(scraps folder)
Quoted from Mud Scout Julie:
"Also, since Julie would have a humanoid face, I had to once again face my longtime bugaboo with drawing a human-faced character (since previous attempts tend not to look quite right). I didn't try to mimic Ciel's eyes exactly as the anime-styled depictions that make up most of her artwork, but tried to come up with something between that and the eyes I normally draw. Future images may contain further modifications, but I'm letting the large eyes stay on account of Ciel's influence on the design. (Julie's sister Prismi, a Final Fantasy race known as a Gria, has no such workarounds however)"...

I quoted the above to serve as an intro to these sketches. Since I don't often post test sketches (with commissions--those are provided to the commissioner along with the final work) this had to be something significant. This is a set of test sketches for a long-delayed pic of  sollycanthrope's 'Prismi Ryussa', sister of Julie (pictured in the above link), as a Mud Scout. Much of the reason for the delay is, among other things, is described in the above quote--I have no luck getting human faces to look right, even as caricatures. I get 90% of the way there, and something goes off the rails, so to speak.

Sometimes music creates a mental picture that provides a flash of inspiration. That happened late one night while listening to satellite radio station The Goove, an "old school" R&B channel, when a 1988 Alexander O'Neal track I never heard before came up. Before you look up the track in question, remember that I rarely give any importance to the content of the lyrics over the actual music behind them. As such, I was inspired to look through my gallery while listening to it on repeat, imagining some appropriately flashy opening-sequence-style animation to go with the song, when I ran across 'Mud Scout Julie' and something clicked. This was followed by a quick reference look-up and a late-night sketch session which produced the three sketches on the left.

Starting with an attempt at human eyes, I moved on to adapting the canon depiction of the Gria, a race from the Final Fantasy Tactics universe to my style (I've never really tried to directly mimic any east Asian-based art styles). The body was an afterthought, which explains why it was too small in relation to the head. Next up was a side view attempt to place the horns, since I'd need a way to place the obligatory Mud Scout beret between them. Last was the full-body view, since all the female Gria references I could find show that they are nearly flat-chested, but with wide hips, fairly thick legs and small feet. I landed somewhere in-between my style and canon with that one.

The final image that will appear in Prismi's "class picture" is substantially modified from the last sketch on the right, but I'll save the pontificating for that particular image for when its posted.