I'll be re-watching this live stream that was recorded a bit ago and seeing how my process
went we did a live stream about character design other designing characters based off of objects
we got a few requests but the dragon fruit I think was my favorite one because the dragon
fruit has so much you can work with right there's a lot of shape language there's a lot of colors
very vibrant colors that I don't tend to work with and also like I heard dragon in that name so I was
like I might as well design a tracking character that seems like appropriate it's called a dragon
fruit because it looks like dragon scaling like right and I really wanted to play off
that I really wanted to create this dragon-esque character so again keeping the really simplified
chibi proportions in there very similar to the first few characters that I did I wanted
to create this over exaggerated smaller dragon character and my first thought was like okay
I see the shape within the dragon fruit itself I see a lot of these scaly kind of bits but there's
leafy bits that you know most people would be like oh it's scales I wanted to create those
as horns and I wanted to let that go through the hair as well that was mostly where I was
thinking that was what I thought of for the shapes and then as the wings came around I was
like I'll give her these like really unrealistic looking wings because I wanted something really
stylized it's not like a dragon fruit has wings so maybe her wings aren't actually functioning wings
either so I made them these kind of fun little vestigial wings but I wanted to make sure that the
shape language of the actual dragon fruit wasn't lost so I gave her a bit of a tunicy like skirt
thing and I let that echo throughout the entire body so I added a bit more of that patterning
to the end of the tail as well but yeah so the same deal with the other characters I wanted to
keep these lines a bit rougher so I could move a bit quicker throughout the entire thing if you'd
like to support the channel and the creation of free arts education become a member on patreon
the dragon fruit itself by comparison to the gummy worm character the dragon fruit is very sharp it's
a very sharp looking object to eat despite it being a fruit it's a rounded fruit but it has
a lot of sharp edges and I wanted to keep that within the design so I was like okay I will make
sure that these lines also feel very sharp edge so I kept in a lot of my sharp edges a lot of
my harsh intense geometry that comes with my line work a lot of the times and when the coloring came
around this was the tricky part because I don't tend to work with very very vibrant colors and
the dragon fruit is a very very vibrant fruit it is this bright this bright bright pink with
bright bright green leaves that are at the ends and like despite those two colors it technically
they're not exact opposites but they're very very close to being complementary colors so working
with that these two extremely bright colors was a challenge because I'm like I don't want to
blow anybody's eyes out um so I need to figure out how to make these colors work together like
obviously they work together because the dragon fruit itself is beautiful but within a design
I didn't want to make it too intense you know what I mean so I needed to really think of how
to balance these colors back out so they're not super super intense and what I went with
was instead of them being completely saturated and like everywhere I made sure that the balance
of each color was present throughout the entire design and I would desaturate it I
would re-saturate it so on so forth like the horns I kept as green to mimic the leaves but
I kept the skin tone like a skin tone color not an inhuman one to add a neutral back in there
from the hair I think is the part that I kept the brightest I kept the hair in the tail the
brightest sections of this entire design because I wanted those I wanted the brightest sections
to be present within the extremities of the body so that was the hair the tail the wings
the wings especially really had the extremities nice and bright and I also still wanted to have
the seedy texture present throughout so I'm like where am I gonna put that I'll probably put that
at the underside um and I'll put that in an area between the wings so it's somewhere where it's not
too centered and I could just have it at the edges of the entire design you can see a lot when we hit
the end of the design I started to struggle with the colors because I didn't want to just keep the
entire thing you know skin toned completely I want to add in a bunch of um extra little flavor into
the design itself so I was like okay I'm not gonna keep the entire design just skin tone I kind of
want to add in more dragony elements but the arms and legs I struggled with a lot I was like okay
how are these colors gonna work um at one point I think I asked chat I was like okay what color do
we like more here because I I couldn't figure it out and then chat was like oh what if we had like
the nails like black so that it mimics the seeds we switched it to black nails with the pink so it
kind of resembled seeds within there and I was like that's a pretty good idea so it resembled
that sort of like fruity motif so I'd never be afraid to ask for a second set of eyes when you're
working with a design because that's really really important join a virtual class to learn live from
our professional artists get creative assignments individual guidance and real-time feedback on your
artwork start today and level up your practice if you learned something new like and share this
with a fellow art nerd if you love receiving quality and free arts education subscribe
if you enjoyed this video here's a couple other videos you can check out next