Anniversary Celebration Round One, Nia Cosplay
So, we're finally at the anniversary weekend of the launch of this blog. To kick off the minor festivities, first is this new art piece teased three weeks ago. It's title is Nia Cosplay.
But first, a note. As per usual the images I complete will show up on DeviantArt. Between this one and the one I'll do up tomorrow, the one which gets the most views and favorites will be the first one that I work to fully colorize, with the goal being the production of a finished product by Christmas.
So, as for this image, the idea is very simple, exceedingly straightforward. One of my favorite artists out there goes by the name Creayus. They have become my favorite due to their fantastic and quite prolific collection of Code Geass artwork, mainly of C.C. A healthy portion of Creayus' art features C.C cosplaying as other anime characters.
Given my use of C.C in my fan-fiction, the idea of a character cosplaying as another is eminently on my mind anytime I work on a story. And as i work on my various art pieces I tend to want to put that idea into a visual representation. This is nothing new, as I've done this time and time again in the past. And I know my skills don't approach the level of someone like Creayus, so I don't really try to compete, per se, with their work. But, whenever I see new artwork from Creayus I do get the inspiration to try something similar yet different.
That being said, I was already working on another idea involving C.C (story wise, not art wise), and so I had an itch to scratch in terms of drawing something C.C related. Mix that with having seen new Creayus art, specifically of C.C cosplaying as Jun Tao from Shaman King, I just felt like doing something.
In case you didn't know, Jun Tao is a character in my Book of the Shadows series. Specifically, she is introduced in the First Moon Saga. She is the sister of Yamu/Yamiyugi, making her Yami's aunt, Anzu and Rini's mother.
In any event, I determined that it would be nice if I could do another cosplay image for C.C, but one that Creayus hadn't already touched. The thought did occur to me to offer up my own "cosplay as Jun Tao" artwork from years back. That one featured Anzu and was meant to be a bit of a joke about Anzu dressing up like her mom. But, that piece was terribly flawed in execution, and I couldn't figure out for myself how I wanted to correct it.
Arriving at Nia Teppelin of the Guren Lagann series was an unconventional choice in that C.C cosplaying as her ignores in my story the fact that someone already has Nia as theri own persona. Specifically, Izanami, who I have previously shared as Road Kamelot of D.Gray-man, uses Nia and her Anti-Spiral form, as alternate past lives. From that perspective a Road/Nia cosplay would make more sense, especially given the version of Nia's outfit I chose and the relative age of the two girls.
How did I end up on Nia in the first place? In terms of story I was predominantly working on Third Moon Saga, a little on Cromwell Universe. Third Moon is a fairly dark tale, and the part of Cromwell I was working on is a dark phase as well. I was thinking I wanted to do something lighter, absent the negativity that the writing I was working on was immersed in. I usually remember Nia right away whenever I think about "light and happy", among other characters.
That was it. I thought about a cosplay of Nia, quickly looked at her outfit in more detail than just my memory, and decided there was enough of an idea to work with. And, voila;
As you can see, based on the picture I used as reference, I didn't really do a whole lot composition wise. I originally thought of changing the angle on C.C's right leg so that it would look more like she's floating through the air more, as opposed to how it looks almost like Nia is on top some sort of flat surface. I went back on that change, but there is still a slight downward angle more than the original had, but far less than the second draft.
I obviously had to do some slight modifications to the dress to fit C.C's body. Being that C.C is physically older than Nia at the apparent point of this image, and that their overall body style is different as a result, I had to lengthen the dress about the midsection and have it conform a little more to C.C's frame. Because of this the belt changes a little too. The relative position of the belt is the same, but technically speaking I suppose you could say C.C's belt is larger to keep it in proportion to the rest of the image overall. It wraps around her a little differently too, so you get a little extra of the back side of the belt as it goes around her waist. The effective angle of the head and arms are slightly different, just because that's how I wound up drawing them.
