When it rains, it pours…

Self critique: The lower arm is… I’m really not proud of that arm. I depended on CSP’s 3D model (I’ll get to it later) to help me, but it didn’t transition well in drawing form.

Back at it with another Skullgirls gal, this time it’s Parasoul. Commission comes courtesy of my regular bud, DagobahResident. In coming up with this pic, I came up with the idea of making this a sort of companion piece with Eliza. Same slightly low angle and using an edited photo as a background, but having Parasoul face the other way. The pose was to be one of her winning poses. At first I was going to approach getting the pose down by using Body-Chan and then superimposing a 3D umbrella during the construction line phase. This worked well back when I drew Cookie-tan for Pocky Day 2018. However this time it wasn’t panning out well with the placement of Body-Chan’s hands. So I instead opted to use one of the Clip Studio Paint’s 3D models and posing that with the umbrella. It actually worked out pretty well (except for the arm that I mentioned earlier). Was kinda hoping the umbrella wouldn’t cover so much of the background. But with how big it is and and how close the shot was going to be, it couldn’t be helped. C’est la vie. I didn’t mention it the Nameless Mermaid and Harriette pics last time, but I’m experimenting with a different way to do highlights to the hair. The end result, while taking just slightly longer, actually makes the hair look very natural. Given this method can only really work for straight hair at the moment. But with enough tweaking, I can definitely make it work with other hairstyles.

This commission was gonna come with variants of course. But this time the variants come with different facial expressions, something I’ve done only done twice in the past with Peg Pete and Ataru’s Mom. Thankfully, because of how I set up faces in the layers, I didn’t have to re-shade the shape of the head all the time, only the more relevant facial features like the eyelids and the part between the chin and lips. So to any future commissioners out there, yes I can do different facial expressions!

The background was another experiment of mine, taking cues from the Saruko commission back in 2020 and the Eliza pic from 2019. I also took inspiration from Genzoman and Sakimichan and their use of photographic image materials for backgrounds. The background here is a photo I took of the clock building in Manhattan’s Flatiron District. It’s actually the same building from the Saruko commission, just from a different angle (sidewalk of Madison Square Park to be exact) and taken during the night. Given that Canopy Kingdom and the older Manhattan buildings share that same gothic art deco look to its architecture, it pretty much fit like a glove. Most I really had to do was color correct it to blue and make the windows glow. The rain was drawn in of course. While I could’ve drawn streaks of water on Parasoul herself… I mean come on, she has an umbrella!

Done on Clip Studio Paint. 3D model traced for construction lines.

Parasoul and Skullgirls are © Autumn Games