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 

My Thoughts:

When I started sketching the draft on Procreate, I thought I was going to scrap the entire thing, however I decided to trust the process. Once I had imported the draft onto ClipStudio and worked on line art on vector layers, the vision started to look more coherent to me. To cooperate with the background, the leopard print had to be a slight pinkish hue.

Headshot of Yami:

I designed this alongside with the headshot of Violet (3rd iteration). My team needed a drawn headshot of Yami so the player doesn’t get confused as to who is speaking.

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

My Thoughts:

Initially when I started doing this concept, I wanted to make this as fast as possible, however the weight of wanting it to be perfect started to weigh down on me. It took me slightly longer than it normally would when designing characters, but that’s ok! Instead of rendering the entire concept, I used rough lines to show the value and shadows.

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!