Character Portrait for my future fighting game 4

火美子　Himiko

This time I pose two different poses for this character as because the second drawing is drawn by copying an existing pose. Long explanation starts right after this paragraph.


I usually sketch out the poses first before I draw the line art for the character. After a few sketches of Himiko's poses, I came to like this pose below.\/

Sketches before drawing the line art



I didn't just improve from the chosen one above for the line art because I believed I could reproduce the pose again. And this is it, the sketch and line art before the clean up.\/

And so, by cleaning up and re-adjust some of the incorrect parts of the body I ended up with this.\/

From the initial sketch, she is confident, pretty and likes looks down on people.
She would be the kind of girl that would be the worst choice to date as she thinks she is better than everyone but...... after taking a closer look at it and also from afar, she doesn't have the quality from the original sketch, even though the pose is almost exactly alike but the attitude isn't there.

Furthermore the drawing itself lacks two common important elements: pretty and good looking, the Himiko in this drawing is badly drawn. Took me 10 hours plus to realize that and another 5 more hours on Photoshop to try and correct the problem and I still failed horribly.

Overall, it was a waste of time for trying to draw that pose. After feeling depressed about it, I proceed to do some research on samurai poses (male and female ones), unfortunately none of the poses I searched has given me any inspiration or luck in trying to sketched out her new pose.

Second line art attempt \/

Sketching again before drawing the one above

I think the pose is too plain for the final line art and compared to the initial sketch, this cannot be her portrait. Furthermore, she isn't standing up straight for some reason. I wasn't focus on drawing this one that day, as I was watching anime and other videos online, taking my time drawing this after each video I watched. In the end, I wasted half of the day and night drawing this (I guess relaxing isn't my solution to "fine art"), I guess I sort of understand the meaning of unused art in official game art books.

That one was another waste of time. Thats fine, I won't get used to being depressed so I will move on. More research on samurai involved art and samurai poses.

Although through searching for "samurai girl" on the net actually led me to a TV drama series named Samurai Girl played by Jamie Chung. Jamie Chung plays as the protagonist of the series, Heaven Kogo. In her family everyone has full Japanese name except her. (I wonder why she doesn't have a proper Japanese name for her role, why not Kogo Ten or Kogo Amane or Kogo Tendou?) By the way she played as Chi-Chi in Dragon Ball Evolution. (the most horrible movie ever to be made based on Toriyama Akira's Dragon Ball series.)

The TV series is based on the book Samurai Girl by Carrie Asai.

I was slowly getting tired of sketching poses and I just needed something I could use, so I used one of Jamie Chung's picture for direct reference for Himiko's pose.\/

My pose reference /\

My copied pose \/

And therefore, improvising is sometimes good. It is something that everyone in the industry does, some do it by speed painting loosely, some just use existing pictures and make some changes, some just do with what they could do or have at that time, the end result may not be as ideal as it was meant to but it gets the job done fast. For me, I was just tired to think and sketch.

For some reason I can't reproduce the same pose with the same facial expression and mood.Her expression in this one above was draw by luck. Yes, after all the drawings and sketches I have tried to made her look sexy and tough, this was by far the best I have done.

Even though I have finally drawn her portrait for this post, I felt that I should not use an exact copied pose from somewhere I have taken from the web. And this is when for the first time pride and ego actually helped made things work and because of these two usually-useless elements, it made me drew my own original pose. \/

"From the initial sketch, she is confident, pretty and likes looks down on people."

------ from the first line of the 4th paragraph

For pose wise, I like my original pose better than Jamie Chung's pose but for posting the drawings I choose both of them. I am not sure about this one being confident but she is pretty and she has the look that looks down on people.

With confidence missing from the picture, she now looks like an angry and sexy woman who is about to draw her slightly-broader-and-longer-than-regular-katana to kill people she looks down on.

Sketches before the original final line art for Himiko