DMG – Dark Miracle Girl

I'm finally back! It's been a good three months since my last post, but I'm here for one, hopefully two, new posts this week. Here is the first one, a very colorful and lighthearted piece.

Planning Background

Cure Scarlet -
Go! Princess PreCure

Cure Twinkle -
Go! Princess PreCure

I first conceived this project upon seeing the Ruby and Sapphire version of the transformations of the main characters in the Mahou Tsukai entry of the PreCure series. It’s not the first time I’ve taken some inspiration from the Pretty Cure franchise. Kirara/Cure Twinkle, and Towa/Cure Scarlet, from the Go! Princess PreCure series made their way into my First Moon Saga continuation, Overture, as Yomi’s daughters, and Kanata as Yomi’s son. Technically it’s four times, since I used Twilight and Towa as separate individuals. Yuri/Cure Moonlight from Heartcatch is a leading character in the Second Moon Saga.

This planned project is very different though. It’s not really “canon” to the BotS story, only a bit of cosplay for my favorite character and her sister, as Cure Miracle and Cure Magical.

I didn’t have anything against the base Diamond dress designs of PreCure series, but they didn’t stick to me all that much. I liked Sapphire version of Cure Miracle’s transformation, but wasn’t so enthused by Magical’s. When it came to the Ruby version, it was the opposite – I really like Magical’s transformation, not so much Miracles. I also liked parts of their “super” Emerald form, so I might do one in those designs at some point. The color palette for Sapphire is a clear and obvious match for Dark Magician Girl, while, albeit a little less so, the Ruby version matches Black Lady very well.

This is basically a cosplay project, so all I’m really trying to do here is show off Anzu in Cure Miracle’s costume. I think that, given the chance, I want this to be along the same lines as the Monster Girls and Gathering series of images I’ve had in the pipelines for so long. That is to say, I want to have all of the Two-Six ladies in various magical girl costumes. Or, alternatively, have at least Anzu and Rini in a wide variety of magical girl cosplay. But the issue, at least at the moment, is that I don’t really have many other magical girl designs I can really say I’m that fond of. Cure Macaron and Chocolate from the newest PreCure series are pretty good, so I’d like to use them for someone. I’ll certainly be using Sakura’s outfit from Card Captor Sakura (definitely her end-of-series outfit, but probably another of the ones Tomoyo had her use in the series). The problem is, after that I don’t have any other particularly inspiring options. I could probably pull a few options from various Yu-Gi-Oh cards, but I’m not hugely into that idea.

Lineart Details

The biggest and most immediately noticeable change for Anzu in Cure Magical’s Sapphire form is the hat. It’s actually the hat of Magical’s Emerald form. It basically boils down to two things. First, I didn’t want to change her hairstyle to match Magical’s. It’s actually a very lovely hairstyle, so I was tempted, but I didn’t think it was that great a fit for Anzu. That being said, the second is that any time I can put a witch’s hat on Anzu’s head is a win for me, so I was glad enough for the opportunity. Miracle’s witch’s hat is merely a hair accessory in her other transformations, but that wasn’t enough for me, so I restored it to full size. Besides, I think most folks recognize Dark Magician Girl with a hat on her head. I combined elements of Miracle’s Emerald hat with her Sapphire hair ornaments to adorn DMG’s hat here.

The other change was the shoes. Miracle wears sandals in her Sapphire form. But in her default diamond form she wears boots with a feather-like trim across the toe. It’s actually very similar to the design of Euphemia’s heels in Code Geass, so it was immediately recognizable to me. I generally like the design, and I rarely draw my characters wearing open-toe shoes, so I went with what amounts to basically a pair of short heels with the design cue to the front.

Cure Miracle - Mahou Tsukai PreCure

I was going to leave out the raiment because I thought it would add too much line clutter in that area. You have the convergence of the lines of the skirt, the overcoat, the ribbon around her waist, the tails of that ribbon, and her arms with those frilly bridal gauntlets, all in that limited area. Adding the raiment seemed at first to be just too much going on there. But, thanks to the pliable nature of that particular item, and there being just enough space to work with, I was able to squeeze it in, having it bend just out of the way of potentially problematic areas.

Focusing on this, however, led me to initially forget about the bracelets, which had been a primary concern relative to the clutter issue. I guess I forgot because my conclusion was much like my initial thoughts – the bracelets are so thin and relatively unnoticeable, they wouldn’t have much impact in that regard. Arguably, I could have left it out entirely, as I almost did, and there’d be no significant impact on the image as a whole. But I consider it a nice little detail that further enhances aesthetic.

