-2008- The Heartless

I often like seeing familiar characters done in different styles, especially normally kid-friendly characters being given a darker look for...whatever reason. Maybe I like corrupting things.

So here's No Heart from The Care Bears. I'm sure you noticed that this is a rather dark picture, so you might need to avoid light reflecting on the monitor to see it well. I wanted this to look scary too (I was playing a lot of Silent Hill recently ), but it didn't work out. I'm disappointed with that. Maybe I just don't "get" scary yet.

I started the drawing for this on March 12, and it was the FIRST (and so far, only) picture I've drawn all year. I was both too lazy to draw or come up with anything and too busy with other things, although I have coloured several pictures this year before this. With that long break in drawing, I was wondering if I was going to be rusty after about three months of inactivity. But I think this came out alright. Then again, there's no face and little anatomy here, so maybe this picture just wasn't very demanding of the points where I usually struggle. It sure gave me a lot of clothing wrinkles to do though, and I've never felt I was very good with those either. It was a lot of work, too. Now I remember why I got too lazy to colour clothes and started drawing nudes.

I was really bent on trying to get a painted sorta look in my colouring a few months ago, but then my enthusiasm fizzled out and I went back to methods I was more familiar with. I tried bringing the painted look back here 'cause I thought it would fit the overall feeling I was going for here. I like how it turned out, and I think this is the closest I've gotten so far to the look I had been going for when I first started trying the painted look.

I learned a thing or two while doing this picture, though there are things I still don't like. The highlights on the lower part of the robe look weird. I learned a new way to do highlights in general, but it doesn't look good on larger areas that need to be highlighted like the big folds on that lower part. And, unrelated to the colouring, I'm not completely happy with the pose. The hand with the head resting on it...it doesn't look like the head is resting on the hand. I'm not quite sure what I did wrong. Oddly, it looked better on the lineart than with the final colours here.

This doesn't happen too often, but I was really unsure of what version of the picture I liked better; the final colour version or the final colour version with the moody effects (which is this one). I think the moody effects suit the picture better as a whole, especially keeping in mind the look I was going for. But still, after looking at the original colours for the long time I was working on the picture, I found it hard to let those go. So the moody effects are the true, final picture, but here are the original colours.
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