Kinda hard not to talk about the style change with this picture, isn’t it? Yep guys – I’m going anime. A bunch of different things that would take too long to go into right now spurred this on, but this picture was one of the catalysts because I have been meaning to do this picture up for about... six years, no exaggeration. What held such a simple thing back that long?

If you must know… kids. I absolutely despised how these characters looked in a western style everytime I have drawn them. But it took noticing the flaw in those designs to make me realise my adult characters weren’t much better. And every time I’ve attempted to draw this has been the same story: I get about halfway through before I get sick of the look and bin it!

About two months ago, after this failed yet again to satisfy me, something spurred me to try and draw Kelly in an anime style. I honestly, like all other times, didn’t expect anything to come of it.

Within about a week I’d redesigned the whole cast.

Everybody turned out superior, but it really was the children characters that locked this in as what I want to do from here on out! I know I haven’t got the style down 100% yet, but Kelly looks cute here! She looks appealing, and most importantly, she looks like a young girl! Not a midget! You’ll have to take me at my word about how unimpressive the western stuff were in comparrison, cause I’m too embarrassed to upload them right now.

Anyway, Let’s actually talk about what’s in the picture, shall we? This is something I’ve wanted to be a prop in the background of several illustrations I’ll be doing in the story. The date of this pic is literally a few months before the start of the story, and technically, before everything goes to hell for innocent little Kelly.

Since it’s a while before they’ll become relevant, you get to see Kelly’s parents in this pic, Doug and Jodie. Fun fact: Kelly’s nickname for her dad is the wolfman, but he’s cleaned himself up so much for this picture it doesn’t seem fitting. You can imagine how ironic that name seems to her later in the story?

We also got Evan, aged 3 and insanely camerashy. Kelly’s 7 here, and on the far right, at long last, I get to show her big brother Sam Houston before his… for lack of a better term, “Disney moment”. Even though he’s not around present day, his role as a flashback character is gonna get quite significant later on.

So that’s that, one of the bigger contributions to my style change. If it looks anime, I succeeded. If the kid characters look okay, then I REALLY succeeded. Either way, something had to give with this picture, cause had I stuck to trying to finish it in a western style – you would not have been seeing this out of me anytime soon.