Been a bit. I know I frequently complain about having lots of work, so that's nothing new. It got especially bad last week though, and I ended up pushing myself a bit too much. So ended up with a bit of burnout. Worst part is, the work spike is not over yet. It has calmed down a bit, but there is still a lot pending.
I don't really "stop" arts, I'll try to use any chance I get, but I've been going fairly slow because of it.
Welp, it is what it is.
Term 4
6 of 10 copy study. "Copy a character from professional artists", with focus on anatomy.
When I set out to do this particular exercice, I wanted to do a female Fairy Tail character, and settled on Erza Scarlet. Being anatomy, I was looking for some reference that exposed a bit more skin, but when I bumped into this picture I liked it so much I just had to work with it, even if there’s little to speak of on regards to muscles exposed.
Reference:
Anatomy is still there under the clothes though, and understand the body underneath is pretty important. The study doesn’t show the mannequin constructed under the clothes, but it IS under there.
Halfway through the sketch I figured I’d try to change rendering a bit for practice, and the idea came up of making her a death knight (World of warcraft). The idea stuck, and I changed her design slightly to accommodate the death knight elements.
I’m also trying to move away from some habits and replace them with (hopefully) better ones.
For example, I usually use the grid and many rulers to keep accuracy, this time I focused more on construction from observation. Moving forward I’m going to try to eliminate the use of rulers/grid to a minimum and just use fundamental construction. My OCD will probably hate me for it, but I think I’ll learn more that way.
I also have the habit of copying a background for the sake of simplicity (and laziness). It looks nice but I’m going to try to replace this with creating the environment manually myself, as I think I’m just leaning on the background composition someone else created (even if that’s not the point of the exercice). It’s probably one of the reasons why I struggle so much with environments, I need to put more work into them.
In this case, the whole BG was drawn by me, even though I used the blizzard effect to hide some of the ugly. Taking notes from the techniques from @snakker , I started using a bit of chalk brush, which gives a lot of nice texture in different areas.
Manga
Once again, thanks for all the feedback! Suggestions from more objective viewers does help realize some points of improvements that seem invisible to the author.
Updated page chap31 pg 6 correspondingly.
And finished chap31 page 7 (of 14). We’re already halfway there!
1) The chapter is finally starting to dive in a bit more into explaining why Iris is still engaged with Gustav. Putting on my reader hat, I can only imagine the reader might have a hard time understanding why Iris is inclined to continue with the engagement (especially since Seki is much better looking). This whole scene is inserting myself as a reader into Sari to finally question Iris about it directly and highlight out some of the obvious points. I think you can tell Iris has been evading talking about the situation with Sari and slouches over a bit as the conversation starts.
2) First frames have blank BG for a couple of reasons. For one, I think it keeps the focus neatly on the back and forth conversation, with the focus being on their gestures and expressions. I mentioned at some point Iris usually only shows expressions before people she really confides in, this whole chapter being one of those instances. Second reason for the blank BGs is, I just couldn’t think of something that properly fit the mood and flow xD. Looking at the chapter as a whole, it also serves to balance the composition.
3) I used CSP 3D mannequins to get the proper angles for the last frame. They can be pretty useful like that. I originally had a different angle in the draft, but wanted to switch things up for the viewer. I also kind of struggle with perspective, so this last frame was also a bit of self-imposed challenge for me to switch things up beyond the ¾ angle. I also read manga/comics try to change angles frequently to subconsciously keep the reader more engaged and to better serve chapter composition and flow, so hopefully I do it more.
4) Kind of rushed the rendering of that last frame, but I think it still meets its purpose, which is a refresher of location, positioning and environment for the reader.
Finally, though I’ve had little time for arts, I used the opportunity to script out chapter 32 (next chapter) and upload it into the discord for feedback.
https://discord.com/channels/371283268215242784/1245965680168140821/1262802153093857301
That’s all for now. I’ll probably continue to go slow for a while, but we’ll keep grinding as possible!
Thanks a lot for stopping by! And if you were able read the whole thing, here’s a trophy for you 
you're the best!
Have a great rest of week! Cheers!
