Hey Hive!
We're back again with another Art Attack! If you're new to the series, this is where I share my drawings and the process behind them. A behind-the-scenes look at my artwork, if you will. This is not to say that I'm very good at art, or that I'm a professional in any way. In fact this is the opposite, and serves as a reminder to how I first started, and lets me track my progress too!
If you missed the last couple of posts, I started a new series where I use this template to draw different characters based on suggestions from my viewers on Twitch!
I found this template on Facebook and had the idea to draw different characters for a potential NFT series in the future, but then the whole NFT thing kinda tanked. But I thought it was still a cool drawing exercise to do and I wanted to reward my loyal viewers. So instead of drawing characters I already know I thought asking chat would be cool since it would expose me to different characters too!
This request was by one of my dear artist friends who is also a streamer! She goes by wolfie_taurus on Twitch and has drawn quite a few avatars and emotes for me of her own volition! So I feel like I owe her so much even though she has a penchant for making me do weird doodles on stream. I have another channel redeem I have where I do a 2 minute doodle on Paint, and one of wolfie's requests was this:
Anyway, for this character wolfie requested I draw Katsuki Bakugo from Boku no Hero, or My Hero Academia! I still have yet to watch MHA so I'm not very familiar with this character but I have heard of him and the anime before, so I kinda knew of him. But I still did research to see what he looked like.
Source: myheroacademia fandom
His outfit seemed pretty simple from the chest up but I was concerned about having to draw his grenade hands, so to save myself the trouble I just gave him animal crossing hands. But I did get confused with his headgear since his hair is really spiky too and in sketching I had some trouble making it clear which was his hair and which was the headgear. But I ended up with something like this after a few minutes.
As with all these NFT art pieces I only follow the template for the overall shape and position but I do cater the poses and facial expressions to the character that I'm drawing. I also do a custom background that suits them.
Wolfie specifically requested I draw an angry Bakugo and in researching it did seem like that was his default expression most of the time so it fits. So I gave him a super angry expression and tried to draw his weapons as accurately as I could.
I cleaned up the sketch but then decided to try and draw some muscles on him since his arms looked a little noodley if I left it at that. Plus I had to include his sleeves and thought I could fit in some muscles there.
But after I outlined the sketch I did, I realised his "muscles" ended up looking more like balloons since I still wanted to keep it smooth. So he unfortunately ended up with Popeye arms instead and I didn't know what I could do to change it since I still wanted to retain a similar style.
I tried to change it best I could but there was nothing much I could do.. So I just gave up and started on the colouring. Since I already screwed up I was just hoping that maybe with colours and shadows I could make it look a little better.
The colour actually came out pretty well I think! But his arms didn't change much unfortunately, and still look like Popeye arms to me. Once I saw it I couldn't unsee it. But I tried my best to make his colours accurate to the references I found and thought his arm cannons actually came out pretty well!
For the background I didn't really know what to draw but I wanted something simple, especially after the previous piece that killed me with the background. Wolfie suggested a flame so I used my flame brush and just did some strokes to resemble a flame. It's pretty simple but I didn't want to draw focus away from Bakugo so I think it works!
Overall it is a pretty simple piece but his arms gave me enough of a headache so I was glad to be done with this one. Here's the full timelapse:
I did like the colours though and it was pretty fun to draw him. I'm so glad wolfie loved it regardless of his Popeye arms and to thank her for all the art she's give me I sent her an un-watermarked version. At least I finally managed to do some actual art for her instead of my very scuffed doodles on Paint with a mouse. 😅
If you're interested, I do draw on stream sometimes and you can even claim free artwork if you get enough channel points! We also play lots of interactive games so come hang out with us on my Twitch channel!!
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
Check out my previous post in this series!
