Arknights Study
My friend recently got into the mobile gacha-game Arknights, and asked if i could draw his Final Fantasy XIV (14) character in the style of the game. He also said if i can't i can just do the sprite character style.
So i decided to do both for him, starting with the sprite art and then moving on to studying one of the many artists that make character art for the game and drawing his character in that artists style.
Character Sprite
The sprites in Arknights are designed like chibi characters with unrealisticly sized proportions, like big heads and hands. To make sure i designed the character correctly to what he looks like and also correct to the style I gathered a moodboard of reference images and put them together in the software Pure Ref, a very handy and easy to use reference software.
I started off by sketching on paper, which was done while away from my PC so instead of using my moodboard i had the images on my phone which made referencing more difficult, however this wasn't too much of a problem as it was just a rough sketch.
I checked back with my friend on occasion to make sure i was drawing it right, trying to imitate working under a higher person in a company or doing commison work for a customer. He pointed out how i drew the hair wrong as he has a ponytail and i drew long hair as the images i had didn't show the ponytail. From there he told me to make it bigger, which led me to my end sketch with the hair to the waist.
I then uploaded the sketch to my PC and used my drawing software, Clip Studio Paint, to redraw the sketch and also redraw the gunblade in better detail. After this I enlarged the sketch, dropped the opacity and began the inking process where i added more detail to the image and edited parts to fit the arknights style more.
After that i used a mask to add the flat colour and took a step back many times to see if anything was wrong. It took me a while but i notice that the way i had drawn it hid the neck while arknights sprites have the neck visible under the head. Due to how far i had gone i had to move multiple parts up to add the neck and redraw segments. This has taught me to take a proper step back after inking to see if there are any changes i need to make.
From here i worked on the highlights and shadows, looking at my arknights references to see how it is done in their style.
Finished Art
Sef the Viera as a Gunbreaker