Guys Deltarune has kinda taken over my life

I made a Shanghai doll as a prop for an Alice Margatroid cosplay I'm working on! I'm not too comfortable posting pics of myself so it isn't guaranteed that I'll post pics of me, but I just wanted to show off the work I did on this doll because I'm really proud of it.

So the main dress itself is made from three components, a thrifted blue doll dress that I fixed up so it fit the doll better, a skirt I made myself, and an apron fastened to the waist via one of those clasp button thingies I forgot what they were called (but dear god did they save my ass while making this). The material for the skirt was something I thrifted, and the white parts of the outfit are made from an old pillowcase and my grandparent's old curtains. The lace was also thrifted and the ribbons were from one roll of that cheap craft ribbon you can find at a dollar store.

Her shoes are actually a pair of Monster High Shoes from Draculaura in the Scaris city of Frights line that I had since I was a kid. I just converted them into a pair of Mary Janes (or as close as you can get with the base shoe I had) with black elastics. These not only serve to make the shoe fit the style I wanted, but also to keep the shoes from falling off whilst walking around during a convention. I know there are other, more elegant ways to achieve this sort of look, but I have never made doll shoes from scratch before and I'm of the "think smarter not harder" mindset so i thought this would be the simplest solution lol

The thrifted dress I used to the top layer of the outfit gave me the most issues because it was falling apart and not the right size for the doll. What I did was sew some lace on the sleeves on another Ever After High doll I had in order to get this specific shape. IDK what you'd call those kinda sleeves in fashion terms but they form this bell shape after being tightened at around the elbow so idk how to describe it properly.

The shawl was made with the same materials as the apron for consistency, and I hand sewed the lace because I really need more practice handsewing things lol. Once the buttons were attached, I sewed on a little bow I made on top so it looks more like the actual clothing Shanghai is depicted in. Guess which one I did earliest in the day based on the lighting LMAO

The base doll I used was an EAH Apple White doll I also had from when I was a kid (so the hair colour situation sorted itself out, I just didn't wanna cut any bangs despite Shanghai usually having bangs in art), and she's actually gone through three different repaints in the past. For the faceup I used some soft core Prismacolour pencil crayons and found that they worked really really well! (and of course did the whole, spray the face with spray on sealant as a base so the colours actually fucking stick to the dolls face, blah blah blah, if you've seen at least one doll repainting video from any of the big name Doll customizers on the internet you know the drill, if not uuuuuuuh I do not have the brain power to explain all of it here, not am I proficient enough with the hobby, I am an amateur at the very best lol).

Don't ask me how I figured out the bow on the back of her hair, the thing is being held together by thread, a sewing pin, and hopes and dreams.

So I figured out how to change my phone ringtone and notification sounds and immediately wanted to theme my phone around Deltarune because I was so hyped for Chapter 5. I legit used a ruler to make sure that my ratio for this was big enough and it worked pretty well so I'm happy about that. Flowery's boss fight annoyed me so much mainly because of how clunky the mechanics are to get used to. I feel like it would have been more interesting if throughout each fight with one of the six flowers, they used their soul effects on you (i.e. Blue makes you blue, yellow makes the soul yellow, etc), where each fight introduces each mechanic, and then the Flowery fight makes you switch in between each soul mode during each attack somehow idk it'd probably be even more clunky but ooooh my god I wish we could have gotten more chances to acclimate to the orange soul's playstyle becaue I struggled SO HARD- but yeah other than that I liked the mechanics of this chapter a lot. Also I love Mew Mew, I love her fight so much, Petal Dance is my favourite track of the chapter because of those BEAUTIFUL ZUN-PETS YEAAAAAAAAAAAH- (I was literally thinking during Aqua's fight, "wow! these bullet patterns feel very Touhou-" AND THEN THE ZUN-PETS KICKED IN AND I WENT FERAL. Speaking of feral, the moment Flowery showed up I hissed like a feral cat the moment he said his name, he pisses me off so much I LOVE HIM, he's such a professional ragebaiter. I really enjoyed Chapter 5 overall, and while a lot of people aren't that big a fan of the tone of the chapter, I think it works with it being the last "fun" adventure and is also pretty good juxtaposition to... something that happens in this chapter that has genuinely made me physically ill thinking about but tickles my morbid love for existential and psychological horror so much that it makes this game feel like a large scale psychological experiment, no joke.

