Wolf's Rain

Click to view.
-
Another series I became a fan of, though I don't care much for the manga except for the beautiful art. I prefer the anime mainly because the story is explained better in it. I spent a long time working on this collaborative piece as a dedication to the series. The main characters depicted are Kiba (top left), Tsume (top right), Hige (middle left), Toboe (middle right), Blue (bottom left), and Cheza (center).
-
I used card stock paper this time instead of regular printer paper because I felt I would be working so much on the characters that printer paper would not be able to handle it. It's a good thing I did that too. *laughs* The only downside is that card stock makes it extremely difficult for me to transfer my sketches onto the paper because it's so thick and light does not shine through it effectively. I used many various references for the characters, who turned out almost identical to how they appear in the anime, except for Cheza. I had her pose firmly set in my mind and I did not want to budge, so I had to do without a decent reference. She ended up lopsided and elongated, but I gave up trying to fix that a long time ago. Each of the characters had their own separate sheet of paper where I scribbled out a sketch. Then I put them all together in the end. In Cheza's case, I went through about seven pieces of card stock because I was trying to trace her in ink. Her eyes were too detailed and my pens were not thin enough to ink the outline without the lines bleeding together. I wish I would've given up earlier and saved some paper. *laughs* I eventually just used pencil, which makes her stand out and has a nice contrasting effect thankfully. Another thing I didn't want to fix was the left side of her bangs. The line art was too thin and coloring Kiba's hair overlapped it. I had a lot of trouble with the background too. I was not sure what to do but I wanted something along the lines of a subtle color gradation so the characters would stand out more. I aimed for a sunset at first, but the colors were too vivid and didn't capture the mood I wanted. I had to go back over it with acrylic paint and settled for a pale blue instead. Then I got carried away and splattered some more paint across the surface to add snow. There's a lot of snow in the series. *laughs* The border was taken from the DVD covers. Overall, it turned out quite nicely though. One of my best pieces I think. I'm very thrilled with how the colored pencil shading turned out.
-
Drawn May 20, '07.
-
Mechanical pencil, pen, colored pencil, and acrylic paint.
-
Picture (C) Alice Falling; Characters (C) BONES