amateur art - lilly satou

we did it! We made it to the end of the Katawa Shoujo series of drawings! Here's a video of someone's kid using a party blower:

And here's the actual drawing. Unfortunately for this medium I'm not able to do any timelapse videos (I don't have the rig for a realtime-capture, or the patience for constant scanning). 

"Relief"

If you're not following, I had made a project out of drawing the 5 female lead characters from Katawa Shoujo; I had done multiple versions of the other 4 but for some reason had never done one of Lilly in between. I think it's because I loved her story the most, and so I wanted to (a) make my own drawing without copying someone else's, and (b) get as much practice as possible first. Since I started posting my drawings, I've gone from making bad copies, to making okay copies, to making my own bad work, to making my own okay work. This drawing is what you get at the end of that progression.

The pencil set I used made it a little difficult to blend; the cores are a little stiff and so I only had opportunity to put 1 or 2 colors together before the page started to get a "laminate" feel, and really couldn't be erased or changed after that. I didn't have too much experience with blending color pencils, so what you're seeing above is really a first-timer's attempt with that sort of thing. That may not have been the smart way to go, especially if I was planning for this to be a sort of "culmination" of my experience to this point. I'm only so-happy with it, if I'm being honest. I really liked the way the hair came out though. Mixing yellow with some browns and blacks really came out looking good, but I did forget to give it some curl, like Lilly is supposed to have. You can see the character's original artwork from the game below. The simple explanation is that I got started coloring without realizing. That actually happened in more than one place, like the shirt and hands.

No more flat irons!

I had only done a very basic rough sketch before I started coloring, so the whole thing had a pretty indefinite shape going in, and I made most of the decisions as I colored. That was very stupid, since you get 1 chance in a lot of cases, because the pencils don't erase completely. But I did get a lot of help from DrawWithJazza's tutorials on Youtube, particularly with the anatomy of the arms and hands, and the fabric. He does some great instructional videos; there are a ton of YouTubers who do drawing tutorials, but his are uniquely well-produced, and easy to follow. I really recommend checking his channel out if you're with me in the "novice" camp and are looking to pick up some solid tips. Here's the fabrics video I watched, which helped me with making her shirt look like it was made from a thin, tight fabric. You can see how he makes it simple by breaking fabric types down to 4 groups.

The hands were a struggle, so I did work on them a fair bit before applying color. If you check my last 2 drawings, you'll see I conveniently (read: deliberately) drew them in positions that covered them up, or allowed me to crop them out. The ones here actually didn't look good at all when I first colored them, but I was able to save it a little bit with some line work. You can see it in the knuckles and outlines of the fingers. I wasn't so lucky on the breasts though. I made the early mistake of outlining them too much early on, and so they wound up looking like butt cheeks or something. I did some more research and found that it's more effective to have them look like a single angular mass. I say "I did some more research", which is code for "played Half-Life 2 and noticed Judith Mossman's boobs". Take a look: 

You can see how they really only stand out from the rest of her anatomy by way of a single, horizontal undershadow. I tried to get the shadow on my drawing to look like more of a straight line but could only do so much. Those 3 black lines, above the breasts and below her neck, unfortunately couldn't be removed either. As was the case in a few other areas, drawing the anatomy in the rough sketch would have gone a long way. Oh well. 

So yeah, we're done with the series. I'm still a big fan of KS, so you might see them come up every now and then in between whatever I post after, but the project is officially closed at last. Whew!