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!
One thing I like to do as an artist is to draw special personalised artworks for friends as gifts! Both because I'm a bad gift giver but also because I find personalised art a better gift than anything I could buy especially in this day and age. But here's the first one I did for one of my mods:
Anyway, this piece was for one of my viewers over on my Twitch channel who goes by nungbak! He's a huge supporter of mine and contributed a lot to the community so I felt indebted to him and decided to gift him an art piece for his birthday, which was in late April.
For this one I was kinda stumped on what to draw tbh, but then I figured since he still plays Genshin Impact, I'll just draw his waifu Yanfei in a maid outfit holding a birthday cake. I wasn't sure if he would like it but figured it was a pretty safe bet.
This is what Yanfei looks like in-game:
Source: Genshin Impact Fandom
So I wanted to do something similar to the Samus one but just with Yanfei in a maid outfit of course. I also didn't want the pose to be the same since she'd probably hold the cake differently. For the cake itself, I wanted to draw something that looked like the in-game birthday cake you'd get since the game does give you a cake. These were the references I used:
So I initially wanted to draw her posing like Hu Tao in the bottom left, but then I found a pretty picture of Yanfei herself in a maid outfit holding a plate by meldrawss on tumblr that I thought was perfect! I used it as a guide for her pose but I wanted to change her facial features to make them more accurate, and incorporate some Chinese/Liyue style to her outfit like the other picture I saw.
This was the sketch I ended up with, which I thought looked pretty okay. It's also kinda more covered up than Yanfei in-game but what can you do when her outfit is already a two-piece. Anyway, I also gave her more of a bust since I thought that'd be more appealing especially in this outfit.
After that it was time to outline! I wanted the cake to just be in colour like all the other cakes I've done so I just did a solid black outline for Yanfei.
After that colouring her was pretty easy especially since most of her colour comes from her outfit which I've omitted. I used my references for colour sourcing on top of her actual splash art.
I also added some shadows and highlights to her outfit and hair.
That was pretty much the easy part done. The hardest was going to be the cake for sure. I wanted to draw something like the second birthday cake you get which is Liyue-themed of course, but wanted it to be a triple tiered cake, since that's more fancy. And as a cake topper I was going to draw a Silk Flower - Yanfei's flower in-game. I started with the flower first:
For the cake I went off of a vector I found but changed the colours to match the in-game cake picture I had. I had to get creative with incorporating some of the elements from the in-game cake but eventually we get this:
I did ask nungbak what kind of cake he liked and he said chocolate so I thought this looked pretty good.
For the background, I went with something similar to the Samus one since I wanted her to stand out so I just did a dark blue background (since he likes the colour blue) and added some bokeh light effect, and we get this:
In hindsight I think her left hand should've been moved a little bit so it looks more like she's resting her hand on her hip instead of in front of it. I think I messed up there and didn't pay attention after I traced the reference. My bad. But then again I'm not good at drawing hands so I didn't want to mess around with that too much.
Here's the 30 second timelapse:
I wouldn't say it's my best and I still like the Samus one better, but I'm not sure what else I would change about this piece tbh. Anyway nungbak really liked it and that's all that matters.
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!
