A Happy Birthday Present! 🎂

Happy 19th birthday nobbele, I hope all your future dreams come true!

It should be obvious now that this post is dedicated to my friend nobbele's 19th birthday! I've been a friend of his ever since 2017, and I am truly grateful to have met him. In 5 years we worked on countless projects together, some were abandoned, and some were somewhat complete.

Novel Tracker, Belfast Bot were our biggest projects to date.

The Birthday Project 🎁

Coming up with an idea was quite easy actually, a few months ago he kept pestering me to draw a character for his Catch the Beat game. With the idea in mind, I started working on the rough sketch.

The Initial Sketch

This was my first attempt at chibi-esque character ever. I was kinda skeptical at how the final result would look like, but it was easier than I thought. The initial sketch had 2 different iterations; the issue with the first one was, that it was in a 3/4 view, which looked out of place. Luckily, the second sketch came out better than the initial one.


Cleaning the Sketch

I then had to re-draw the sketch on a bigger canvas, to have a bit more freedom. I also refined the majority of the sketch. For some weird reason, I thought this looked acceptable. And oh boy, I don't even want to know what I thought when I started coloring it, but thankfully I came back to my senses before it was too late. Hence was the reason why I used this as a sketch for the next iteration instead.


Drawing the Line-art

At this point the drawing was coming along nicely. Although, I've never been a fan of drawing line-art, like ever, I had to deal with it to deliver a good present I was proud of. To my surprise it came about way better than I anticipated, additionally I was going to add more line weight but decided not to complicate stuff I wasn't used to yet. Immediately after finishing the line-art, I started coloring it.


Coloring

I hate coloring just as I hate line-art, but I had to color it whether I liked it or not. And I am glad I colored it, during the process I learned a lot of new techniques that felt right for my style. My blending technique isn't perfect yet, but hey last time I colored something was nearly a year ago (Excluding the Shiba and the Sculpture, I received some help on those.) Anyways, after the coloring process, I realized some errors in my drawing, and immediately opened up Photopea to tinker on it.


Adjusted Colors

Lastly, I imported the image on Photopea and used liquify tool to adjust its proportions and played around with the colors to further enhance its looks. And with that, the short project came to an end.


I definitely learned a lot more about coloring and other processes of art which I don't like. But the effort was worth it.

Final Result ✍🏻

Initial SketchCleaned SketchLine-artColoredAdjusted
Status #1
Status #1
Status #2
Status #2
Status #3
Status #3
Status #4
Status #4
Status #5
Status #5

Afterword

I hope you enjoyed this short post. This post was quite difficult to put into words for me, mostly because I wasn't sure about what to write down, so I just went with the flow. I will definitely make another post on the progress of my custom card deck in the upcoming weeks or months.