Meet Lylatt
Almost a month after finishing Nimbus's character sheet, I've made one for Lylatt too. This means that I have three of the archive's mascots down and only one to go.
Lylatt is easily one of the most complicated characters I've made not only in looks, but in her writing. I attribute some of this to how cynical her point of view is despite her colorful appearance; if the facts about her are any indication, she had a bad home life and her strained relationship with her mother only made it worse. Despite the negatives, she and her father are very close and she's made some friends that are a positive influence on her. Out of all the character sheets I've made so far, hers was probably the easiest to write next to Aqua's, which I attribute to the applicability of her story in a real-world setting.
I frequently find myself comparing Lylatt's sheet to Nimbus's because of how much effort each of them took, albeit in different ways. My biggest struggle with Nimbus was differentiating her sheet enough from Aqua's so that they wouldn't blend together whilst scrambling to write her identity, whereas Lylatt had an identity to begin with. This caused me to shaft the design for her sheet until later in the design process, only dedicating my time to it once Lylatt's artwork was finished. I knew from the start that I wanted to incorporate her yellow and green outfit into the design somehow, I just wasn't sure whether to approach it similar to how I approached Nimbus's crystals or if I should incorporate the asymmetry of her shirt into the piece into the design. After testing out Nimbus's approach first, I thought the asymmetry worked better for Lylatt and stuck with it.
The parts of Lylatt's sheet that took the most time design-wise were how to color the background and what to put behind her sketch. I was hesitant about using purple at first, considering her pants are a darker shade of purple, so I tested out a few pink and orange hues and I even thought "what if I made the background green and everything else a shade of yellow" before deciding against it and switching back to purple. When the lighter purple hues proved too light, I tested some darker hues and got better results. With the background color a success, I briefly considered the idea of making the design behind her a rocket similar to how her story is represented on the website before deciding against it and remembering how I chose to emphasize her claws in this piece and made that her design in a way that worked really well here. In hindsight, it'll make designing a character sheet for Leo easier as all I'll need to do is swap out the cat pawprints for dog ones.
Aside from everything I just mentioned, the only other change I made to the sheet's layout was italicizing the header text in for the likes, dislikes, and facts categories because those looked better than the standard text, so now it's time to move onto the bread and butter of this character sheet, which is the design for Lylatt herself. She's the most complicated character I have to draw, but she's also the widest due to her wingspan. Just like Nimbus, I sketched her out on a different file, only moving the finished sketch back when it was done. I made a few adjustments to Lylatt's shirt, such as adjusting the neckline, redrawing the hem, and styling her left sleeve to have a green cuff, whereas her previous shirt only showed her green sleeve that I gave a yellow cuff. The other adjustments I made to Lylatt's design were small, such as making her right eye a darker green while making the tufts of fur in her ears a lighter green. I also showed the claws on her right hand, which I always intended for her to have but never got to show off.
Getting Lylatt's pose and expression right were probably the toughest things for me to do when sketching her. I wanted her to look slightly cocky, but I couldn't quite get them right for a while. I fine-tuned her expression a few times as a result, as it looked more "off" the more detailed the sketch got. When I was finally satisfied with her expression, I moved onto her hands, which were pretty dang tough. The references I used for her hands were intended for characters with five fingers on each hand rather than four, so getting the poses right took a bit of trial-and-error. Thankfully, after this, the rest of the piece wasn't too hard. The only other struggle I had was with Lylatt's four tails, but even then, I found a way to make them look good.
I'm not starting Cithera's character sheet right away, as I'll be busy for a bit after writing this entry. With that said, I already know how she's going to look. I can't wait to show off Cithera's sheet when she's done... or maybe some doodles I made in between projects. Who knows?