Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

It's been a while since I’ve been on my blog, but I'm back, however briefly, to share with you another few art pieces.

While I've been busy the last few months, I haven't had a lot of time to spend on other things. My new position at work means I don't really have days off anymore, and with regular life to take care of, the impending end of me advanced degree program, that doesn't leave time for much else. But, in the time I did have to myself I did manage to produce these two pieces for Christmas, and one for New Year's.

As you may have gleamed from past pieces of mine, I tend to favor scenes over straight portraits. More often than not even if I end up with an image with a single figure in it, my original intent was to have one extra or two more characters in there. Usually this starts with me drawing the characters individually, then merging them into the final piece. My "... of the Two-Six" series follows this scheme. The Izanami, Kali, Athena, and Anzushiro projects, shown below in relative order, represent a part of a much larger final piece. That more or less is the idea here with this duo of Christmas themed pieces.

The scene I had planned is not particularly original, let alone difficult to guess. It was to feature Hime and Kallen at a holiday party, Hime enthusiastic and joyful, Kallen less so due to having to be in the reindeer costume and (not depicted) carrying a large sack of what can be assumed to be gifts.

The reason I choose to merge pieces later and not draw them all together at once is because I suck at scaling while I'm drawing. I don't have a good eye for it. As demonstrated here, I end up drawing one (Kallen) too large relative to the original (Hime) piece. Imagine that the plan was for Kallen to be in the upper right of the Hime picture and you have an idea of how bad the scaling issue can be for me. Certainly I wouldn't have finished the Kallen portion with it at that stage, but I would have had to spend a lot of time redrawing her head to get it right, only to worry about scaling the rest of her body along the way. Just goes to show how far my art skills have yet to go. When I get around to redrawing the lines in Corel I can scale Kallen's image as I want – one and done.

The Kallen image is a costume change on this one. As you can see, not much variation there beyond the change in clothes. I think it made her scowl a little more pronounced, just marginally, and that’s it. The Euphemia piece was a lot more work. The entire piece is original (aside from being based on Euphy of course) so I had to develop all the details myself. I’m a lot happier with the way the body of her hair turned out than the curly tails. For the tails, some images depict them with more rounded edges, while others have sharper ones. I originally wanted to go with the rounded look, but they just didn't look right, so I ended up with the sharper ones. I still don’t think they look quite right, which is a bit frustrating as I have done a couple other Hime projects before. But, because the curls were too large in one of them, and the other has a similar problem, I haven’t been able to get the right midpoint. 

The New Year's piece was a more complex one mainly because I knew I wanted to do something for New Year's, but didn't have an idea to go on. What with the sheep motif for this New Year's, I got the idea for "Wolf in sheep's clothing". From there, making a piece featuring Izanami - Road of the D.Gray-man series - in sheep-printed clothes came to mind (why Road is a tangential tale regarding my fan-fiction). 

I have mixed feelings about how this one turned out. I do very much like it, especially as an original piece. But I just don't think it looks much anything like Road. I'm sure adding some color would help, but still, it doesn't capture much of Road, I don't think. So, for anyone who isn't familiar with D.Gray-man it probably doesn't much matter to them, particularly if they think the way she looks is fine as is. She doesn't look bad or awkward, just not like the character I intended to draw.

The idea is for there to be a two-tone transitional color thing going on with the kimono. The print is the Sheep Token from the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game/series. There is a nondescript flower in her hair - I suppose it's alright to think it a rose, but it really could be just about any flower you can think of. She is holding a sparkler in her left hand. The depth (or lack of a proper representation of that depth) makes it look like she's probably holding it too close to her. 

So that's it for the 2014 Holiday season art on my end. Hope you love them. I might come up with something in time for Valentine's Day, but I really don't have a solid idea yet, so it would be fairly hard to make that promise. 

So, I hope you had a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year's celebration, and that this year brings you great peace, joy, and fulfillment. Until next time, take care.