Tingyun

Tingyun was the first new character I got when I started playing Star Rail and unlocked the gacha system (not counting Asta who is guaranteed to be your very first pull) and she was instantly one of my favorite designs, so I knew I wanted to draw her right away but just never got around to actually doing it.

Fast forward about a year and half and her new 5 star form got announced, and her design got even better than before, with the pink tails and the red nails and new dress, so this time I couldnt pass it up. Its probably also the first time Im posting a character while their banner is still up, lol. I wish I could this timely more often.

It was still a very intimidating one, which is always the case with characters I havent drawn before but also with how detailed her outfit is etc, so I decided to just do my own take on it instead of trying to make every little thing just like the original. And I also knew I wanted to do something with leg focus because bare legs always look so good with kimonos.

Then she often uses folding fans in her animations so thats another thing I wanted to add, while having it match her kimono. Plus fans are one of those things that always add a lot of elegance and fit so well with eastern aesthetics so yeah, I should just do more of them really.

I think what took me the longest here was to get her face and feel just right. Its always very challenging to adapt a pure anime style into mine, where the character looks more realistic and older, especially when it comes to the lips, while keeping the same feel as the original.

Then there was the overall scene/background which yeah... I just knew I was gonna have to be patient with this one and take it slowly, so I worked on it here and there while doing other stuff. It took a while for everything to fall into place but Im really happy with the composition and colors overall. I do mostly indoors stuff nowadays so this felt very out of my comfort zone but it all worked out in the end and I know its what I wanted to do from the start anyway, an indoors setting just wouldnt have had the same impact.

So yeah glad I finally got it done. Theres a chance I might draw her again some time later since I had some other ideas I wanted to do (probably a nude), but the main challenge is figuring out a good pose and composition where I can fit in the tails in a natural way since they take up so much space.

I also have another Star Rail character Id like to draw in the near future but as always it will be a matter of getting past that initial barrier.

I did end up taking a bit of a break this week to just relax and catch up on some tv shows and all that. I was obsessing a bit too much over every drawing lately, constantly going back and making tiny changes to stuff Id already finished, so that was becoming exhausting. But I should be good to start the year with a bunch more stuff now.