Princess Nikkita of West

If you’ve been on the blog the last couple days, then you already know that the title character for this piece is Nikkita Eurum, the main character from a new story I began writing two months ago called the UA series, Three Kingdoms War. UA stands for Unassigned, reflecting my view of the related series as being viably, but not yet satisfactorily, linked to any existing story of mine.

When I began, her name was simply “Nikkita”. It was as I was developing the story that the idea came to me to use Latin as part of some wordplay, and to have the last names for the major characters correspond to pastoral themes. So, Eurum is Latin for wind, Mar-Grave is a slightly more corrupted Latin translation for deep sea, and Ignis can mean light or flame.

This is the first image of Nikkita, and I’ve already got a second in mind. If you were to place a timing on when in the story the images take place, this one today is Nikkita shortly before or at the time of awakening as the Consort of the Azure King, and the second one – I intend – will be after. This second one, that I will not spoil fully right now, will show her full breadth of changes in appearance associated with assuming the power of the Azure King.

This image, however, is much simpler. It is an original piece. In a general sense I had the likes of Sonsaku Hakufu and Ryofu Housen from Ikkitousen, Oda Nobunaga and Mitsuhide from Sengoku Collection, in mind when I was considering her persona. At best, her appearance matches Ryofu, but obviously the clothes do not.

I wanted to have her in some kind of dynamic pose, rather than merely standing there holding her weapon. As noted in yesterday’s post, Nikkita is practiced in combat with multiple types of weapons, including swords, spears, and bow and arrows. Oddly enough, this aspect was inspired by Fate Harlaown of the Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha series, and the way her weapon, Bardiche, takes on a variety of blade forms. Of course, Fate doesn’t have a bow and arrow, so I initially had Nikkita holding a bow and arrow, her arm and hands obviously in a necessarily different position. However, I couldn’t arrive at a design I was satisfied with for her bow. I want it to be relatively intricate and unique, but no idea really seemed to fit all that well so I abandoned that one temporarily. 

I chose red hair, dark burnt-orange sort of color, because it’s one of my favorite colors and one that you don’t necessarily see as a hair color all that often. It was also a nice counterbalance to the blue theme that would otherwise be dominant with her “azure dragon” legacy. I also made her eyes orange. The pattern to the dark ring around her pupils is based on the eyes of girls from the BanG Dream anime, which is otherwise completely unrelated to this overall project.

The shape of the ears is a somewhat subtle nod to her status in the story as an Elf, even if that word is attributed a different meaning within the context of my story. The hairstyle is a product of the fact that this story was inspired in part by ancient Chinese folklore. Given that, I wanted to afford her a similar Asian-styled hairdo. I considered adding a long braid trailing behind as well, but for now that probably isn’t necessary. The tassel hanging from her swords is made from her own and her mother’s hair, which is something associated with various theological and cultural traditions around the world.

The design on her dress is another nod to the meaning of her last name, intended to remind the viewer of wind. As such, the color scheme of the image has a deliberate pattern to it. The trim of her dress blends to the wind pattern. Above that is the very pale blue of the sky on the horizon, darkening as you climb higher and reach closer to space, until it meets the brilliant red sun that is Nikkita’s hair, her braids and hair antennae representing coronal loops.

I colored her swords a deep blue because I had the idea of connecting her power directly to them. Functionally, however, her power works more to encase her weapons in her blue flames (dwelling in them an advanced skill she should pick up much later), so it’s not as though her weapon should itself need to be blue. But, I did it anyway, for effect.

I played around with the color of her gloves. At first I was content to leave them white, but due to an issue I ran into while coloring the image as a whole, I ended up coloring them a color I wasn’t content with. Technically what happened is I color individual areas of an image on a series of different layers below the line art. Since that top layer is transparent, anything on the lower layers becomes visible. It’s a simple trick to allow you to be a little messier and a little faster when doing complex elements. If you have something that’s white, so long as your background is white this works fine. But if your background isn’t white, you can run into minor issues of how to address that.

In any event, it got me off my inclination to just do white for the gloves and I began experimenting with other color options. Starting at the fingertips and copying the fade from light to dark from the dress, and counterbalancing that with a fade from the red of her hair to the same dark blue while starting at the top of the forearm, made a lot of sense as an alternative, so I ended up with that. I think it does a very good job of unifying and translating the entire color theme I was aiming for, although I do admit it looks a little funky.

I couldn’t conceive of a fitting background in terms of a scene to necessarily have her standing in front of. I went with a yellow because it was among the least represented colors in the image, and balanced well with the rest of the colors without those other colors getting lost in that background.