Making of Ziwei

During this post I will be revisiting the making of a piece of artwork I created in November last year. The main subject in this work is Ralph, an old character of mine. A punk rocker kind of boy who originally was a pikachu character. That is why I draw him with a pikachu shirt. The dragon is inspired by the Ziwei star.

Zi Wei Dou Shu is a form of fortune-telling in Chinese culture. It remains one of the most well-respected processes for laying out "The Destiny Path" or "Fate".
* Zi Wei (紫微) - literally "purple micro"; it is the most auspicious star in the chart.
* Dou (斗) means "to put together".
* Shu (数) means "to calculate".

Zi Wei Dou Shu thus means the study of a person's life based on the movement and location of the Zi Wei Star and 100+ other stars at the specific time the person was born.

And thus the creation of this artwork.

Sketching
Of course when drawing characters it is best to sketch them out. It is usually a step I glance over but for this piece I seemed to have wanted a little bit more thought brought into this. As you can see from the following image I roughed out the movement then followed onto a much more detailed sketch. From the sketch some clean linework. I chose a brown for the lines because I already knew what my colour pallet would look like.


Flat Colour and Background
I kept all my colours rather earthy with reds and pinks. All warm colours. This works with the brown lines I already chose. Once that was done I made a gradient in the background. This is how all my backgrounds begin even if I am painting a scenery. From there a little bit of rising sun style lights from the back of the character with the lightest colour chosen in the gradient.


Textures and Shadows.
Now the background is how I like it I work on adding more interesting textures and lighting into it. The shadows I was not going to work on until I had a good idea of how the shadows in the background were. This isnt so important for character pinup style work like this, but its a little more important when working on environments with characters in them.
Without the background you can see how redish the shadows actually are.


Creating Ziwei.
I placed a white layer over Ralph and the background so I can see where I am working on this without too much distraction. Once I finished him in his normal colours I then continued to working him into the background. Without the pink glow he would have stuck out like a sore thumb. The idea for the dragon was to frame the page, not take over from Ralph.


And here is the final product for those who have not yet seen it.