Black Widow (Marvel Rivals) -- Exclusive 12/24

Sorry not sorry, but apparently this is Marvel Rivals month, and we are back at it, this time with Black Widow. ;D

One of the tough things about drawing this character, even with the 3D model from the game, is that the art style gives all the character's these strange multi-toned surfaces. So Black Widow, while at first glance it looks like she's wearing black and gray, actually has all these shades of blue in her outfit. The colors are distributed across the surface of the character like a stained glass mosaic, in these blocky puzzle pieces that don't seem to have much rhyme of reason. These effects seem to be baked into the character's colors themselves, so it's hard to tell what the "flat" or base colors of the various parts actually are.

I also made things unnecessarily hard on myself by fully drawing out and rendering parts of the character that simply aren't visible in the final image. Black Widow here is separated into several groups: Head, Upper body, left forearm, rifle, and legs/feet. The advantage of having all these pieces separate is that I can make changes to them individually without breaking everything else; for example, just before finalizing the piece, I scaled up Widow's legs because they looked too small relative to the rest of her upper body. If she was all in one layer group, that would not be easily done; I would have to copy everything, flatten it, excise the legs out with the lasso tool manually, scale it up, and then zoom in and clean up the edges.

But the problem with this method is that I end up doing a lot of work that is hidden at the end. The right arm, the midsection, and the whole rifle are all fully drawn, detailed, and colored, and while it's nice to have that flexibility to tweak things in isolation, it does take extra time that I could spend doing something else... I think that if I do just a bit more planning up-front in terms of sizing, and in determining exactly what would be hidden and what would be visible, I could cut down on drawing unecessary details. Ideally, considering how most of my drawings are laid out, it's best to have only the head, feet, and the rest of the body isolated from each other.

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My next availability for commissions is in February... Hit me up sooner rather than later if you want one!