Banana Scoop

This is a drawing of Arcade Sona I painted.  She’s probably one of my favorite champions right now and she looked like a lot of fun to draw.  As stated before, I’m pursing a different style now, kind of edging away from keeping with line art and using more of a brush.  The previous Harley Quinn picture was simple though.  This drawing was a lot more complex, using nearly triple the colors required to do this technique.  I’m really proud of this one and look forward to what else is in store for 2015!

I wrote a small breakdown of how I did the whole thing included below.

Constructive Shapes

First I draw simple shapes that will ultimately mesh together to form the pose I’m aiming for.  The shapes are normally referenced from a predetermined finished drawing/pose.  Some details should be added to see if certain features can fit on base drawings (the joystick and buttons on the piano), but overall, keeping it simple is the way to go.  This step is fairly easy, but can be very crucial to the rest of the drawing.

Sketching

Probably one of the more time consuming and difficult steps, sketching is the meat of the drawing.  You have to nail angles, perspectives, and sensible details.  I took the reference pose and reference character and placed them next to each other.  Then, line by line, I copied important features like the hair, the vest, the bra, the dress, etc. in a different perspective than the character reference.  Relaying that is probably one of the more difficult things to accomplish.  For example, sometimes you don’t know what the back of the character looks like, so you’ve gotta use the rest of the drawing to extrapolate reason to unknown areas.

Cleaning

Inking and cleaning is what I like to think of as the autopilot stage.  You make the sketch transparent and take a fine pen to make a new and cleaner drawing on a separate layer.  For the most part, this section is tracing.  Almost mindless tracing.  Line variation is key here if you want to stick to a line art based final product.  The details can be further emphasized here, to add some spark to drawing in this section.

Coloring and Polishing

In my old style, coloring and polishing would normally be the quickest step.  But in this new technique, I’ve tried to create more emphasis on water brushes and blurring tools.  If you’ve kept the line art, you can still use it to overlap your colors, but I’ve decided against using line art to give a less disjointed and cartoony feel.

Hope you all enjoyed the quick breakdown of explaining my new approach.  Please feel free to add constructive criticism and commentary!