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#18 a deadly ponytail

Now, this one was so much fun. As probably one of my favorites. I have, at my place ,a couple dozen sketchbook pages that I keep thinking: "I have to digitize then someday.", but never do. I think that specially because grafitty drawings iare very hard to keep in good shape. for a long time. Some of those are a series of images more or less inspired by RPG art and a few other things. So my first idea was: lets try to do something like that but with a ponytail. The main issue was that the focal point of the image should be the ponytail. I mean: that is, after all the prompt. That was the result:

#Inktober 2022, Day 18: Ponytail

So, It makes no sense to mention these drawings without showing then here. Why not scan then? Well, I dont know, my scanner is not working and using a can scan just does not look good. Sooo... maybe later, someday? Anyway, moving on.

My first problem was to find the main proportions for the entire piece. I thought the image should be horizontal with a lot of the space taken by the ponytail. The warrior should be in the extreme rigth so I imagine a line at the 2/3rds of the page to use it as the axis for the warrior design.

Then I looked a lof of ideas for the warrior general body disposition. I liked this one in the right because it reminded me of one of my favorite drawing from the sketchbook series I mentioned. It was also very clean which is good for a reference. I specialli liked the disposition of the weapon and the disposition of her right limbs. I had a different idea for the left side of the body.

So, I started with a few sketches and it was actually a very fast process. I decided to show the entire drawing sequence in the next sections.

First step were some guide lines for disposition and general motion of the image. Some of those where erased (for instance, the lines I used to mark the center of the character and the one that marked the point its leg hit the ground , giving a notion of the character general width). Parts of the last one are still visible.

The spirally shape of the guide line for the ponytail? I have a technical background, remember? Two words: french curve.

Then I started detailing the weapons, specially the ponytail since it showld be the focus. At this point I also realized that the spear in the left hand should look better not projecting forwarb but backward, so I changed its guidelines.

The result looked more balanced, so I decided to go with it.

In teh next step I finished the line drawing and started adding color (actually grayscale) to the weapons. The idea was to have an overall notion of how the light would work.

After that, I finished the shading in the entire character. Since I am used to pencil and blending tools IRL, I used the digital equivalent of those here.

It was time for details. Since time was the main thing and the ponytail should be the focus I decided for a white armour with a featurless mask to cover the face.

Faces alway pull the attention, so lets avoid then.

And that pretty much covered the main part of the image. After that I added more details and shadow and hatching (technical school again...)

To create the background I used a similar concept to the one I used in "Empty": made a black layer and opened it up ith a soft eraser. Unlike "Empty", however, where I used this layer as a foreground, here I used the resulting layer as a background.

The funny thing about this drawing is that it is probably one that took the least amount of time. I actually began working on the #day19 and #day20 ahead of the deadline! But, of course, this things got me distracted and I ended up posting #18 just after the midnight. As usual. It actually became kind of a regular thing: always posting after midnight. This happened again with #19 Bluff... But that is the next story.

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