Been struggling to draw Mhin (from the game Touchstarved) for a while. So recently have been doing studies of them from various screenshots taken in the game, trying to learn their likeness more accurately. Here is my progress in this from the past few days:
Still struggling with making their eyes too big, trying to change the black eyelashes & eyebrows to white/silver, trying to make the vague nose shape from the sprites make sense to me, and not quite having accurate colour pencils.
More under the cut:
The June 30th one above, I tried to recreate the features from memory. Was somewhat unhappy with my memory's retention.
These last two I spent a lot of time on, focusing on trying to get as close to the screenshots as possible (and leaving the eyelashes/brows as black instead of trying to make them pale), while also making an effort to draw the armour bits that I'd largely been avoiding thus far (because of how difficult it seemed). The second one in particular took several hours and I was no longer sure if I was learning anything or just disassociating.
Some tags I wanted to use but chose to put them here instead: "hot NB summer (too hot)", "the love of my life (fictional)", "holding a boombox outside Mhin's house while they throw rocks at me"
Some day I will draw you properly, Mhin. Hopefully.
Finally was brave enough to try and draw Mhin and my main character (also non-binary) doing a kiss. Took most of yesterday to get the drawing to this stage, after erasing it so many times that the paper started fraying.
Didn't want to draw the bandages. Don't worry I'm sure nothing bad will happen to Mhin touching the upper part of their cursed arms. Probably.
Mhin (of Touchstarved) and my OC (hairstyle, eye colour, and name still not decided also I think I made their face too wide and/or their eyes too far apart)
Some technical issues I was having with this drawing under the read-more.
This drawing is about 13cm by 8.5cm and I regret trying to render so much detail that small. Especially when I was running into issues with the colour pencils acting strange. Turns out half of them were low quality pencils that I had jumbled in with the loose good quality ones. It went a bit better after I stopped using the crap ones but the damage had kinda already been done. Gummy wax from previous layers scratching off with each additional layer of pigment and getting smeared into the wrong places. Instead of erasing, it clumped up into sort of rubbery glue-like blobs that stuck to the paper, not only also smearing but making weird textures which made it difficult to apply more pencil.
These issues combined with me trying to make up the lighting instead of getting references resulted in this drawing taking much much longer than I'd expected it to take, especially given how tiny the paper size is. It was a struggle the entire time (less so when I busted out my ancient set of really good quality Prismacolours). Not really happy with this one, especially with how long I was working on it, but I really wanted to be.
And my scanner seems to pick up some of my orange tones as vivid red. That's not why Mhin's nose is so red though. I don't even want to explain that one. Thought about trying to adjust things a bit with levels in Krita but I couldn't tell if I was making everything worse or not so I just left it as scanned.
One thing is for sure, I should probably use larger sketchbooks next time I want to render something with this much detail.
Colour pencils on tiny sketchbook page. Tried to spruce up the scan a bit in Krita but it's been too long and I don't remember what to do digitally anymore.
Sketched some things along with a video I was watching about sketching things (https://youtu.be/ydwJ5r0VRoQ?si=HJRonaDlJjbwnXmY)
What I did was I paused the video when they started drawing each one, and try to draw the photo displayed on my own first, then watch how they drew it. It seemed to help me not get in my own head about drawing as much.
Tried to stylize them a fair bit at first, but perhaps less so as they went on.
