#OC Helena Longley

[shinkoscribbles]

Next up on the docket of redrawing old art, this one is @rabbitthewriter 's choice, from 2013!

So this character! Her name is Helena, and she was part of a story called Coloring Medium. The premise, to make a very long story short, is that writing and drawing tools fall into the fictional reality and characters start using them to alter their stories, in the process causing the fictional reality to fall apart (the pen Helena is holding is one such tool). This particular drawing is from the story's climax, when one of the other characters (again, vast oversimplification here) decided to use his tool to turn all of the fictional reality into a copy of his own story and damn the consequences. Hence the blue and black cityscape background!

Aaaand here is the redraw!

For this I had a couple things I knew I wanted to change. Firstly, Helena's design needed to be tweaked, because she is black and her features were very anime white-washed and that wasn't gonna fly. I also wanted to try a little harder to make the background look less flat and uninteresting. And finally, I wanted to make the weird red smudging all over her a little less… vague and random looking. The context is that immediately prior to this she'd found herself in a survival horror setting and was splattered with blood because you know, survival horror.

And here's the two pictures together, 2013 -> 2023

Overall I'm pretty happy with how Helena came out in the redraw! My human art has come a long way in ten years, as has my comfort with dynamic posing and shading. The background I'm not suuuuper happy with, but backgrounds are a pretty consistent weakness of mine that I need to practice more. It does look better than the original, which is still good!