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For my third entry into
the Topsfield Fair Fine Arts display, I decided to go for a different style of
digital art. I wanted to show off several of my original Lucids characters, and
I was at the time fascinated by a Playstation 4 game I had never played: Persona 5.
For those unfamiliar
with Persona 5, while the game does
use typical anime-style art, there’s a recurring motif throughout the game of
2D imagery in black-and-white, often shown on a single-color background
(usually red). It’s a striking style, and I thought combining such dark shadows
with bright simple colors would make a striking image.
At the front (and
furthest left), we have my mascot: Sakura Miyazaki, also known as “Crescendo”
when acting as a Lucid. And we can see her matching her skirt color to her
dress because, in my quest to make her look good but not too busy in terms of
color, I decided giving her either a red skirt or a teal skirt would be best
for the design, and I wanted red (a rebel’s color) to be the dominant color in
her design. I also had her readying her Newmoon power as the black disc in her
left hand.
Meanwhile, behind Sakura (but further ahead), we have several of her Lucid
friends and allies popping out. Next to her is Ken Thunder, leading the charge
with a sword in one hand and lightning in the other. While Ken considers
himself a hero, he does enjoy being able to fight Dream Pirates. The other
three characters are ones I mentioned on this blog in past posts years ago, but
I’ve updated their designs in some ways. From closest to the front to furthest
in the back, we have “The Nocturne”, Mike Anacle (maybe change that to
“Anakell”?), and Wendy Krane. In whatever stories I run through my head, Sakura
and Ken are the stars, while these three are more supporting characters.
One thing to note: the colors I show here may not be the colors I use for their
designs now. I just wanted to emphasize a color scheme of simple, distant
colors in this image.
Below them all, we have
an audience cheering on these “Stars”. While “Lucid” is the catch-all term I
use for these psychic superheroes, I have been debating for years on what to
call the good guys. “Dream Guardians” is a bit of a mouthful, “Dream Police”
sounds unintentionally sinister (especially in the past few years), and
“Knights” could be a little confusing when some of these characters don’t fit
the image of knights, even if it was supposed to be a play on “night”. For now,
I’m settling on the term “Stars” for Lucids who protect the Dream Dimension and
those who enter it. “Stars” also kind of helps for the crowd at the bottom of
the image cheering these Lucids on – an audience, if you will.
Unlike many of my other digital art pieces, this one started as a pencil drawing. Then I photographed it, uploaded it into Photoshop, and I inked and colored the picture in Photoshop, using the original drawing as a guide. Looking at my sketch again after a while, I’m surprised how closely the lineart I inked matched the original drawing. Often, when I make the sketch in Photoshop, I don’t apply the lineart exactly along the lines of that sketch, since I’m just making the rough shapes. Maybe here, I had a more defined picture already, so I could follow along more accurately.
Sadly, I haven’t nailed down the actual stories for these characters in a written form, but this picture has since become one of my personal favorite pieces. 2019 seemed to be a good year for my artwork in general. Next week, however, while I will talk about the next year where I submitted to the Topsfield Fair, this one’s going to look… significantly different.
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