New Character: Kazumi!

That's right! Firestar is adding a new character to her lineup. ;3 Meet Kazumi.

Profile:

Despite his appearance, Kazumi (or Kaz as he's often called), is quite generous and understanding. He would never take advantage of anyone for his own personal gains and believes in helping others when needed. Even so, Kaz is quite the daring lion cub that will rise up to any challenge to show he's not one to be pushed around.

Even though he's still young, Kaz already has a criminal past. He's stolen prey numerous times from a neighboring pride's territory to help feed his starving pride. He was once caught by two scouting Guards and taken to their leader for punishment. The leader pardoned his offense exclaiming he was "only a cub". However, as his pride's condition worsened, Kaz was right back stealing prey, despite being caught before.

Later, he was caught again and this time he was punished for his actions. The Pride's leader gave him 2 scars, one below each eye as a marker of his criminal activity (Not shown in profile pic). He then explained that if he was ever caught again, he would be killed, no questions asked.

~~~~~

Kazumi will definietly be added to my list of "main" characters, which I'll hopefully be posting in a few days to clear up a bunch of questions I've been asked. I'm already totally addicted to drawing him as it is. :B His profile's also got me thinking of a really cool comic/story that may replace Stardust should I come up with a good plot.

Fire's Art Channel

So I set myself up a Livestream channel:

Fire's Art Channel

For people who want to see how I draw. ;3 I'm not sure how often I'll be drawing online live though, but if enough people want me to I should probably be able to broadcast 2-3 times a week, mostly on the weekends.

Aki - final development-

In my last blog post about Aki, I think I said something about her design being finished. I lied. :B Her design has change a bit since then but I think I finally have a design for Aki I like. =3

So for those of you who are just now reading my blog or your click on the link in my Artist's Comments box by chance and you're too lazy to go find the post I'm planning to make Aki my new fursona for both TLKFAA and deviantArt. She'll replace Manjoume and Anderson since they were both temporary fursonas and Aki will be made to represent me better.



You can't really tell much now since these are just sketches, but this is Aki permanent design. I changed her eyes from blue to golden and her hair tuft got slightly larger sinc eth last post, but I think her stripe pattern stayed around the same. :P Colors also didn't change that much. She's still a tiger cub with dark purple/black base fur and redish-pink stripes.

Still working on her background, but all info on her will be completed by the time I upload her reference sheet.

Picture Process: Gem Kitties -Lineart-

Step 2: Lineart

This is probably the most improtant step of them all since you want to make sure your lineart looks its best. But chances are, you'll be "inking" your picture in pen, which means if you do happen to make a mistake, there's no eracing. :P

I start inking all my picture from the characters faces, since the face includes a lot details, and work out from there. Remember, the smaller the pen tip, the more details you will be able to show. I use a 0.1 pigment inking pen for my lineart. Pens ususally range from 0.9 to 0.05 depending on the brand you use.

I trace all my lines from my sketch until I have the whole pictured outlined in ink. If I want a more cartoon/animated look, I'll use a 0.5 - 0.7 pen to make a larger, darker outline around the characters.




Yay! So we have lineart now! Only we can still see the sketch behind our pen. :P Use an eracer to get rid of all those pencils marks so you can have nice clean lineart ready for coloring. Don't press down too hard on the eracer though or you'll cause your ink to fade. I usually wait 10 - 15 minutes before eracing so my lineart doesn't smudge or fade.




Next we'll see what it takes to bring this pic to life. (Note that I've stopped the pic here until I get all the colors I need in copic markers. It might take until December until I can start coloring.)