A Different Miki
One thing that I've been compelled to do after receiving my copy of Rebuild an Omnipresence in [the] Wired is to play around with my art style. While I've been becoming more technically proficient with my artwork, the manner in which I draw my characters hasn't changed for a while.
I decided that I wanted to toy around with a more natural style and imitate my favorite mangaka. After several attempts, I came up with the image you see to the right. The rendering of Miki is certain different from any I have come up with before. Her characteristic bangs have been reduced to recognizable extensions of her hair rather than something "attached" to her head. While I appreciate the naturalism, I'm not convinced this is the right direction to take the character design.
The prime reason for this piece was to experiment with a change in the shading technique. Her top is drawn using the old method. As you can see, it's shaded all over on the paper, and then enhanced by the shading on the color layer. The rest of the image is using a cross-hatching technique. My guess was that shading the image all over was time consuming and needless. They can be shaded at the color layers far more effectively than by shading with pencil.
The place where you can see this the most is on her jeans. There a cross-hatching technique was used to get the article a sense of depth and shadow. The color layer was airbrushed to give a further sense of depth. This wasn't as successful as I had hoped. While there is a sense of depth, it doesn't seem as expressive as I wanted. I think the problem is that all the color layers are set to 53% opacity. This is because the pencil sketch is placed on both the top and bottom layers of the image. This allowed the shading to come through. The consequence of this was all the color layers are translucent.
This has become a technical limitation in what can be done with the colors. Since you're only working with half of the amount of color, you can only get the color so bright or so dark. This has been a problem in most of my artwork since I favor dark colors. It's possible that I can overcome this limitation if I do not need the bottom sketch layer. Then the drawing can be exclusively on the top layer and the color layers can have 100% opacity (as needed), allowing more color range. It may also make coloring each image less time consuming.
