“Be dazzled! Be amazed! Behold the high flying antics of the one and only Cerebella!”

Self Critique: Not too sure I really like how I did the hand gripping the bar. I probably should’ve added a bit of bulging to the ropes holding the bar if I was gonna make them detailed like that.

I’m finally back to posting artwork here again, this time with a little bit of razzle dazzle. Continuing with the series of Skullgirls commissions from DagobahResident, here’s Cerebella. The initial pose was supposed to have her right leg (the one on our left) kicking straight up. The problem however was that because of the angle of the camera, the leg was covering too much of the upper body. I tried to see if this could be mitigated with CSP’s 3D model, but it didn’t. I had to settle on bending that leg at the knee and moving it down a little bit, as well as adjusting the camera further to show more of the top half of Cerebella’s body. Also initially, this pic was going to be in portrait. However there was going to be a lot of empty space at the top. Even though it would’ve helped sell the verticality of the shot, I just couldn’t deal with the empty space. So I changed the aspect to landscape so that she filled in more of the pic in general. This also gave me more space on the left and right to play with, so I boosted the “manga perspective” of the 3D model to make the left leg appear more closer to the viewer to further sell the height of the whole shot. It was a bit of a challenge to sort of seat the trapeze bar under Cerebella’s butt since the rope would’ve kept covering Vice Versa (the sentient hat she’s holding). So I had to make due with the placement you see now, with just one leg directly on it.

For the background, it’s not very detailed as it wasn’t part of the commission. However I did take a long time to finish this, so I put a bit more oomph into this. Since the majority of the circus would be dark, I could get away with some low detail stuff, like the crowd. I did want to continue the trend of using the emblem of the individual Skullgirls, so I put Cerebella’s under the spotlights. Speaking of, the spotlights were a challenge to figure out. At first what I wanted to do was to have the spotlight on the right shine on her directly. But because of where I wanted the light to land, there would be this gigantic beam cutting across half the image. Then I tried its current placement, but still crossing over her. It wasn’t making much sense, but it looked pretty cool. So I settled on just putting it behind her completely. Second spotlight was added as a test to see if it would look cool, which it did. I was thinking of adding a third, this time aiming from the ground instead of the rafters, but it would’ve either made things look worse or just too busy.

One thing some may have noticed on my recent artwork was the heavy use of bright rim lighting, usually all over the characters. This time around, I wanted to ease up on that and just use it in areas where it would make sense in relation to reflective lighting, particularly on the left and bottom edges of Cerebella where the brightness of the light would presumably reflect back up to her. It ended up working out better than I expected.

Done on Clip Studio Paint Pro. Wacom Cintiq 16 Tablet used. 3D Model traced for construction lines, then drawn freehand afterwards.

Cerebella, Cerebella insignia, and Skullgirls are © Future Club, Hidden Variable, and Autumn Games.