An actual model guide please!

Sunday, August 19, 2007

 

I'm doing an entry for Shojo Beat's Beatgirl contest, and I'm in the home stretch. Just need to add colour, photocopy and scan it for keepsake and send it off. It's been almost a week planning and about 2 weeks of madly drawing, redrawing and redrawing again. I actually have 4 test pictures, and 4 redraws of the final thing. Test pics were finding a pose in a fashion mag, doing the pose North American style, then same model in manga style(Crimson Hero), then close up on the face for facial expression, then putting everything together. The redraws were mostly due to rescaling so that everything fit on the page and were in proportion. And we're talking manual all the way. No computers. I used 3 inking pens, 1 brush w/ diluted black ink for tone, and white paint for touch-ups. My arm's really tired. And I need a better light to draw by. It's waaaaay too dim.

But my beef w/ the contest is that it says the hair has to be certain way, but the written directions are completely contradicted by their example which has the instructions written above it. Someone doesn't know left from right. And their examples from their features artists don't even follow the character guide. And why is the hair colour red? A colour that is only found in a small population in Northern Europe?? For a magazine featuring Asian characters and culture??! Really peeves me off. And of course I'd forgotten about the hair colour, so the colour choices I had were for someone w/ dark hair. Now I have to re-pick the colours. It totally sucks. And her eye colour switches from green to brown. Driving me nuts.

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