#zanhisa

So I've been thinking about Zanmu a lot since I posted my last post on her and I had the idea to do a Zan/Hisa piece kind of inspired by how I see their dynamic. I did quite a bit of experimenting with the rendering as I slowly learned the wonders of the default gouache brush in CSP and how much texture it gives in lighting and rendering.

My goal was always for this piece to be lit like an old Caravagio or vermeer painting since I fucking love doing dramatic lighting a lot. Some of the values ended up a bit muddy but honestly I kinda like that, it makes the piece feel mysterious and leans it towards a more impressionistic style in a way. I love the way that many older paintings are rendered and lit, and I often look to those for inspiration for a piece.

My sketch started with me just getting the gestures for the poses down, colour coding each figure so I could differentiate them, after this I changed both of those colours to skin tones and defined the face shapes a bit more so they weren't blobs like they are in this sketch.

Here are also the multiple thumbnailing sketches I did in my sketchbook, mainly because I needed to figure out the posing and what the hell I was gonna do with Hisami's left arm lol. I even made an abstract line version of the composition mainly to get a sense of the movement, and the larger sketch on the bottom really helped solidify Hisami's pose in the drawing.

I focused on Zanmu the most during the process, mainly because I knew the way her clothes were positioned would affect the overall look of the piece since she took up quite a bit of the background. I used an old piece I drew of Reimu to kind get the sleeve on the raised arm right since I knew I did a similar shape before, what mattered most was it reading well rather than being super focused on the physics.

Hisami was actually surprisingly easy to do since I usually struggle with making her veil look right, but I'm actually with how I drew it here, it added some nice motion to the piece and I like that. I also made Zanmu's tassles more dramatic, basically surrounding Hisami in the piece.

I fucking love how the lighting turned out. After using the gouache brush in a previous drawing (which I can't show because it's a part of a thingy I'm working on) I thought it would be perfect to use for the painterly vibe I was going for. After I finished all of the lighting on the base, I went in and painted over a few details to make it look more crisp and define some more details in the drawing. I also gave Hisami her red halo that I gave her in an older piece of mine, mainly because I thought it fit in this context. Overall I am really happy with this drawing, and it helped restore some faith in my skills that I lost for a little while.