#tqj

[darioascanionegron]

Dentro de mi tristeza hay mucha alegría... despidiendo a mi #Hija Lina, va camino a una nueva #vida #TQJ #Dios te bendiga

[aura-luxe]

Late night sketchbook doodles pt. 2 an Elysée

[aura-luxe]

doodlin’~

[thequeensjewel]

I actually posted this to my twitter a while ago when I finished it, I don’t know why I forgot to put it on tumblr.

It started out as me just messing around with some ideas I had for the opening for the whole comic and I liked this page in particular so I turned it into a finished thing to 1) see how it’d look in color, and 2) to test out the things I’d be doing differently art-wise in this comic compared to Xeno [insert shameless plug to main webcomic here].

The main differences are the simpler shading and line art that isn’t black but instead is 20% grey. I want the comic, for the most part, to have a softer look than Xeno (or one of my other projects on the backburner). Scenes where Ely’s fighting Dragon Seeds will have black line art to make things seem more dynamic and have more impact (I think I’ve talked about this before), but everything else is going to look more or less like on this page.

I kind of just did whatever with the girls’ dresses while still trying to make them look 18th century since it was just a test page and didn’t need to be SUPER accurate in regards to the clothing.

It’s obviously not a super perfect page. In the second panel I was going to draw something that looked like a royal portrait but I forgot so there’s just a random white block in the background. I did look up pictures of Schönbrunn Palace (where this first part of the comic would take place) so hopefully the background is a little accurate compared to the real thing (I had to sacrifice a lot of detail just so I wouldn’t die while drawing the bg).

I did struggle a little bit with the background characters, mostly the dresses of the women. I wanted to keep the same general shape but for some reason struggled with the design/decorations on each one. Also this was the first time I used a pattern on clothing that wasn’t hand-drawn, so that was interesting to do.

Honestly I think that’s about all I have to say about this.

[aura-luxe]

Okay so you remember that drawing of that girl in a blue rococo dress? Yeah I made another one, this time with Marie Antoinette. To be perfectly honest the thing I was dreading the most was her updo but it was surprisingly pretty easy to draw and color and stuff. I think maybe I was dreading it because I've never drawn hair piled up like that before so there was a whole "NEW THING IS NEW AND THEREFORE SCARY WAH" thing going on there. I actually had a lot of fun drawing her hair and putting all those things in it. Ribbons and jewels and roses agh I wanna draw more hairstyles like this. I think the hardest part was all the jewelry I gave her. So. Many. Pearls. In the sketch I thought it was a good idea but then I went to ink and color it and augh I wanted to stab something it took so long, especially that bracelet with the roses on it. I do like the little rose cameo earrings and hair ornament. I was going to have one on her choker instead of the rose but I liked the rose better on her neck than in the middle of her head so I swapped the two items and stuck roses on the sides of her head. And on the bows on her sleeves. If I'd drawn a full-body version of this outfit I'm pretty sure I'd have added roses to her skirt and shoes too. I kind of wanted to add feathers but her hair already went off the top of the image and I thought having one or two sticking off to the side would look weird of course looking at it now that would've looked good... She looks really good in pink, I think it complements her eyes well. I did try to give her hair a powdered look but it's already such a pale blond you can't really tell I tried that. I think the next one in this set I'll draw is Yolande, Duchess de Polignac. Gonna get all the girls finalized then work on the two leading men. Also I just have more fun with the crazy dresses and hair. It's just a "having fun outside in the spring of 1770-something" kind of set, nothing in particular. It's mostly to get a better feel for the characters as they'll appear in the comic. Ely's pretty carefree, Marie's a sweetie pie, Yolande is... the fun-loving one, probably. I don't know, I'm still working out how I want her to act in the comic without straying too far from what's known from history (since it's alternate history I can get away with some things, I think).

[aura-luxe]

I’m really up in the air about how to write the dialogue for The Queen’s Jewel.

On one hand I want to give it a more modern spin because it’s more natural to write and would be easier to word things. Also I think it’d be easier to try to be funny if I wrote the dialogue the way we more or less talk nowadays.

On the other hand, though, I want to reinforce the time period (despite it being alt-history) and make the dialogue more rigid and formal and more like what people would’ve spoken like back in the 18th century’s upper classes.

On the third, invisible hand I want to combine the two and have Ely speak in a more casual, modern sounding way and have pretty much everyone else speak with the formal rigidity of the time and classes they lived in.

Oh well, that’s something to mull over and decide in the future.

[aura-luxe]

Also: Please note that whenever I mention the name Marie I’m most likely using it in reference to the version of Marie Antoinette that’ll appear in The queen’s Jewel.

If I just use ‘Marie’ it’s about my comic version.

If I use ‘Marie Antoinette’ I’m talking about the real life version.

I know it’s weird but I just wanna make this clear.

[aura-luxe]

may or may not be imagining anime opening and closing animations for The Queen's Jewel to 1789 songs >.>