Old Vs New! Part Two!

Hey everyone! Welcome back!

Firstly, sorry this post is a day later than usual. A friend and co worker of mine was celebrating their birthday yesterday and I was covering their usual shift for them so they could have fun. Here's hoping that she had a great birthday, though! But yes, by the time my shift was done it was a bit late to get the blog written so I decided to post it today.

Still, next week I should be back to posting on Mondays again. But for now, sorry about the shift in schedule.

That said, I'll actually talk about what I've been up to.

So, last week I started playing around with redrawing characters that I had made and drawn ages ago back when I hadn't touched digital artwork before, starting with the character of Huojin, and showed you all the line work I had currently done.

Well, from there, I now have the image completed! Yay!

But before I show it to you, just a quick reminder of what the old version of Huojin actually looked like:

As you can tell, its a little on the amateurish side, though I go into it a bit more in last week's blog post for my full thoughts on this image, looking back on it half a decade or more later. In comparison, this is what Huojin looks like (though admittedly not a full body image) in my current digital art style:

(Please forgive the somewhat lowish quality upload - for some reason the site lowers upload quality and it always looks a bit blurry - and note the actual image was made with 600dpi)

Either way, as you can see, he looks a lot more lively in digital form and happens to closer resemble his age. I'm actually quite happy with my flame, too, especially since I, yet again, used no tutorial for it and was mostly testing it out. I've been having a bit of fun with the shadows on this one as well. After all, with an obvious light source, it does make playing around with light and shadow a little easier to work out where said light is coming from.

I think my favourite parts to do on this was the hair and the undershirt. The former was due to the style itself a nd trying to get the strands right, especially those drawn back into the topknot, and the shirt because cloth folds were a bit awkward for me at one point, but I'm starting to get a bit of a linking for it :) - not to say its perfect, but it at least looks like cloth that is over arms and such and not just something flat. Oh, and I liked doing the eyes. No particular reason for that, just did. lol!

Even so, Huojin looks much more like I imagined now than it does in the original concept, and I'm happy with how it turned out! Though I was almost curious if I should do a background. Thoughts?

I'll admit that I've had a fun doing this old verses new, so I might give it another go sometimes. Believe me I made a ton of characters in the past, so I wouldn't be too shocked to end up with many an old verses new in the future. lol!

Until next time!

Tara