Fan Art: Imitation Nightmare

I recently did this for a friend and fellow twitter follower @bhartsandcrafts. This is her original character Reyn from her webcomic Imitation Nightmare. I enjoyed reading this one and Reyn's a cute character. I drew her wearing a gothic lolita inspired outfit.

Reyn

The character in the drawing is named Reyn -- btw, I keep pronouncing her name as "Rain" and I don't know if that's correct. She's the protagonist of Imitation Nightmare. I read the comic a while back so I don't recall everything that's happened, but it doesn't start out well for her as she comes across a back alley murder in the dead of the night. Things get weird right from the get go for her, and I'll let you go and read the rest.

I've been chatting with Nikki (@bhartsandcrafts) since November of 2015 about doing some fan art for her character since I enjoyed the comic, and I finally got around to doing it, yes, four months later.

I asked her how she'd like to see Reyn portrayed and batted around the idea of a Mori Girl x Lolita style, Gothic Lolita, or Military Lolita. In the end I choose Gothic.

Rough Sketches

This is what Reyn looks like (the character on the left):

When I try to draw a character I haven't before, I begin with rough portraits. Here are a few attempts from January:

I was trying to mix the Mori Girl aesthetic and drawing her all at the same time and it wasn't working out. It lacked the cuteness that I like from her original artwork, and since I couldn't get it the way I wanted, I returned to inking comic pages. A week ago Nikki tweeted me this:

Fanart of Kamiko from @AlbinoGrimby's webcomic This Mortal Coil!#WIP pic.twitter.com/Sd8w88Izl3

— Nikki (@bhartsandcrafts) February 19, 2016

She had done a WIP rendition of Kamiko and I decided to try again.

I asked Nikki for some details, quirks, or characterizations for Reyn and she tweeted this back to me:

@AlbinoGrimby She can be kind of a ditsy/absent-minded professor type - it's circumstantial seriousness, ha ha ;v;

— Nikki (@bhartsandcrafts) February 19, 2016

Without the hangups on what she should look like, and knowing a little bit about her character, I settled on a pose and tried to draw it as best I could. Here's the rough sketch:

I find that if I let something sit for a while and return to it later I can get closer to what I want. The first time you're still trying to figure things out so all the rough drawings are terrible and forced, but after a while, you let all the ideas soak in and the rough bits get smoothed out in your mind and it all works out better on paper.

Once I had a sketch close to what I wanted, I went straight into doing the blacks. Some of the other fan art I've done began with the background as white, and this time I made it black and began etching it away to reveal Reyn underneath all that black. The process is simple: use a g-pen modified to erase instead of draw I can trace the parts to remove and use the fill tool to erase the black part.

The difficult and time consuming part of this piece was, as usual, the Lolita dress. I thought I might leave it simple -- a stripe pattern, but as I began to play with the design in a separate file, it grew in complexity. Here's the flattened version of the dress' pattern:

The design is "This Mortal Coil" and contains images depicting things surrounding Kamiko from the Rabbit and the Moon or from her person. The book (right) originally was not related to Mortal Coil, but Reyn being a book-ish type, but I'm sure I can make a case for it later.

The List

That's the behind the scenes for this fan art piece. I have a list that has a bunch more comics on it which I want to try rendering in high contrast. It's not hard to get on the list, either. Just leave your comic in the comments below and be pleasantly surprised one day when your turn comes around.