Old to New 4: Aiya

On to Aiya in Effenta!  An unlikely hero if ever there was one.  After hearing tales of the UCD (United Champions of the Defenseless) from her cousin, an Officer of the Law, Aiya decides to offer her services.  Her skill set?  Science, chemistry, and a special interest in experimental explosive and incendiary devices.  Has there ever been such a dangerous woman with such an innocent air?

To be fair, it's the intellectual pursuit that fascinates her, and she leaves using her creations to more qualified UCD members - at their own risk, of course.

Aiya is a cheerful, sometimes intense, often absent-minded character, and young.  So the key with her was mixing scientist intellectual with fun loving young woman and communicating this through Effentan dress: a romantic mix of Baroque, Marie-Antoinette, Revolutionary America, swing dancing and that modern me touch.

I both love and hate designing for Effenta.

I love it because it's just so unabashedly girly and frilly and fun - I often look at wedding dress pics for inspiration.  I LOVE the rich look of the dark, bitter-sweet chocolate hue of Effentan skin.

I hate it because laces, satins, velvets, gathering, draping and tucking can be tricky to draw as I envision in my head (designing for men is a whole other issue).  Also, getting their skin to be the dark hue I desire while not losing detail, and placing the highlights just right isn't a walk in the park either!  The last two I've drawn I've had to go back over the skin a couple times before I got the hue and smoothness I desired.

Still, I love the concept and when it comes together I'm just too pleased for words!  Hence Aiya's style didn't particularly change from picture 2 to picture 3.  While keeping the same basic silhouette and color palette, I changed some cuts and added some details to give it a little more visual interest and richness.

I Love how her stockings turned out.  The white colored pencil wasn't popping enough on top of the light gray marker base, so I traced the rose shapes with a white paint pen.  In some scans this gave them a really cool glow, but I chose not to use those as typically the rest of her didn't look so good in those shots.

Picture 1 is actually the 2nd time I drew Aiya, while Picture 2 was my first go.  I included Picture 1 as reference because I couldn't find a scan of the original drawing.  Picture 2 has been greatly cleaned up on the computer.  So for the true original just picture coloring worse than Picture one and you'll know how far Aiya has come!