This is hands down the most time and effort I've put into a drawing...possibly all year. And there's still so much more I could do, but I'm out of time and I have to stop somewhere. 🫠
Some of you may remember this previous attempt at a Killjoy OC/Killjoysona I made back in March of 2019, woefully unaware of the surprise-of-the-decade we were going to get a few months later, that March 22nd no longer has to be sad day, because My Chemical Romance is BACK baby!! And I'm sure loyal Sparklers have heard plenty enough about that from me already, but stick with me here. 😆
Well, the more time has passed between now and then, the less confident I've felt in "Neon Haze"'s design, and once I started dying my hair purple (also in 2019), I started wanting to re-design her for both reasons. But then, if I've wanted to redesign her (sort of her, we'll get to that) for so long, why is it only just now happening? 🤔
I don't really have a good excuse. I suppose in some sense it just never felt like the right time or I just never had the proper motivation, but beyond that, I couldn't really tell you what it was. 🤷♀️
All that changed earlier this month when the makeup brand HipDot revealed they're doing a second MCR makeup collection, this timed themed after good ol' MCR album #4, Danger Days. And if you're reading this between July 22-July 29, here's the link where you can pre-order your very own. (And I'm not an affiliate or anything special, but I did find out code HDCART15 should get you 15% said order.) For context, they previously released a collection themed around album #2, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge in December, which had a different order process and therefore sold out entirely within like 2-3 minutes.
I've gone on record before saying Danger Days is tied with The Black Parade for my favorite MCR album, and that still holds true. Don't misunderstand me, though, basically, everything else in MCR's discography is tailing right behind them both--there are no MCR songs I actively dislike. But TBP is their most popular album for a reason, and DD appeals to me on a more personal level for existing in the realm between harder rock and pop. Both also just have pretty great storytelling woven in them, which is something you just don't get very often in music, especially the further you move in pop's direction.
So, naturally, that made it seem like now was as good a time as any to finally get on that Killjoy re-design.
Now, because the art itself already took so long, I'm going to do my best to breeze through this description. I really don't think you guys want to experience in real-time how much deliberation I went through to get here. 🙃 So if you miss my usual nuance, here are my apologies and excuses right now. (And I may come back and add some more nuance back in later; we'll see how I feel.)
That said: Two key factors played an important role here.
Both of those things took...a while...in planning. It was just difficult for the outfit to pick something I genuinely liked, that also fit with the style of the official DD outfits, and made some sort of sense for a Killjoy in the first place. I'm still not sure it's exactly right, but this is the outfit I came up with I liked best, so here we are. While we're here, her shirt says, "More Issues Than Vogue," taken straight from a shirt I own. I can't say I feel it's 100% in line with the general Killjoy style, but barring something copyrighted that really doesn't feel fitting, this felt like the best option for now.
The name...Look, I now have five sticky notes full of names that aren't "Void Vision" by now. I wanted something that really did feel me, at least a little, but y'know, fit with the other Killjoy names (Party Poison, Kobra Kid, Fun Ghoul, Jet Star), and still fit with the outfit, and might reasonably fit with how the character fits into the Killjoys' world. In the end, this was close to the last one I thought of but it won out simply for sounding the best to me. And it also sounds a lot like "Boy Division," my favorite MCR song. (Though some of those other names may come back later with some purely fictional Killjoy OCs, now that I've gotten my self-insert taken care of.)
I will also admit I spent way way way too long Googling and trying to find every scrap of official Killjoy information on the internet to better understand what the heck I was actually doing here, since last time I was going pretty exclusively off of the DD album. For those unaware, there has been one line of comics around the Killjoys for years, and just recently a new line came out too. I don't currently own those (but I want to!) so I had to rely on things like Fan Wikias to dig up any proprietary Killjoy information that might've come from them. Although other than maybe giving me some additional perspective, I'm not sure how much all that extra digging actually helped with my character design struggles. 😅
That said, I also spent a long time going through tags here on Tumblr and over on Instagram to see what other people had done with their Killjoy OCs. This was more helpful, but at the end of the day, I think part of me wanted someone to just hand me a "How to Killjoy" handbook and that was never going to happen anyway. 🙃
At least once I had finally gotten largely through all that convoluted planning and moved on to the actual drawing things only moved slowly because art in general takes time. I'm not thrilled at how long it took, considering I still took a decent chunk of shortcuts to get there, but it's far less...laughable? I guess? Than the amount of time I took to even get to a finalized sketch just because I thought so hard about every little detail beforehand.
Chief short cut: If you look closely and notice the line art seems oddly rough, that's because for Void herself (the full figure) I was too lazy to do my normal clean digital lines and instead played around with Adjustments (contrast, exposure, etc.) until the lines were nice and black and most of the detail was preserved, then I fiddled with the Pencil tool until I could reasonably make new lines with the same texture as necessary for fixing mistakes, adding details back in, and the additions (fixing her gun-holding hand, the separate gun, the headshot, etc) I knew I'd be making a bit later.
Since I was already playing fast and loose with the line art, I also figured I'd do a fair amount of "throw things at it and see what sticks" as far as the shading goes. Pretty much everything other than the hair uses a basic cell-shading style, but with an extra darker color I previously haven't thrown in for the darkest shadows, and then some areas like her pants have some additional texture thrown in using that same Pencil brush I was using for the lines (in various sizes) just for the visual variety. Truthfully, I really like the results even though from a skill-point level it was relatively easy to get here.
