Let’s see if I can create a thread where I post my progress on this art piece as I go along. I’ll probably edit this as I progress and add more stuff, so please check back often!
That being said, here’s my newest piece of fanart, made for a giant ninjago fan project: Samurai X!
Final edit: Wow, was this one fun to do!! It’s all done now, sadly.
Added some effects. Had to tinker for a while with the glows. Was originally gonna have them be much more extreme, but it looked too chaotic.
The shadows look really cool at 100% opacity, but alas, this’ll do for the cell shading. Time to move onto effects, blending, etc!
Pre-shading was REALLY fun to do. I’m new to that sorta style but I wanna get better at adding subtle undertones before I go into hard shadows.
I’ve got the flat colours done now. Ready for shading! Also received some constructive criticism over discord about the hips, so I did fix the proportions too.
The cleaning up of the lineart is now done. Gonna finally lay down some base colours now!
Pixal/Samurai X is my favourite Ninjago character, not only in terms of how interestingly written she is (I’m a sucker for explorations on sentience and the nature of humanity via robots) but also in terms of design - her & her mech. (Sadly, I fell out of the show during 2018 but hopefully I can pick up that mech on Bricklink soon before prices skyrocket.) For this piece, I wanted not only to create a nice manga-style sketch of our favourite female robot, but also make a believable draft for a plastic model of Pixal I could build in real life. See, I have a Frame Arms Girl kit (plastic model kit of a mecha girl) lying around that I wanna turn into Pixal eventually, and I thought I could use that design as a base, meshing it with the design of the Pixal minifigure and some 3D printing models I found on Thingverse. I also made sure to hide a bunch of Ninjago weapons into her body, taking advantage of the fact that she’s a robot. In any case, I’m excited to move onto the colouring stage!
