Songs without Words

Hmmm … perhaps only Megatokyo/Kanon fans would get that title, haha ..

Anyway, while studying for finals (which turned out well, it seems!!), I sketched a happy girl. At a friend’s suggestion, I’ve colored her now. Regarding the coloring scheme, I knew that the skirt had to be burgundy because I saw a woman wearing a solid burgundy skirt in the snowy winter and it was stunning in its simplicity and elegance. She was probably the only person wearing a skirt, period.

The character’s hair is black, but I tend to avoid coloring anything solid black, so I did a red-wine interpretation of black. That left the argyle sweater in the middle, and I think one of the merriest colors to go with burgundy is green. Lots of green! I’ve recently started to like green, despite an earlier aversion to it. In fact, I may buy a green dress shirt if I see it in a store (they’re rare!). Almost all my shirts are blue (and my bro’s are mostly pink … he has curious fashion tastes … kind of preppy?) or white, plus one black one.

Coloring-wise, I tried to learn a new technique I had seen, which is essentially to make some transitions between light and dark shades gradients while others are sharp distinctions.  This differentiates color transitions based on folds and cast shadows (sharp) and transitions that are on gentle slopes.  I artificially created the gradients using smudging.  Additionally, this is my first time doing shading on patterned surfaces – it’s pretty annoying to come up with dark/light shading pairs for each color and then applying them, but I like the way that it looks.  I may try being more efficient next time by using other tools.

My main regret is that I made the line-art thick, appropriate for the cel-shading I originally set out to do. I switched to this style when I started using those colors – certain colors want to be cel-shaded, and certain colors are just too exquisite to be used that way.

I am also a purveyor of lazy-ass backgrounds. Sorry … one of these days I’ll do a real background.

Click here for bigger version (you can’t see much detail at this size ..)

All comments/crits welcome.