My first illustration of the year vs. my recent illustration

Since it's almost the end of the year already, I thought I'd put my earliest 2022 art beside one of my most recent and compare how things have changed.

Though it was started in 2021, this commission was completed in 2022. The composition technique and style is quite obviously an homage to the Disgaea series, a commission style specialty of mine that was requested by this particular client.

This is my new and improved share image for my website (the image that appears as the thumbnail when its shared to platforms such as  Twitter, Discord, etc.) It features my original characters and was designed to resemble box art/promotional art for anime fighting games.

I feel that looking at these images side by side really highlights the importance of references. For the commission, the references supplied were pretty low quality, so I had to infer a lot of smaller details such as accents on the clothing and the markings on the face. For my characters, many of their design elements are referenced from real life articles of clothing, and the resulting image is much more detailed.

I've also gotten significantly better at proportions. At the start of the year, my illustrations were often quite skinny. Perhaps due to my love for Guilty Gear, I have been paying a lot more attention to muscles, which I feel has not only helped my characters look less unnaturally thin, but also has helped me better visualize poses by understanding how the muscles move and interact.

As for my coloring, for my share image, I had several art books and game covers on hand to derive inspiration from, which helped it look more sleek and professional. A very small detail that I feel helped a lot was adding subtle airbrush shading onto the cel shadows rather than leaving them one solid color. Gives the image more reflective lighting and impression of depth.

All in all, the moral of the story here is that no one is too good for references, so use them more! Use them for every little thing, your shading, your clothing, your expressions, your anatomy, your poses, reference reference reference. The greatest artists are also the greatest thieves!