As usual you're looking at a picture I drew by hand, then scanned and cleaned up on my computer using PaintShop Pro. Recently I've always just messed with color balances and the usual artifact and noise removal items for cleaning up my scans. But this time I used the eraser tool and overlaid the scan on a white background. This takes a little extra time, but I think it gets a better finished product. This is especially necessary since this image spanned two physical pages, three scans, to get the full thing on here, otherwise there would have been "seams' across parts of the image. You can probably still see the joining spots if you look closely enough, since the actual art lines are distorted there.
Alright, that wraps up round one. Round two comes tomorrow, another recently done art piece. Hope you come back to see it.
But first, a note. As per usual the images I complete will show up on DeviantArt. Between this one and the one I'll do up tomorrow, the one which gets the most views and favorites will be the first one that I work to fully colorize, with the goal being the production of a finished product by Christmas.
So, as for this image, the idea is very simple, exceedingly straightforward. One of my favorite artists out there goes by the name Creayus. They have become my favorite due to their fantastic and quite prolific collection of Code Geass artwork, mainly of C.C. A healthy portion of Creayus' art features C.C cosplaying as other anime characters.
Given my use of C.C in my fan-fiction, the idea of a character cosplaying as another is eminently on my mind anytime I work on a story. And as i work on my various art pieces I tend to want to put that idea into a visual representation. This is nothing new, as I've done this time and time again in the past. And I know my skills don't approach the level of someone like Creayus, so I don't really try to compete, per se, with their work. But, whenever I see new artwork from Creayus I do get the inspiration to try something similar yet different.
 |
| Creayus artwork of C.C dressed as Jun Tao |
In case you didn't know, Jun Tao is a character in my Book of the Shadows series. Specifically, she is introduced in the First Moon Saga. She is the sister of Yamu/Yamiyugi, making her Yami's aunt, Anzu and Rini's mother.
In any event, I determined that it would be nice if I could do another cosplay image for C.C, but one that Creayus hadn't already touched. The thought did occur to me to offer up my own "cosplay as Jun Tao" artwork from years back. That one featured Anzu and was meant to be a bit of a joke about Anzu dressing up like her mom. But, that piece was terribly flawed in execution, and I couldn't figure out for myself how I wanted to correct it.
Arriving at Nia Teppelin of the Guren Lagann series was an unconventional choice in that C.C cosplaying as her ignores in my story the fact that someone already has Nia as theri own persona. Specifically, Izanami, who I have previously shared as Road Kamelot of D.Gray-man, uses Nia and her Anti-Spiral form, as alternate past lives. From that perspective a Road/Nia cosplay would make more sense, especially given the version of Nia's outfit I chose and the relative age of the two girls.
That was it. I thought about a cosplay of Nia, quickly looked at her outfit in more detail than just my memory, and decided there was enough of an idea to work with. And, voila;As you can see, based on the picture I used as reference, I didn't really do a whole lot composition wise. I originally thought of changing the angle on C.C's right leg so that it would look more like she's floating through the air more, as opposed to how it looks almost like Nia is on top some sort of flat surface. I went back on that change, but there is still a slight downward angle more than the original had, but far less than the second draft.
I obviously had to do some slight modifications to the dress to fit C.C's body. Being that C.C is physically older than Nia at the apparent point of this image, and that their overall body style is different as a result, I had to lengthen the dress about the midsection and have it conform a little more to C.C's frame. Because of this the belt changes a little too. The relative position of the belt is the same, but technically speaking I suppose you could say C.C's belt is larger to keep it in proportion to the rest of the image overall. It wraps around her a little differently too, so you get a little extra of the back side of the belt as it goes around her waist. The effective angle of the head and arms are slightly different, just because that's how I wound up drawing them.
As usual you're looking at a picture I drew by hand, then scanned and cleaned up on my computer using PaintShop Pro. Recently I've always just messed with color balances and the usual artifact and noise removal items for cleaning up my scans. But this time I used the eraser tool and overlaid the scan on a white background. This takes a little extra time, but I think it gets a better finished product. This is especially necessary since this image spanned two physical pages, three scans, to get the full thing on here, otherwise there would have been "seams' across parts of the image. You can probably still see the joining spots if you look closely enough, since the actual art lines are distorted there.
Alright, that wraps up round one. Round two comes tomorrow, another recently done art piece. Hope you come back to see it.
Comments
Post a Comment