Category: Yami Development

Once we had the meeting with Sophie about colour palettes and thumbnails, the team has finally come down to the conclusion of a finalised colour palette that was picked out by a survey which can be found here. 

The next step from here is to remake Yami’s design and fit the environment a bit more. As the background uses no line weight variety and little shading, I looked at a couple of artists that have the same art style as Izzy’s. Once I had looked at these artists, I didn’t bother with a mood board and just switched between drawings whilst I was drawing Yami. Here are the images I used and I mainly used @freshboba_tae on Instagram as reference for this new art style (I have been a follower of her art for a very long time, she inspired me a lot growing up!). 

Process: 

This time, I wanted to approach my design process a bit more different. By this I mean that I wanted to complete a sketch on Procreate and import it to another software that supports vector layers. This is because I have noticed that in Procreate, whenever I slightly transform the drawing, the pixels become a bit deformed and it doesn’t look very nice, especially if the main attraction will be the character. I tried to do the drawing on Adobe Illustrator on iPad, but I wasn’t familiar enough with the brushes to change them, so I went to ClipStudioPaint to complete the line art layers.  

Base sketch (Procreate) 

Although it isn’t as noticeable here, but the pixels get quite deformed, hence why I moved to a different software. 

Line art 

 For the line art. I had to change the default g-pen to decrease the pressure output. This is to make it so when I draw, the line weight won’t be affected by the amount of pressure I put down so it stays relatively consistent. 

Base colours 

Rendered 

Against the background 

When I had finished the first iteration of Yami, something felt off, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. After a couple of days of not looking at him, I had finally come to a conclusion as to why I thought the way I did. For me, I didn’t think that his original design truly displays his personality, and as a character designer, it’s my job to expand on and change a character’s design if I see fit. So I started to mood board an idea of what his new look could look like + neaten up the art style. 

When I was picking out the images for Yami, I wanted to give him sharp edges as line art and broader shoulders. For his design, I didn’t want to go too crazy with the changes. I wanted to keep his original design aspects in the new design, more specifically, his leopard print.  

Design Process 

Rough Sketch

Detailed Sketch

Rough Colours

Finalised Colours

This week, I started to make progress on Yami’s idle, I chose to reference a fairly casual pose. When I draft out my ideas, I try to use confident long lines rather than short lines that appear scruffy.

When I was done with my first draft, I asked my partner what he thought about the perspective. This is because when I draw for a period of time, my eyes get used to the drawing and ignores all the flaws, which is why I needed someone to point out what could be potentially wrong with the image before I proceed onto the line art and rendering. There were a few things that I didn’t realise that were wrong with the drawing until he pointed them out for me:

Once I had refined my sketch more, I quickly drew out the line art. I also added a belt onto his design

By using the selection tool, I filled the areas with colours and began to render:

I found this part quite hard in the sense where I just kept on shading the same areas for it to lead no where as I would restart again. But eventually, I got the end product!