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I'm posting a couple of doodles I made between this week and the other month. These are both concepts for Amagi, the android in my visual novel. She has a very strong likeness to an MMO character I have, so I'm working on creating a design that can stand on its own.
Drawings
The one on the right is a drawing I did back in March, I think. Amagi is supposed to be in a military uniform. I think this specific uniform is based on an old uniform that belonged to a female officer in the US Army, but colored blue. The hat I borrowed from one of my favorite characters from NIKKE, Helm.
As you probably noticed, I'm mixing and matching a lot of things I like and am trying to create something new from it. This is typically how my creative process goes.
The doodle on the left is from this week. The pose and uniform are based on a figure that I found on Amiami. I just really liked the pose and I think the school uniform is pretty generic, but I like it.
A friend of mine told me something earlier this month that shocked me to my core, because I didn't realize it myself. Or maybe I did, but the idea never consciously formed in my mind.
She told me that I really like women in suits. It took me a while to register as my brain quickly referenced each female character that I like and many of them fell into that category.
My friend brought up Helltaker as an example and I couldn't agree more. I actually dress my MMO character similarly. She's wearing a jacket with a tie, though I often go for a skirt instead of pants because it looks cuter.
As you can see in the drawing on the left, I'm a huge fan of bows. The bigger the better. Next time, I might leave out the bow on top of her head since I really want that thing behind Amagi's head to be more emphasized. I'm not even sure what they are, they're like antennae? I also would like to experiment with taking the catgirl ears away and having the antennae look like ears instead. I think it could work.
VN Major Theme
I've been rethinking the overall theme for the visual novel lately. The other month I wrote about following a guide and it honestly helped a lot, but the theme I wrote back then doesn't feel right anymore. And a lot of the themes I've been coming up with are not satisfying me.
The theme is the backbone of the story and I wouldn't feel confident in writing any further if I don't figure it out.
In my last post I wrote that I want to motivate people to enjoy life with the visual novel. I've been trying to find a positive message to use as the theme but I'm unable to say anything substantial that I strongly believe in. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place? I think I might be. Themes like: "It's okay to let things go because not everything is meant to be" seem more attractive to me than anything super positive.
Maybe something along the lines of: "refusing to let go of what you have lost will only bring contempt for yourself and those around you". I really like this one because it tells me that an obsession with a goal can cause you to lose friends. Or it can push away people that you care about. That's the core of the relationship between the alchemist that created Amagi and his pupil. And I've been experimenting with the idea of Amagi having to go through her own version of that with the cast in the VN.
Evil Amagi
I would be lying if I said that Muramasa didn't give me a lot to re-examine about my own story. I really like that visual novel a lot and I'm trying to be careful to not copy stuff I like from it too much.
I didn't think about the possibility of routes in my story, but I really like how "simple" it was in Muramasa. Lately I've been feeling a bit of anguish over the same topics that were discussed in my previous post. I think I'm able to keep marching forward because I'm a resilient person, but sometimes I wonder what would happen to me if I wasn't.
I idea of writing a route where Amagi loses everything and cannot come to terms with her situation is interesting to me. It goes back to what I was talking about in the Muramasa review/write-up I posed, when I discussed the Yoko Taro quote. Amagi only needs to think that she's right in order to hurt people. If she was very vulnerable and was only able to latch onto the concept of vengeance, I think that route would be very edgy. I can see it being a transition from being a hero to an anti-hero.
I did think about a "good" route as well, but I don't know what that would look like. One thought that comes to mind is that Amagi embraces her role as a hero, or believes she is, but has to learn that she cannot save everyone either? As talented as she is as an android, she still has her limits. Even as an android she cannot feed all the hungry people in the world, solve inequality, etc. The world is not her burden to bear, not alone at least.
That might be a good starting point. I always thought that "good" routes had to be straight and boring, but I would be interested in experimenting with the idea of how being the person everyone relies on can be harmful to you.
These were just stray thoughts I had on my mind. Let's hope this weekend is pretty good. The project that has been occupying my mind for the last few months might finally be handed off to someone else. I've already started spending more time at work doodling and goofing off. It's been great.
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When I started drawing last year, I quickly learned that I'd need references no matter how good I got. When I'm bored or want to learn a technique, I try to do an art study and replicate something I like on my own without looking it up.
I'm currently interested in working on my anatomy a bit more. I'm also trying to practice doing line art since I eventually want to move beyond sketching.
First, I find an artwork I really like. I've been playing a lot of Girls' Frontline and there's a lot of units in the game that go under the radar. One of my new favorites is APCK9, I really like how she looks and her pose might seem simple at first but there's a decent line of action as you can see from the orange line I drew.
If we break down the pose a bit, we can see that there's a few thing the artist does to make it appealing despite just being a standing pose.
For starters, ACPK9 does not look stiff. Her shoulders appear very relaxed and her body is open towards the viewer. Her upper body is also at an angle, while the legs are slightly bent. Her arms are interesting to look at too. The arm with the APC9 sub-machine gun in her hand is in front of her body while the free arm/hand is slightly behind her (ignore my note), emphasizing her torso just slightly.
APCK9 is not exactly sticking out her chest, but she still looks very confident in this pose. You can quickly assume that she's a professional in her line of work.
People typically recommend that you use boxes to break down a pose, but I ended up drawing the egg-shaped torso that I learned from studying a book called Morpho. I think I like it a little more because I can visualize the neck and some of the shoulder muscles a bit better.
As for the line art practice, there's a certain style that I want to learn. I think this pen gets very close, but in the original art the lines are slightly textured, kind of like a pencil.
I'm using Clip Studio Paint because I prefer all the tools that are included in the software. I also have Procreate on my iPad, but I'm not too crazy about it. One of the benefits of CSP is that I can pose 3D models and download a bunch of neat community assets. However, for most of these studies I try to keep it simple. Actually, the image of APCK9 that I loaded was in full color but I think CSP recently added an import feature that lets you extract the lines and turn the image monochrome. It's really useful for looking at stuff like shading, too.