Mana Anzai Art Project, Part 3

Welcome back for a look at a little more of my progress on painting this portrait.
So moving on from the last bits I showed off a few days ago (the bow and skirt), I began to work on the rest of Mana's outfit. This is a relatively simple step in terms of function. But as I said in the last post, it's a little different regarding the decision-making process. All one has to do to understand that decision-making challenge is go to a store and piece together an outfit made up of uncoordinated pieces. Pick one top, match it with a pair of pants or skirt. Do you have both in the same color or different colors? What color do you want to match? Which piece is the primary? Do you have shoes to match? Luckily for me I'm a guy, and guys tend not to have that much coordinating to do. It's a little different for women, and that realization necessitates that a little more thought is given in coordinating Mana's clothes.

To that end, I made the skirt the primary piece to her outfit, selecting a navy blue to counter the bold and bright shade of pink I chose for her hair, and the relatively bright green I used for her hair bow.  

For her blouse, I had from almost the beginning thought that I would like to do something like extremes along a gradient. So, if the skirt was a red, then the blouse would be a very light pink. Of course navy blue was the color I actually chose, so the opposite extreme of the gradient was light blue. I went with a very light blue - sort of baby or sky blue - because it was the most extreme I felt I could go without it being too white.

That left the slightly more complicated matter of the sleeves/overcoat like part of the outfit. Functionally it is a part of the blouse, but in the original Yomako piece it is a different color from both the skirt and the torso section. I considered making it the same color as the torso section, but it didn't seem quite right. I also thought about making it the same color as the skirt, but again it didn't seem to fit the right way. This is likely due to the fact that I'm so accustomed already to seeing that part of the outfit as a different color from the rest. That is how I settled on remaining with the theme of differing shades of the same basic color families. With all the blue focused in her outfit at this point, red came as a reasonable alternative. I decided to add a tiny bit of blue to it, therefore arriving at a maroon/burgundy sort of color.

All that is left of her outfit at this point are the shoes. The shoes came as a different sort of challenge because I have other pictures I've drawn of Mana and of Anzushiro wearing these modified versions of the Dark Magician Girl's boots. For my use of Mana as someone functionally different from any other DMG clone iteration, I wanted her to at least use a different color palette than the others. At the same time, Mana isn't meant to be a maven of fashion, so it's not as though she will have tons of different outfits and so on. In that case she's likely to only have a few pairs of shoes, not likely more than one of any beyond-basic design, and therefore not many color variants. In short, Mana probably only has one pair of boots that look like these boots, so any picture I create that shows her in these boots would have to have these boots match those colors. In that regard a simple, neutral, color scheme is imperative to ensure it at least isn't out of place. So, black boots with a white trim piece made sense. At the last second I went back and instead used a very dark, smoky, gray, so that at least it had a little more personality than plain black.

So that's the next three pieces. If you've noticed, the process is getting very close to the final stages. The only big piece left is her skin. That presents its own unique challenges, and I'll focus on that tomorrow. Hope to see you then.