Seaside
I was initally rather hesitant to upload this picture. I’ve always tried to be a bit “prim and proper” when it comes to drawing my characters, having only shared pictures of them in the past wearing proper clothes and not exposing much skin, so this image is a slight diversion from that. This is also one of the few images I’ve drawn that’s split the opinions of my closest friends into two distinct groups: one group that congratulates me on challenging myself to draw something like this, and another group that thinks it’s weird and wrong and shouldn’t exist ever. To be honest, I don’t know which side I feel like I’m on; drawing this was legitimately a challenge because I was forced to get the shapes right, but initially I felt a bit uncomfortable drawing “mai waifu lel” in just a bikini with nothing else – so much so, I put her in a sarong and invited one of her friends to stand awkwardly in the sea in the distance. I’m not sure how I feel now, but I know that this is pretty much entering fan service territory here.
I’ll now try and write some stuff that isn’t directly about the content of this image.
When I draw people (my characters included) I’ve found that I usually end up covering the mistakes with another layer of clothes. This means that if I made a mistake that I couldn’t really fix, I’d just mess around with the clothes and force the body to fit inside. Recently I’ve noticed that it’s got to the stage where I’m letting the clothes dictate the shape of the body, leading to some pretty unrealistic proportions. I know my style isn’t highly realistic – it is inspired by manga/anime after all – but I’ve always considered realistic shapes and proportions to be important in my works.
With my previous image, The Little Rocket, I tried getting back on the realism route by making the clothes slightly tighter-fitting and forcing them to follow the body shape of the character. With this image, I’ve taken it one step further by, well, keeping clothes to a minimum. Don’t ask me how many times I’ve redrawn her upper arms (because it’s so many times I’ve lost count) and I’m still not happy with the final shape of the legs – but oh well: some of it works really well, so I guess the badly-drawn knobbly knees aren’t so bad.
There, I managed to write something constructive to accompany this picture. Anyway, enough trying to justify it. I’ll see what I think about it next week.