Her hair and those kaleidoscope goggles (which yes, I do own pretty much these exact goggles. They're not very practical to wear like the headshot because you will walk like a drunk, but they're fun and still look cool just sitting on top of your head, like on full-body Void) are the two areas that "break" the "coloring rules."
Her hair obviously has some extra texture...because hair...Which was again added with the pencil brush. Originally I thought I'd use that and come out with something more similar to an older style of mine. Yet with just two colors of these "pencil ink" lines on top of the flat base color, it was already pretty good, I just needed a little more color variation to sell it. I got that by making the "pencil ink" brush way bigger, shifting the purples slightly, and adding a few splotches underneath the existing shading. Again; relatively simple, but pretty productive results. 🙂
The goggles...Both orientations are an amalgamation of color splotches, blurring, and layer settings where I just did my best to recreate the look I see and remember of the real goggles most strongly (shiny aqua and gold). I think they're still a little...off, but certainly close enough considering I've never drawn "kaleidoscope texture" before.
I guess that fly-by brings us to the other things on this...it's kind of a ref sheet, but I can't say calling it that is something I consciously thought about. Still, it's functionally one. 🤷♀️
So the headshot of Void is there really just to show off the goggles actually on her face, and the mask I've given her in place of the bandanas the original Killjoys wear in some promotional material. The idea is to breathe in less of the desert sand/dust, I think, since DD's story is set largely in the semi-post-apocalyptic alternative reality California desert. the mask is based on--get this--some masks MCR released last year (for reasons I probably don't have to remind you of) and they were actually old stock from an event that was planned for Danger Days but didn't end up happening. I don't own one of the official masks because I couldn't justify paying $15 + shipping for what was a very basic fang printing on black fabric, but I do have a homemade version; My mom made the black mask part (as she was learning to make them anyway) from an old T-shirt for me, and I hand-painted the fangs on with some white acrylic.
Truthfully, mine might actually be better for me, since I have a small face and there's a good chance the official ones wouldn't fit me properly anyway. 🙃 And the official ones weren't made to the current mask standards, while my mom did her best to make sure any she made were/are within reason.
Admittedly, it felt like a bit of a cop-out to use the MCR mask, but I didn't have any better ideas that felt like the right choice for Void. 😅
Other than that and the fact I drew the lines entirely digitally with the new brush, the headshot was made the same as full-body Void.
The Raygun was probably the easiest thing here; I used an official image of one of the guns since they're all the same shape anyway and while I am a lot of things, "weapons designer" ain't one of 'em. But from there I had very little thinking to do: Purple, because that's what I wanted Void's color to be (same as the real Killjoys all have a color associated with them that comes from their guns), a little white like 3/4 of the official ones, and I threw in a little cyan and chartreuse as accent colors for good measure. And then I added the "NO" on the side after noticing all the official ones have text of some kind on them. Why "NO"? Again, no better ideas. And most other things I tried felt too cramped. It's also just kinda funny to me. I know if I really were dropped into DD and had to use a raygun to defend myself, I probably would be shouting, "Nononono NO" almost anytime I had to use it. 🤣
I designed the separate gun first, then just flipped it around and partially re-did the shading for the one Void is actually holding. The point of the separate one is really just to better show off the design.
Void's little symbol--that skull thing everywhere--was probably the most fun thing to design, despite also being totally over-thought. It's a skull with sparkles for eye sockets within a sparkle. Very on-brand for me, fits okay alongside the existing Killjoy symbols (in any of the presentation styles, as you can see 😉 I was maybe a little too eager to show that off), and it kinda works with Void herself and the name. Sparkle eyes match up with the kaleidoscope goggles, which match up with "void vision" on their own, and the sparkles also work as an alternative to X's on the eyes that usually mean "this thing is dead."
That's probably something I should mention; We've established the goggles aren't very practical, but the Draculoids (enemies of the Killjoys, long story) only see in black and white, and so I've chosen to believe it's possible Void's goggles would mess with their vision a bit, similar to how animal eyes glow when seen through night vision. It's probably not realistic, but I can also pretend that in the Killjoys' universe, Void mods the goggles to be more useful and for her name to make more sense. Maybe she mods them into having proper night vision, so among Killjoys, she's one of few that can see at night--she has vision within the void. Something like that, anyway.
I mean really, Party Poison sometimes wears a freaking character costume mouse head, is it really so bad if my character totes around impractical goggles just because they look cool?
The block of desert behind full-body void is taken from Pixabay, though I have considered changing it to the desert background I made for Heaven Help Us. I may actually change it in the future, but for now, I just wanted something reminiscent of the Danger Days album cover, and borrowing from Pixabay was easier and faster than I could figure out how to draw it myself.
The rest of the background (save for the Killjoys logo on the right, that's just taken from one of the comic book covers), is all me, but inspired by some official images I came across, and those as far as I can tell feel like they're made in the way BL/ind, the enemy corporation from the story, would design them. That seemed like a good fit, especially if you do view this as a ref sheet, so I ran with it. And then plopped the variations of Void's logo on the side over there to fill space and, as I said before, because I was excited about them. 😃
Again, all this took way too long, and I still see plenty of tweaks I could make (and some I probably will as soon as I get the chance) but I can't deny being really happy with how it turned out anyway. 🥰 It's just...I don't know. It's fun even if it took forever for me to decide on the details, y'know?
I hope this also kinda makes up for the fact that I totally missed making something for March 22nd this year for various reasons. 😅
Now if you'll excuse me, I think I've earned the afternoon off after all that, and I'll add anything to the description or make tweaks I feel as necessary later. 🤗
