The greatest earthbender in the world is just a kid.
guy ngl i gave up on this one :c
watching art videos has made me realize that to a trained eye, art can look really obviously "wrong" and the journey to develop that eye... idk if i have that dawg in me LOL
tried to do some more realistic colouring but idk, it just didnt turn out. not that i expected to get it with so little practice, but this is just off and doesn't feel like toph at all. and the lighting makes no sense
but alas, still wanted to share this and try to get better!!
i did find a ref for this on pinterest, but it was a picture of an irl little kid so im not gonna paste it here as i usually would
me thinks 30 hours of drawing in 3 days has done a number on my neck 😭
had a blast following this colouring tutorial from the goat @samdoesarts! a lot more stylized than im used to, but i definitely learned some things i hope to practice more in the future :3
im super proud of this one!! he looks fierce asf!
though... don't look too closely at it... and not even kidding, i almost forgot bro's arrow
redrawing character designs based on different traditional cultural inspirations is a lot of fun! colouring this was a nightmare tho, but a good exercise. a lot of the time, the charm of the line art is lost when you add colour, im sure yall know what i mean. here's the original sketch cuz i liked it:
design lore drops under the cut!
As you can see, I went for a chinese hanfu-ish inspiration, tho I used a lot of historical c-drama references so those are obv more costume-y than historically-accurate. I tried to keep Ursa's original pointy shoulders
The characters I used for Ursa - 爾萨: Neither of these are super "name-ish" characters, but alas, we're tryna "spell" Ursa phonetically here. 爾 comes from the comics, where Ursa's letter to Ikem signs off with 爾妹. 妹 means "little sister", but it can be an old-fashioned way to refer to young women in general. 萨 I chose for the sound, but also because it's 萨 as in 菩萨 ("Bodhisattva"), which is an old-fashioned way to say someone is kind bc of 觀音菩薩 ("Bodhisattva of Compassion" in East Asian Buddhism)
The traditional make-up she has on are called 花钿 (hua dian, "flower adornment" at the forehead) and 靥钿 (ye dian, "dimple adornment"), respectively
On one of her pinkies, you can see a 护指 (hu zhi, "finger guard"), which is something I saw a lot in historical dramas growing up, worn by imperial women (usually older/higher ranking ones but idk if that's just fictionalization). It's meant to protect long nails, since long nails were a sign of wealth and status. The ones I've seen are a lot more intricate but I just left the drawing pretty simple.
There's a lot of nuance when it comes to how your hair can be as a Chinese imperial woman of status, like usually the greater the seniority, the more fancy stuff u put in your hair and the bigger it can be. And I think there's stuff about whether having it up or down signifies marriage status? Tbh I just did a mix of Ursa's original hair shape and some typical decorations from memory.
I drew from a picture of super popular Chinese actress Yang Mi, who I first saw in her 2011 show Palace. The screencap reference below isn't from that show tho. I searched through a lot of my fav Chinese actresses to find a model... maybe more character redraws from those other searches coming soon??
Can you spot a White Lotus symbol hiding in the design? 👀
If you read up till here, wow! Thank you, and I hope it was interesting.
had to draw this text meme from @your-royal-momoness (tho i'm not even a huge zukka person tbh):
i keep wanting to draw ideas beyond my skill level, pray 4 me
like seriously drawing poses from scratch and stuff is NOT my strong suit cuz i usually just redraw screencaps and i didn't even know what to look up for references LOL
also not sure if i 100% like adult zuko's hair design... hmm...
(can someone please tell me if it's better to reblog and include my art in that rather than make a new post and tag the original blog??)
The Adventures of Lover Boy and His Forever Girl <3
not sure which version i like better... what do yall think?
i really like this one! tried something new with the style and this scene has a great colour palette. maturing colour theory-wise is realizing that there is not a lick of actual blue in this image LOL
i'm not a big shipper in general for the atla fandom bc i got into it before i was old enough to really get shipping... but c'mon, childhood crushes kataang is so sweet and hopeful :,)
Had a great time drawing her hair! I think it's so pretty when people's ears peak out of their hair :3
I remember this being mentioned somewhere, but Malevola's original character design does look like Alanah somehow?? Like maybe the face shape vibes?
