Time to once again loop back to Nuranto... Er, I mean Narunto... I mean... You know what I mean. Actually, I shouldn't be that harsh on him. Most people's opinion seems to be that if he resembles anyone, it's Tidus. So this is what Tidus would look like if he was a furry? Oh wait, we already have that. He's named Ratchet!
This picture was a bit of an experiment (and a slightly painful one too) to find a middle ground. I really love my painted characters and I’m glad that’s a skill I can add to my repertoire, but outside of those few pics I did of Kelly, I haven’t really been happy with it. Now that I’m doing backgrounds commonly, I find my characters mesh too much with them if they have that look. I have to remind myself that LOK got it’s start, in my head, as an imaginary cartoon series. I lose that look, and I’m losing a bit of what drove me to do it in the first place.
But guess what? I’m not too comfy or confident in my cell shading since I picked up the paint bucket! There’s something I’m working on that’s gonna force me to pick it up again in the future, but I’m not sure I’d ever be satisfied with it being used in the bulk of my work again. So I’ve been searching for that aforementioned middle ground. Something between cell and painted.
This is my first attempt at it (Consciously, anyway. It might have bled into the Kelly pictures). As an added bonus, I think I figured out a little trick to make shading stand out more clearly as fur. It’ll take some more practice before I say for certain. At the very least, this looks less like it’s just skin with fur markings painted on now. Really bad habit of mine from early days.
Nuran’s looking more like a Kitsune then ever here. Good guy! Main good guy, I promise! Although, with the unintentional resemblance to this particular bastard, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6Aevo-XvsA&t=3m32s can’t say I blame you if you thought otherwise. I tell ya though, with some of the evolved looks of these characters, I’m genuinely starting to think of dropping the Celtic and druidic themes for his race, and making them more Shinto oriented. It’s fortunately not as big of a retcon as it might sound, since I haven’t really expanded on the Madraki too much before. It will require a little rewrite though, and Nuran and Suri may lose their somewhat trademark Irish accents.
Mind you, that mighta happened anyway, wot with the Kanyans now speaking fluent Kanya-nese. sigh Thank god none of my rewrites have been anything derailing so far.