Delights From a Sketchbook

I thought I would take some time out to actually talk about my latest pieces in a bit of detail and show the world what I have been doing. I draw every day as part of both my therapy and as a way of passing my time. Sometimes I find it hard to draw because of the shakes that I get from my bronchodiolators and it does sometimes get to me because I can't draw the way that I would have liked. I have always wanted to draw photo-realistic pieces like Becky can but I have accepted that it's just not something I can do. Instead I like to draw in the anime style. My biggest inspiration is Tetsuya Nomura and I like to draw in a style similar to his.

I can't draw the style perfectly, but I can make it my own. This piece was one that took me about a week to do and it was a week well spent if you ask me. I think I did a character outline in a day and then worked on texturing with my pencil. I used all my different pencils for this as well as fine erasing for some light and shade effects. The one thing I did that was very different to the original was omitting a character. In the original, you can see Tseng peeking out between Sephiroth and Cloud, personally I felt this was a bit too crowded and a little unbalanced with the 6 characters. So instead I left him out and brought Cloud and Seph closer together behind Zack, the main focus. I think the hardest thing about the process was the shading and figuring out where the lights were going to catch in which places. I worked on this between feeling rough and sleeping a lot and in some ways it was what kept me motivated. After all, if I gave up halfway through a piece then what kind of person would that make me?

The other piece I did around about the same time was a Dissidia style Cloud. I worked from the artwork from the Dissidia Strategy Guides that I have littering my floor. Cloud was an interesting character to draw, and wasn't one that I do often. I wanted to capture that deep and brooding side of the character as well as the almost lost child look. I often feel close to my characters as I drew them and sometimes they like to move around the page. Sometimes I have to tell them to hold still!Cloud looks ready to fight and has a look of quiet conviction. This is similar to the pictures used as icons in the game. Every character has one, and they are all in full colour, something that I hope to complete at a later date. I'm going to scan these drawings in to my computer and make some digital copies and some colour versions. It's all part of my sketch, scan, colour, scan, final colour process. It's time consuming but it really is worth it. I don't rely on digital editing much these days, whereas before I used to use digital edits to remove bad lines or redefine sections that weren't quite what they should have been. Some people call that cheating, but its something that even the professionals use to make their work just that little bit better.

I'll draw some more as time goes by and I will do colour versions of what I have done so far. I'm just in a sketchy kind of mood I think.

Loves
Wendy xx