Hey everyone! Welcome back!
I finally got my tablet fixed. Huzzah! It is no longer 'sticking' or holding onto things longer than it should - at least for now. I'll have to keep an eye on it to make sure I hopefully dont have any repeat performances for a while. If it does happen again, I may have to result in taking the nib out each night, but, for now, I shall be glad to have a functioning tablet back.
And with my functioning tablet I....decided to experiment.
A while ago, I mentioned on this blog about looking at past characters I'd made and re-drawing them, to see how they might look in my current style as apposed to my old one. Admittedly I wasn't always thinking full body, but if nothing else it would just be interesting to see how they might look these days.
First on the list - if one minuses the few full body character designs I did.....oh, a year or so ago - is a character created as a Firebender from Avatar: The Last Airbender named Huojin. Though certainly not a canon to the show character, he was used during a forum in several places, once in a purely ATLA forum, and the other was on a crossover type forum.
Back when I originally created him, I hadn't yet even started any digital art at all and was still just sketching, sometimes with pen, sometimes pencil. While there was occasionally interesting things, looking back, my art style was...well, pretty appalling, pretty generic stuff and, honestly, pretty out of proportion. As such, this was the first drawing I made of Huojin:
I wasn't the worst drawing I had done, of course and, while a little off - especially concerning the hands - it at least looks like he's sitting crossed legged - always a plus. Colour wise....it was really bad though. I hadn't really figured out how to do light and shadow properly, some places went over the lines a bit...There are plenty of 'egh' moments, looking back. However, as a character, I enjoyed playing him. Back then I tended to play more logical characters and Huo was a rather emotional and blunt person, and tended to be (unintentionally on his part) funny at times because of it. As such I thought it'd be fun to see how he would look if I drew him these days.
While I didn't go for a full body shot for this particular drawing - I'll do one of those later - I did a portrait shot of him showing up to around elbow height. Because its been so long since I drew him, I wanted to do some focus on his hair and face before I come up with interesting firebending poses, or reuse the current pose for a more direct old verses new.
Admittedly, it isn't finished just yet but I thought I should show you guys my current progress:
This is Huojin in my current style and, honestly, he looks more like as I envisioned. Huojin is meant to be a younger teenager, around fifteen years old and fairly open as a character. In the old picture he seemed more just overly snarky and maybe a person prone to being suspisious, something Huo really....isn't. As a character he hates lies, whether being told them or telling them, so generally will be extremely open in how he thinks of you. The other picture makes him look a little...perhaps not evil, but certainly not as benign, which Huo generally is when he can get away with it.
As you can tell, its not finished yet. There is no colours here and the fire floating over his finger is certainly not going to remain white - canon wise, only dragons and Azula seem to have fire that are colours other than....well, fire.
So far I'm quite happy with how he's coming out. It makes me interested to try this exercise with other characters in the future too.
Of yours, YMMV. But I'm always happy to hear peoples thoughts!
Until next time!
Tara
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