Another one of my boredom doodles. (Visible female shoulder = boredom doodle. Every time.) I was watching TV late one night, half interested in what was on and opted to draw while listening in, occasionally glancing up for the rare moments TV is interesting enough to get my full attention. The only problem was I didn’t really feel like going all out and designing a drawing where every little detail is pre-thought out, and yet I can’t really draw without some kind of inspiration/motivation.

So I turned to a story idea that was brewing in my mind at the time (a story I ultimately abandoned). When I drew this, I’d just finished playing Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven and I pictured Noria as a mystical offshoot of one of that game’s characters: Ayame. It was really drawn on a whim; as you can see, I didn’t bother to fix the fact she looks like she’s about to fall over, and the background came as an after thought so it looks as though it doesn’t really belong with her. Strangely, though, I like the contrast of the lightly drawn background verses the much darker foreground. I could have given the background a lot more care and detail, but I didn’t feel like it. I guess I could have lightly shaded the background with no form in mind to give it a quasi-artsy feel a la the Kadessa drawing).

But, like I said, it was just a midnight boredom project. This is something of a continuation of the Betrayal Render: an excuse to experiment and try a few different variations on the lined style (incorporating a combination of line and gradients to create texture). I’ve also started trying to make the characters a bit better fashioned than in the past (there’s a design on her top!) since I have no fashion tastes whatsoever, but maybe I can trick people into thinking otherwise by my character’s wardrobes . . . at least until people meet me in person.

Finally the color version - taken into PSP 7.0 and colored there. I’m really just starting to do color in my drawings (added electronically), and usually I work off the initial scanned size (300% bigger) to make detail work easier but I didn’t use my usual scanner to get this into the computer and I really don’t like the scanner I did use (specifically how it treats the image) so nothing has been scaled at any point. This is the size it was scanned into the computer at. I need to try playing with cell-shading style for grins, because adding color to this style is a lot more difficult. I went ahead and cropped it and added the black border to give it a different look/feel.

Also available: Noria Grey, Take Two