A Magical Minamicon ( 2014 )

This is a piece that I created for the conbook of Minamicon 2014, a convention which celebrates anime and manga. 2014 will be it’s 20th year of running. What I especially love about Minamicon is that it tends to have a good amount of creative activities and workshops available to take part in.

Each year the convention has a different theme and this year the theme was " Idol Singer. " Their mascot is a fairy character, though the character used here is actually of my own design since her design varies. Although I use my gallery mostly for fan-art I do really love designing original characters, I just prefer to keep most original work offline unless it has or will be published in something.

I really wanted to use a harmonious colour-scheme for her outfit and wings and I tend to love seeing blues, purples, pinks and greens used together and also in differing shades so I incorporated that into her final look. This piece gave me some needed practise at applying lighting effects and I put a lot of thought into where the light and shadows would go. Considering the theme of the picture I also used it as an opportunity to have some fun practising with shimmer and sparkle effects. My original sketch included a long ponytail combined with her current hairstyle, but I decided at the inking stage that it would be best to drop it since I felt that it might interfere a bit with the wings and it would give me more to colour, highlight and shade when I was already working to a short deadline. I was also thinking of giving her blue hair for that extra anime feel, but after dropping in the basic colours I saw that it would benefit a lot more from being a contrasting colour. So I went with using black which I felt was equally appropriate for being a common Japanese hair colour. I also used this piece to show some of my full body drawing since I noticed that I don’t have many examples up in my gallery so far.