A.K.A. "I attempt to draw a character with armor. Oh, and Sharon grows up."

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Yeah, I'm actually posting a drawing that I made to my main gallery, if you can believe it! While I've been using my FA account to repost lots of commissioned pieces of my characters that other people had drawn (and will continue to do when I manage to get around to it), I still intend to post original pieces here, as well.

Some of you who follow me (or, to be more precise, check my scrap gallery) may know that I've been making a lot of drawings of Sharon in recent months, developing her character and advancing her story. I've had this character for a very long time now (well over a decade, in fact!), but she was mostly just a flat character with very little going for her. Sure, I had ideas on how to develop her, but almost never put them to paper until just last year... like this one.

I've had this idea of a grown-up warrior Sharon tumbling about in my mind for many years now, and last year I finally made a sketch of her portrayed as such. It wasn't my first attempt at drawing her like this, but it was certainly my first attempt that actually looked like I could do something more with it. So I did, all the while making new sketches that focused on developing Sharon further as a character. Soon after, I took to designing her equipment and shaping the character more and more, and I have no doubt that I'll continue to do such past this concept piece. In a lot of ways, getting that sketch down... it kind of kickstarted my desire to really develop Sharon more, and it even motivated me to start sketching out a younger (but still adult) Sharon before she takes to mercenary work (her "Outcast" years, as I've taken to calling them).

Funny how that works.

I feel it's important to note that this design is just a concept, this is not a reference; the design itself is still very much a work-in-progress and future illustrations of this character will most certainly feature changes. Once I become more certain of how things should look, I'll be sure to work on a proper reference that will be a bit more thorough (such as having a back pose, having her wear her equipment, etc.). But... that's still a ways away and it certainly won't be happening any time soon.

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While making this drawing, I suffered from a few major technical issues that brought all progress to a screeching halt and hampered morale quite a bit. The first came when the PSD file I was using for this became corrupted and I was no longer able to access it. I was eventually able to restore the file, but only in a compressed form with all of the layers merged together (including background). Not good. Luckily, when this corruption happened, almost all of the character assets were shaded and complete, so it wasn't too difficult to finish shading what little was left and arrange everything accordingly, though the file corruption did mean I had to improvise a new background.

The second major technical issue (and a major reason why this took so long to complete) was me losing my drawing program. I was forced to wipe my computer a few months ago, as it started chugging to the point where it would crash every five minutes and made it impossible to do much of anything on this thing. The wipe seemed to fix that particular issue, but it left me with no drawing program... Yes, I made a back-up before the wipe, but it was useless without the serial number, which I no longer had. So I sort of went without a proper drawing program for a few, uh... m-months?

...

I am a little disappointed in how this came out. The file corruption issue meant I couldn't really experiment with the colors of Sharon's outfit easily, and I'm still not wholly sure if I want her armor to be a burgundy color or simply a shade of brown. On top of that, the pose is really boring and I regret not being able to draw wearing any of her equipment - I mean, the point of a concept is supposed to just show the design off with no frills or anything, but... well, maybe I can do that now that this concept is done.

I'd also like to apologize for the background and notes looking like a subway map. I wanted to try something new with applying notes while still maintaining a lot of the colors I used in past references, and to keep the concept from looking too boring I tried to stylize the notes with all manner of lines that oftentimes cleverly point to the part of Sharon that is being described. It didn't quite work out as I had hoped, and I feel the setup looks a little too contemporary... and like a subway map. I'll see about trying something different for the next reference.

All of this said, I am glad it's finally done and I hope I can continue trying to developing my characters. For too long, I felt I never really showed that off and was just content with pictures that never told much of a story. I'll probably still make pictures like that, but I'm hoping I'll be able to do more drawings that actually feel like something's happening. I've already been doing that with my traditional drawings (again, see my scrap gallery), but I'm hoping I'll able to do that with my digital drawings soon enough, as well.

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Artwork and character belong to  SilverMelee, A.K.A. myself.