“AAAAAIIIIYAYAYAYAYAYAAAAAAAA!!!”

Self Critique: Not quite thrilled about how I drew the knee to the left. The raised hand also isn’t as expressive as I’d like it. Given that she’s being thrown aback by the dragon summoning, a different hand gesture might’ve helped. On the dragon, I did something wrong to the back scales on the upper left. Rather than using Liquify to just make the scales smaller and squash them in, I should’ve instead deleted some of the excess, then squash in what remains. The dragon is basically doing a backwards somersault, then twisting off-screen and coming back around. The back scales here don’t reflect that all that well, and only I realized that when it was too late. I tried to rectify it at such a late stage, but that’s the best I could get it.

Time to #EmbraceWaifu! Here’s Wu-Ruixiang, one of the new characters from Samurai Shodown 2019. This pic was actually a very long time coming, taking nearly 5 years to go from concept sketch to fully completed pic. Not too long after her reveal trailer did I start having interest to draw her. By the time I started, the game came out but I had yet to own it. Only references I had to go on was gameplay footage, story illustrations, and small renders of her. Right away there were discrepancies with her hairstyle and headgear between the in-game model and story illustrations. I decided to stick to the in-game model design, particularly with gradient direction of the tassels under the fish ornaments.

Eventually I finally got a copy of the game in December 2019. As 2020 came and went, I barely attempted to draw her, only getting a pose down with a body-chan model. I wanted to give her a clumsy pose while also being airborne. That where the idea of incorporating her dragon Super came to be. Initially her shield was planned to be behind her. But as I looked over her Super in the game, I realized that the dragon is coming out of her shield. So when I finally got started, I drew the shield in front of her, with the dragon planned to come out from under it like a portal.

2021, almost nothing happened. First half of the year, I did the 1^st sketch phase. But that’s where I left off as I was mostly busy building the new Blue Fish Apartment and drawing the Main Circle, so I didn’t work on her at all until that was done. Come September of that year, I finished her 2^nd sketch.

Early 2022, I did her Inks and Flat Colors. Fast forward late 2022, I’d meet another artist at Big Apple Comic Con, David Abrevaya. I mentioned it back on my Lum pic, but I took his advice to make my pics longer, moving them from roughly 11” x 14” to 11” x 17”. Some benefited while others didn’t. In this case it worked very well as now the entire shield could be drawn AND I can show the dragon itself coming out of it rather than some off-screen light suggesting the dragon is coming out of there. It also gave the pic more room to breath and not be so cramped.

Moving back to May 2022, her Hanfu was where the biggest challenged lied. From the start all the way to the flat color phase, I had no clear references to all the patterns on her outfit, only what I mentioned before (promo art, now having the game itself, etc.). Much of what I was doing was approximating what her patterns were. Even other artists were doing it. I even tried in vain to trace over the patterns from her renders. There was a mod that someone did for DOA 6 (or probably 5) where someone created Wu-Ruixiang, complete with her patterns, which did help with pattern tracing attempts, but not for all of them. Then the XNA Lara community entered the chat. They extracted all of SamSho’s model and texture data, including Wu-Ruixiang’s. Then PharoahIllusion came in and made the raw textures available. Since the patterns they were still too lo-res to use, I went ahead and traced over them in higher resolution. This also helped with the shield as well! So no more approximating! I’ve gone ahead and made them available to download on the Blue Fish Apartment. I’ll link at the end of this description.

2023 I finally started shading her, slowly. I had gotten the Samurai Shodown artbook in Christmas 2022, and so I started referencing the book as I shaded her. Things wouldn’t really pick up until earlier this year, 2024, when I found time to start knocking out the shading of four other characters, Ruixiang included.

Moving to the background, I wanted to have it take place in the Kamui Kotan stage during Autumn (or at least a place that looked like Kamui Kotan). I wanted to incorporate a mountain like Mt. Fuji in the back. But Mt. Fuji is nowhere near where this stage is located. BUT, there is a mountain that looks like Fuji called Mt. Yotei that’s closer. So I reference that mountain. The dragon took a bit to nail down both in terms of scale… and scales. I referenced her Dragon Stomp Weapon Flip (called Hijutsu: Kuzuryuushou) and compared the size of the dragon’s foot to her model. So I made the dragon bigger than my initial schematic sketch. For the back and underbelly scales, I referenced both the Weapon Flip tech and her Super (called Koureyuu Kengen: Kaiten Byakuchi) to determine how big those were. The underbelly I shaded in similar to how I did Euryale’s scales on that pic. The lining for the back scales is a brush I got off of Clip Studio Assets. But there was no shortcutting the shading, so I had to shade in each individual scale (which is still easier than how I used to do it way back when, but still rather time-consuming). One final detail I found out when doing the background was that when Ruixiang is doing her super, as the lightning surrounds the shield on the floor, some of the lightning is shaped like the characters on the shield, which was a really cool detail. So when I stated doing the lightning effects near the end, I made sure to add some Feng Shui characters into them.

And with that said, the near 5-year journey with this pic comes to an end.

Tools and Resources

Done on Clip Studio Paint 2.0
Wacom 16 Tablet used
Artwork cloaked with Glaze to protect against AI scraping.
Body-chan model traced for construction lines.
Textures extracted by XNA Lara community, then made available by PharoahIllusion
Back Scales Brush downloaded from Clip Studio Assets
Closer tree leaves is a brush downloaded from Clip Studio Assets

Wu-Ruixiang and Samurai Shodown are © SNK