Character Illustrations: Death's Advocate - Daughters

 
Drawn By: WrittenDusk
Game: Death's Advocate (In Development)
Concept and Development By: MRHAPPYFACEMAN

I've been working on these illustrations for quite awhile now, wanting to post this up only after all four of them are finished.

These character illustrations are for a game, being developed in RPG Maker, called Death's Advocate. In this horror/thriller you will be thrown into unknown worlds as a proxy to assist Death in his fight against demons. The four characters that I have drawn are your daughters, and they will play significant roles within the game. All this is done in collaboration with, and for, MRHAPPYFACEMAN; a user of RPG Maker Forums. I'll have links to the RPG Maker website and their forums below.

I'll still be helping out with this game for the time being, so I'll give more updates as I post more illustrations and/or drawings of this game.

Overall I'm pretty proud of my work on these four characters; especially since this is after I've gained a clear direction for my own style of drawing. Working on these characters really helped me test how viable it is to draw like this; and it turns out it's pretty viable. It didn't take nearly as long as I thought it would per character, and they all turned out fairly consistent.

What I would like to improve on now is to increase my speed further, and to improve my skills in drawing different poses in proportion. I really need to level up my perspective skills. Some of the poses I did above actually gave me quite a bit of trouble. I would still like to improve on them right now, but that wouldn't be very productive. 

Beyond that I would also like to see if I can achieve a similar look with simpler colouring. To achieve a more free and flowing style that stems from, if not improves upon, this style. This will likely to be my next experiment.

It feels nice helping others improve their ideas and even better if I impress them. But what I gained most from doing this is getting the chance to focus more on just the execution, and less on the conception.

Hope you enjoyed the illustrations! As always let me know if there is anything I can improve upon.  

(Note: For those who maybe wondering why I chose this background colour... It was kind of just on a whim. I simply wanted it to feel more draft-like, so I picked a more newsprint-like colour. Another reason I can give is that I wanted something other than white, allowing the white portions of the characters to show better.)

Update: 2017/04/11

I actually forgotten to talk about one of the most important things I've learned while working on this project. I was so caught in the moment of finally posting this that I forgot.

What I learned this time is that the critiques from someone you are drawing for, is different from the critiques you get when drawing for yourself. 

It may sound obvious, but there is actually a little more nuance to it.

The nuance lies mainly in the goal of the criticizer. A criticizer of a more general sense aims to evaluate you on how good you are at what you do. Asking themselves questions like: How is the colouring? The Proportions? How about the Composition?. On the other hand the "commissioner" aims to evaluate you on how well you match their vision. Asking themselves questions like: Is this how I want it? Does this match the idea? Is this a better idea?. This difference in their goals direct you towards different faults that would normally be less pronounced.

This realization makes me want to try and review my projects in a similar fashion; looking at them with different goals, with different perspectives, in mind. 

Maybe I'll improve faster and better this way. Or maybe it'll be too much for my brain, haha!

Links:
RPG Maker 
RPG Maker Forums