Danganronpa Study: Shadow
In May 2020, I was working on pose studies for Aqua and Chlora uses references on Pinterest. I planned on doing the same for Shadow, but I couldn't find any poses that suited her at the time. To work around this, I used the sprites from Danganronpa as a reference instead. The sprites are very expressive, but they are good for shading practice, clothing practice (especially fabric folds), and proportion studies.
I grouped Shadow's and Electra's Danganronpa pose studies together because they used references from the same franchise, but also because I couldn't find the exact date for Electra's pose. I also placed Shadow's picture before Electra's, believing I did hers first, until file analysis in December 2022 proved the opposite: Electra's piece came first, not Shadow's, and the amount of time between them was significant enough for me to write separate entries for them.
Shadow's pose study began on the Danganronpa wiki, where I was browsing through the sprite sheets to find one that suited her personality. I don't know how many sprite sheets I went through out of 48, but I ultimately settled on one of Akane Owari's sprites from Danganronpa: Goodbye Despair. Looking back, I think I referenced the pose a bit too much, but I did what I had to do so I could learn. This drawing also has a lot of firsts: this is the first time Shadow's left eye was visible, the first time Shadow was drawn with thin eyebrows, the first time Shadow was drawn with cat-like eyes, the first time Shadow was drawn with a lower neckline, and the first time Shadow was drawn without the shirt tears over her breasts and smaller tears on her stomach. I found the tears near her breast to be too distracting, hard to work around, and excessive when compared to the other tears in her shirt, so I removed them. The other tears in her shirt, except the spots near her left shoulder, now appear more clawlike too. It had to be done, and it's stayed consistent to this day.
This piece was also from what I call "the dull shading days," as I was still learning how to shade and the colors I chose were so light or so dark that they were unnoticeable. This lasted until September of 2020, and I'm mentioning it here because this is a glaring example of how faint the shading was. My shading improved after receiving feedback from other artists that motivated me to improve my shading technique.
I want to wrap this up by plugging the sprite I used for this study, which can be found here. Massive thanks to The Danganronpa Wiki for archiving the sprite I used and to Spike Chunsoft for publishing the game this sprite came from.