Color and Background

Which does lead to the matter of colors. Ostensibly, however, this is the essence of a children’s magical girl design. We’re not talking about a more mature offering, where the heroines are dark and brooding so their costumes and associated color palate and necessarily dull and simplified to convey that. There is a lot of color, and a lot going on with the design of their costumes. So you have a skirt and a half, the half in a slightly darker color than the whole, with a tank top with puffy shoulders with beads across it. And you have a sleeveless haori-like number over it, with tassels on the end and a diamond at the choker. You have elbow length bridal gauntlets with frills at the elbow and a jewel at the finger. You have with it knee-high leggings and sandals, while carrying a raiment draped over your arms, your hair in a super long and complex style, adorned with about a half dozen hair ornaments. It is quite obviously not practical in any sense, let alone as the clothes you’re going to be throwing punches and high kicks in while scrambling about at Mach speed fighting monsters. But it’s certainly more eye-catching than a grey tracksuit or jeans and a tee shirt.

Dark Magician Girl - Yu-Gi-Oh!

That’s not to say there is anything wrong with that sort of color direction. I wouldn’t consider Dark Magician Girl a particularly “gritty” magical girl, but she is a bit more “mature” than the primary target audience of most of the magical girl genre of the past, and her design reflects that. It’s still lighthearted and whimsical in nature, but it’s also fairly simple by comparison, and uses the same group of colors but without the degree of variance.

I was relatively strict in adhering to the color palate of Cure Miracle’s design, which wasn’t really much of an issue since, as I stated previously, she shares the same basic color scheme for the most part as Dark Magician Girl anyway. As I am apt to do, I didn’t directly pull the colors from either a Miracle or Dark Magician Girl image, so don’t expect that any particular color or shade will match any particular Dark Magician Girl or Cure Miracle image. This certainly is a more time-consuming method, but I tend to get mixed results if I try to digitally eyedrop a color, or source-match RGB and the like. Additionally, I wanted to get a mix of the two anyway. The blue, for example, is a representation of the blue from both Sapphire Cure Miracle and Dark Magician Girl.

The result is that the extra little half skirt is actually darker than Miracles so as to create better contrast. There are other slight coloration variances (a pink or a blue that is a little lighter or darker than it should be relative to Miracle’s design). As is usually the case with my Dark Magician Girl images, I end up in a bit of a quandary over hair color; do I go with her Takashi created color, do I go with Mana’s hair color, do I go with my pink variance to match her BotS story sister, or do I go with her Ascended, Anzushiro, hair color? Well, the pink option was out due to the abundance of it in the image already – anymore pink and you’d get a picture of chewed bubblegum. The white Anzushiro option was out too, that being because I generally, reserve that one for special projects specifically related to Anzushiro, or otherwise intending to make a point related to either Anzushiro or the Book of the Shadows in general.

In general I was split between Mana and “proper” Dark Magician Girl. I’ve only really done a couple Mana pictures ever, and I thought this one would look great with dark hair. On the other hand, Miracle has blonde hair, so there was that known and obvious continuity. Ultimately two things won out. First, it was my desire to just do something a little different from what I normally do. As I said, I’ve only done a couple images using Mana instead of her “future” self, so I wanted to try that out here. This concept works on another level when you consider that it is essentially the inverse for how I deal with Rini, with Black Lady being the “future” self of Small Lady.

Second, I wanted to play up even more the color tableau of the piece. There are a lot of colors here. Even though it is within the select gamut of a red, blue, and yellow, there are a lot of variances in those color options. There are four shades of pink, plus one red, two shades of yellow, orange, green, and four shades of blue, before you even get to hair color. I just liked the idea of making this as colorful as reasonably possible.

The background was a bout of random inspiration. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I was going to leave it blank, but when I did that it looked really, well, empty. I considered doing just some manner of swirling darkness like the background of Dark Magician Girl’s card, but that didn’t fit with the overall theme. I thought adding stars would make it better, and it did, but still didn’t get me where I wanted. So, I lightened it and made it more like a blue sky. Doing that, I decided to play around with making it non-uniform. But even then, it seemed too empty, and the stars were now out of place. I changed the thinking on the stars to more like sparkles or glitter, so changed it from white to red. Then I added the large heart that she’s standing on. Hearts a central theme of most magical girl pieces, and this design itself has four in it before you consider the background. That worked out better, yet I didn’t want to stop there. So, I interspersed a few more hearts floating about. Now it looks more like a display of whimsical power of a magical girl.

DeviantArt Link

Minitokyo Link

That's it for today. I'm about 90% sure that I will have another post this Friday, but it may spill over to next week. Hope you enjoy this one, and have great week!!

*Update*
- Added links to DeviantArt and Minitokyo.