Welcome, friends!

For this post, I am going over a digital piece I did of two characters from - yet again - Mystic Messenger, the mobile game about wooing beautiful men's hearts. The white-haired heart breaker is Zen and the professionally suited badass in the corner is Jumin. If you haven't heard of the term "yaoi," it means a romance between two boys as a Japanese manga genre. This was a cover I created for a yaoi doujinshi (a fan comic made on an existing series) of the game.

Time Taken: 4 days

Materials

Wacom Intuos 3 Tablet, Medium
Paint Tool SAI
Adobe Photoshop CS5 (for the text)

The Process

When I envisioned the comic, I was thinking of having a bittersweet relationship between the male characters. Zen would be annoyed at Jumin's advances and Jumin would nonchalantly make references that would embarrass Zen. What a wonderful combo! So, I wanted to sketch something that captured their perfectly adorable and complex "tsundere" relationship. That is how I came up with Jumin getting all chummy with Zen, who is about to smack him!

Did I mention how much I enjoy inking hair? It is my favorite part, albeit the most time consuming process of everything. I like to incorporate intricate details with each hair strand, how they interweave with each other, where the layers are placed, how they flow in opposite directions, and so on. I changed the expression on Jumin's face because I didn't think it fit his persona well. He isn't one to smirk, so he shouldn't be!

I start putting down "base colors." These are the flat, basic colors that are the foundation of the coloring that will follow it. Although Zen's hair is white and Jumin's hair is black, I don't like using pure white nor pure black when coloring. It lacks depth and doesn't allow me to add as much tone and warmth that I like. Colors I often enjoy to use for shading on white include grays, blues, purples, and yellows! Those triangles in their hair is just an added flair to give the picture a little more jazz in the end when I add a neon affect to them.

I honestly do not know why I took a picture of this as I was coloring, but I did! Perhaps because the color from my screen looked so much better on my monitor than it did when I finally saved. I definitely really like the bright, neon purple-blue mix of colors in Jumin's hair. The triangle decorations definitely help bring out a more illuminating effect as well.

At this point, I have finished coloring Jumin. This was a very experimental process as I had wanted to see how much color blending I could get away with, which was hard because I had so many lines in the hair that shading each strand would not only take a long time, but also look messy and disorderly. That is why I use a very blended and washed out look of coloring, almost like watercolor.

Finally, I am finished with coloring both characters! I add in little dots of shine on the character to imitate a very ethereal look. It also helps lift up the entire illustration by imitating a somewhat "galaxy" like atmosphere in the foreground. Lines are also placed across the picture to indicate random hair strands to give it a slightly more natural and believable picture. I use light colors, again, to make it more bright and bring sparse attention throughout.

And now, the finishing touch! The instagram filter. Sometimes I abuse it because it's so nice. In this case I think I did. One of the best features that instagram does is add a "warmer" tone for your pictures, which is the effect that I want to achieve. Sometimes I utilize the "cooler" tone when I want things to look less saturated.