Anyways, onto the art. So I wanted to try doing actual lineart for once after using the chalk brush again. Despite a few stray lines here and there, I'm actually pretty happy with how this turned out. It's a different sort of style and feel compared to what I usually go for, but I enjoyed changing up my style for this one. Choosing an actual colour palette was really difficult, but once I changed up my process and added the actual foreground and background I ended up really liking it. I was inspired by the Kingdom Heart's Stained Glass art, so that influenced the composition of the piece a lot. I'll also put my sketchbook doodle for this piece in as well, because there were a few changes in terms of Kris' design along the way. I made Kris' cape cover up the entirety of their chest because I genuinely did not feel like drawing their torso and also because I liked how it looked a lot. I really like making Kris' cape big and flowy because there's just more oppurtunities for posing and compositions that way. I also just really like drawing fabric, it's so fun. I may not be 100% satisfied with the way the pose reads, though I blame that on the fact that I've been looking at this god damn piece for way too long LOL-

I REALLY REALLY wanted to incorperate the blue roses Kris is associated with into the piece, and this ended up making me think about Kris' backstory again. So, blue roses are genetically modified versions of white roses (which thinking about it now, calls to mind the whole "copies are monochrome but you coloured us in with care" thing) and this got me thinking about theories like "Kris is the vessel we made in the beginning of the game." I'm not 100% a follower of this theory, but a part of me also believes that Kris is tied to Gaster in some way. Another idea I've had is that Kris was experimented on by Gaster in the shelter, or that Gaster is PLOT TWIST! A HUMAN! And is Kris' biological father that heard about the prophecy, had a religious psychosis about it, can did scientific experiments on his own child to try and create a vessel for them in the shelter, to which Kris escaped and was taken in by the Dreemurrs. Their dynamic would probably be something like, "no matter how much you hate me, your are still my child," and a lot of Kris' childhood was Gaster focusing on making Kris a strong enough vessel for us, the player (I wanna make another post and/or art piece talking about this so I'll leave it at that). On that note, I believe that down in the shelter, something similar to the determination experiments is going on down there, and if Dess Knight is true, then those experiments are what caused her to turn into the Roaring Knight. This is also why Friend is similar to Endogeny, they're also an amalgamate, alongside the knight (who noticeably drips darkness goop when we first see it in Chapter 3). I don't have any solid evidence as I don't know all of the lore, but I just wanted to talk about some of my ideas here.

IDK why but I tend to really struggle with using bright fuchsias and hot pinks in art. Maybe it's just because I tend to gravitate towards certain colour pallets or I just don't like using super bright cold colours. I had this issue with the last piece of Deltarune fanart I made where I just didn't like how the pink of Kris' cape stood out, and my one gripe about that piece is how monochrome it looks. I think improving on my colour range (like, the kinds of colours I use, IDK I just made the term up) is gonna be my next thing to work on because I do wanna try branching out to colours and pallets I normally don't use.

I was also listening to Penumbra Phantasm a lot while working on this piece, and while a lot of people thought it would be the final boss theme, idk I always saw it as being Kris' theme weirdly enough. Maybe because the original version of it is played on the piano or I just really like Kris and think they deserve a cool-ass theme lol. I do think they'd take after their father and include the game over leitmotif in "Faint Courage" because I think it really fits them. I was even humming it at certain points while listening to Penumbra Phantasm and it actually works really well in the key of the piece. If I were to ever compose a musical piece for like, a battle theme for Kris, I'd probably throw in a leitmotif or two from Heartache to represent their connection to Toriel, using Penumbra Phantasm as a base, and then using the Faint Courage leitmotif as well. The main instrument would probably be a piano because I think their love for playing the piano should be reflected in any potential boss theme they get.

You'll also notice some changes in how I designed Kris' armor. Like many aspects of my art style, the way I interpreted Kris' in-game armor was inspired by Yoshitaka Amano's work on the Final Fantasy series. My headcannon is that Dragon Blazers is the Deltarune equivalent to Final Fantasy, and the aura that Amano's works give off just feels like the kind of aura Kris wants to exude. Like, they'd fucking love the fact that their armor looks like it came straight off of some Dragon Blazer's box art, so they have every right to aura farm.

I like how the blockyness of their cape ended up contrasting with how intricate their armor turned out, and I also loved rendering their hair. One thing that I've started doing when doing the lighting is having it almost reflect off of the armor to emphasize how shiny it is.

So the process of figuring out Kris' armor started in my sketchbook. I found a bunch of references of how Amano designs armor and tried to sort of capture the vibe they gave off while drawing Kris' armor (also Noelle as a bonus, I'll be honest I'm still trying to figure out how to draw her in my style as well). I also wanted to give them some silver hoop earrings because that just feels like something Kris would wear all the time.

In some of my initial drafts for Kris' armor I gave them long sleeves but found that the short sleeved look just worked better for Kris (also is more accurate to their in-game sprite) and also fit the vibe I was going for (I'll put some of those initial sketches in here too). The one I did in colour was like, one of the first drawings of Kris' dark world form I did. You can also tell these are old because of how wack the anatomy is (also bonus Ralsei, Frisk, and Friend). In these older sketches I gave their cape this collar that I stylized by making it a triangle, and even tried giving Kris some chainmail but I was never 100% happy with them. You can also see where I started trying to take some inspo from Early final fantasy designs with Kris' armor. I'm also really really bad with markers so please pardon the shitty colouring. Weirdly enough I have an easier time with Kris' in-game palette traditionally than digitally idk. Originally I was going to give them a heart-shaped chest plate but I'll be honest I couldn't make it work digitally. Also, I do not CARE if the long ass cape is impractical, it's fucking cool as shit and it lets me have fun with Kris' silhouette when drawing them so SHHHHH-