This was originally posted on my now-defunct creative blog.
This is Ruby, my main character from the now defunct Phantasy Star Universe videogame for the Xbox 360. I wanted to draw her when I was still playing PSU, back in 2006-2009, but never got around to it. Now I have.
First of all, since the game is no longer playable, I had to scour the internet for references. My memory isn’t the greatest, but even so, to replicate an intricate costume and weapon purely from what can remember about them would be lunacy. It brought back a lot of memories, that’s for sure.
The initial idea I had in my head was to simply have an up-close shot of her head, with a delicate touch on her weapon, but I soon abandoned that in favour of something a little more exciting. The first image, pencilled in blue in ArtRage, was just to get an idea of the pose, and how big I wanted the character on the page. Then in the second image, I refined the pose, and decided to make her be twisting around and launching an attack. I was getting bored of drawing static people that are standing face on to the viewer – people rarely do that! I wanted a challenge, something to convey movement, the confidence she has in her abilities, and show how comfortable with her weapons she was.
After I was happy with the pose, I moved on to another layer of pencils, this time working out some of the details, like her clothing and hair. Over the top of this, I started on the final line-art, all the while with the movement of the pose in mind. It is definitely a step up from the line-art in the Doctor Doom piece, more intricate and detailed. The red and green lines are indicators of where her plaits would be flowing – that’s the beauty of working with layers in digital art, you can remove or add them at will.
Once I had made sure that the lines were solid, I flood-filled the spaces to get the base colours down. I started with laying the deepest tones down first, but towards the end I was replacing them with a mid tone, then manually adding the deeper and lighter tones. Once the base colours were down, I worked on the background (a rough interpretation of an area in the game called Raffon Meadow) and the spell she is casting (it is a dark Technique called Megid, and can potentially instantly kill enemies in one hit).
I then worked up through all the layers of colour again, this time adding mid-tones and highlights. It was like being a kid again, it felt like I was using a colouring book! It really made the image take on a 3-dimensional appearance, and I was careful to make sure the different materials, such as her clothes, the metal of her weapon (a Psycho Wand) and her skin, had different shading applied to them. Her skin is softly shaded, whereas her weapon is sharp and metallic. It’s taken on quite an anime style look, something I was not expecting. Then the final details were added, some of which I have decided to leave out of the final image (like the waves of power surrounding her, and the name and level indicator above her head).
I enjoyed the process greatly, and I have learned so much about colouring line-art from this and the Doctor Doom image. I feel like I got the mood across. I wanted to convey the movement of her spinning on the spot – I feel I succeeded by using the ribbon on her dress, the dress itself, and her hair to get the movement across. I wanted her to look confident, but not arrogant. I wanted her to look supremely confident in her handling of her Psycho Wand. I wanted her to look as if she was always prepared to attack an enemy, even though she was surprised by it, spinning on the spot and instinctively firing off a spell. Overall, I am very proud of this image – I may have to get it printed out professionally so I can take in the detail and size of it all at once – something you can’t really do on a screen.
Here are the work in progress images, it’s quite fun to progress through them and see how the pose changes, and how the colours come to life and make her look solid.
If you have something to say about this piece of fan-art, please feel free to leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you.
