Sakura CG WIP - Translating Sketches to Completed Work

For this WIP post I thought I'd focus more on the process of creating character CG, since everything else has been focused on the scene CG.

Going from sketch to completed work is likely a lot more work than people think. I mean, it makes sense to think so. Since with the sketch done, the idea part is over. You just have to do the same thing but more detailed, right? But that's not quite how it works. The sketch phase is about more broad ideas that then need to be refined, and as things get refined, they may not make sense. There's also a lot of instances where something looks okay and made sense in a rough sketch, but then looks bad when it starts to get fleshed out and needs to be reworked.

I'll show what I mean with Sakura.

Here we have the concept sketch for Sakura.

We can see she has a ponytail, straight bangs, a necklace with a pendant, and then a fairly basic off the shoulder dress with a waistband sectioning off the top and bottom parts. This looks fine as a sketch. It gets all of the primary elements and shapes across. You can tell what everything is supposed to be. 

But it's lacking a lot of detail. For example, we don't really see the folds of the clothes and the necklace is extremely undefined. There's nothing to tell what the necklace is even made out of. Is it a chain? Is it silver? Gold? A rope necklace? And the pendant is just kind of a blob. Is it meant to be a jewel? A locket? How is the pendant connected to the necklace? Then looking at the dress, how is it being held up? How is a dress like this supposed to fold and sit? There's also the basic block for the hand. The fingers are meant to be sort of fanned out, but how is that actually supposed to look? All these things need to get fleshed out when working on the actual lineart. When it comes to things I've never drawn before, it requires a bit of research. Which happens very frequently. I have some reference books for different types of clothing and jewelry, so I flipped through it to see how I needed to flesh out the design.

And here's what I ended up doing.

Starting with necklace, I decided to make it simple. Just a basic rope-style necklace with a square pendant. I'm currently planning on making it gold, but I may end up making it pink instead. I put it in the shape it's in so I could do either one and just do which ever looks better.

Then for the dress, I added some frills to where it's sitting on the body. I found some other dresses that had the same kind of design, so I thought that would be the best way to do it. Since it looked a bit odd just as a line. Then There was also a bit of bunching up around where the sleeves connected to the frills, as well as some folding where the dress connects to a waistband like this.

Then the hair was a bit of a pain to figure out. In the sketch, it just looks like a fairly flat almost perfectly round shape around the head. But when I did that, it looked really bizarre. So I added a random strand on the left coming a little bit off of the head, to help sell the effect that it's hair instead of just a big lump on her head. Then on the right side, I added a bit more detail in the side bangs so that it wouldn't be just a solid round object. In the sketch, the ponytail is also filling in the area between her left arm and body, giving the effect that her hair is spread out quite a bit and is extremely long. So here I added some hair ends between the arm and body to show where the hair ends. That way it doesn't appear as long. Since doing super long hair in scenes can be a bit of a pain. The longer the hair, the messier it needs to be towards the ends and the more space it needs to take up. That's why I designed Sandy, Ayako, and Kaori with short hair. They'll all have more scenes than most women, so having them with long hair would have made making the scenes a lot more work. And I'm really trying to be as efficient as possible with my time on this project, so that at least the initial version gets released as soon as possible.

Anyway, back to Sakura. Another thing that I changed a bit was her expression. In the sketch, it gets the idea across, but when I replicated it in more detail, it looked kind of like she was doing a sort of condescending laugh. So I softened her smile a bit. 

The coloring also comes with it's own set of challenges and decision making. Since while the lines give a basic idea of how things are, there's still a lot that needs to be conveyed through the shading. Like the direction of the light, how far and how deep the folds of the clothes are, and what colors to use to emphasize different parts and create more focus. Usually in these I emphasize the boobs by adding a bit more detail, because that's what people generally want out of these anyway.

All of these decisions and research takes time, and it's not something most people are really aware of, so it's just something I thought would be interesting to talk about. I hope it was interesting lol. Now back to finishing up Sakura. She'll be posted later this week along with her character description and inspiration and all of that!