In march I tried to complete the "Magical March" Art challenge, which has a list of prompts, each for one day of march, to which I had to draw a Magical Girl. As a lot of these Prompts were clearly inspired by existing Magical Girl series', I decided to ditch Fanart for the most part and focussed on creating Magical Girl Outfits based on the prompt.
I only managed to follow through with about 20 of the prompts, 15 of which got colored in digital.
The Prompts I followed were Day 1-15.
- Favourite
- Pokémon
- Sun
- Moon
- Stars
- Pet
- Flower
- Dessert
- Fruit
- Music
- Royal
- Sailor
- Warrior
- Fairy
- Mermaid
So I tried to create Magical Girls inspired by these prompts or themes. However I quickly realised that the challenge was especially in making them look like Magical Girls and not like... well something else. Then again, there are only few finite guide lines in what makes a magical girl, and even these have been toyed with in the past. Especially Fairy and Mermaid gave me headaches, as I ended up drawing a Fairy and a Mermaid, but it would be hard to tell from the images, that they are anything else than just that.
To me they are failed attempts. But I learned from them in regards to design and illustration choices. A lot of these images do not clearly communicate, that these girls are in fact Magical Girls. Instead they might as well be Girls in Fancy or Crazy Outfits. So next time I tackle such a design challenge, I will have to thouroughly break down, what makes e.g. a Magical Girl recognisable as such, in a single image.
Finally I think the reason why I feel like these Magical Girls are failed illustrations, is, that most of them are not shown within the context of being indeed Magical Girls. A character sheet or a transformation sequence would have been a better format for me to deliver them. Rather than the square images, which I made, because I used the same sketchbook as I did for last year's inktober.
For now I won't do any challenges, I still have webcomic pages to draw and plan and there's a lot of university work left for me, waiting. However, I'm hoping to be able to maybe post a bit about our Animation Showcase next week. We are planning on giving it the theme "Animation in Wonderland".
