of computer. Plus it was just fun looking at lighting effects. On the other hand, the lighting effects for the male's side was a little more difficult. Not only was his hair colouring diferent from Kirito's, but getting the light streaks in the background to not just look like I had no idea what I was ddoing rather than them meant to look so fragmented was a bit more difficult and needed a few tries to get right. I wasn't entirely happy with them, but the client was happy. In the end, since lighting effects are still a little newer to me in comparison to other effects, I count it as a win.

Is there room for improvement? Well, yes, of course. There always is! But all in all I was fairly pleased with the image and I had tons of fun with it. Not to mention that my client loved it too, so I think that it went pretty well! Certainly well enough that they asked me for a second commission to be a present for their daughter, too - but more on that one next time.

All in all, if nothing else it certainly helped teach me a lot in experimenting with colour and light, so I thought it was a valuable experience. I do hope you enjoyed this and will look forwards to the second part :)

Until next time!

Tara