Inktober 52 - 2021 33

So I got gifted a sketchbook, and I thought I might as well use it. I've got a disproportionate number of empty sketchbooks, the designs I thought were very pretty at the time, but up until recently I never felt too great about using any of them, however, now I think I should probably change that. Not that the design on the notebooks will be in any way indicative of what I can produce inside it, but maybe it'll help get me there.

This week's prompt made me think of light studies, which I don't think are very interesting in and of itself, and going out of my way to do stuff like that tends to make me lose focus pretty quickly, so I'm just going to not to do that. Instead I'll try something I have always wanted to try.

With Pokemon being one of these eternal things in popular media, every now and then somebody decides to translate a Pokemon design into some other kind of character design. I think that's a pretty fun idea, and maybe a decent way to cheat a prompt that might have been more tedious otherwise.

I decided to go with this guy, mainly due to the name. I imagine "Luxio" is derived from the Latin for light, which hopefully justifies the realization of the prompt.

I'll try to adapt the shapes that are prominent here, that is the mane, the star on the tail and the stripes on the front paws. I'm not sure about those ears yet. I'm not too keen on sticking those on a human character, mainly because they don't really mesh well with my style, but we'll see.

That's a first sketch. The hairstyle is aping the mane, and I'll use the star-shape as part of the detailing, especially on that ribbon that's meant to imitate the tail. I decided to translate the ears into the large, round headphones. The headphones then gave me the idea to go with the punk-aesthetic. Now that the sketch is done, I'll give myself some time to play with different expressions and maybe more dynamic poses. I want to go for a double-page.

After I had the details of the design figured out, the rest of this went pretty quickly. Maybe that's because I had the hairstyle dictated already, which otherwise would have taken me a while.

This is the first pass with the fine-liner. It's still a bit rough in a few places, but considering I haven't taken the eraser to any of it yet, that's not too bad, I think.

I guess that very first pose does bother me the slightest bit. It's mainly the proportions that have improved in the other two full-body poses. No heavy shading this time, because markers like that like to bleed through paper pretty heavily.

Achromatic flashes of lights in the distance call

beating in six eight time, bathing all

you can see in colourful greys.

The crowns of the trees, paint a green flashing blaze,

the faces of people trapped in a daze,

in awe of a rainstorm's natural ball.