Lisa, a well known Nyonyan in the proud city of Melakat. Her hobbies revolves around gossiping with other nyonyans, making traditional Baba Nyonyan's sweets and stealing precious artifacts....wait whattttt????

Hello everybody~

How is everyone doing? Good I hope. For me....This has been a pretty hectic week with my assignments and all...But hey that's life right, we just have to keep smiling and try to think positive ( trust me a positive mind really really makes everything seems brighter).

Anyhooo, despite my busy schedule, I somehow managed to squeeze in a somewhat last minute-ish entry for a contest hosted by @aranda. A Nekomimi character challenge. For those who don't know what a nekomimi is, it's basically a girl with cat ears....enough said.

Cat ears is something that was made popular during the rise of anime... at least that was what exposed me to this cat girl culture.

IDEATION

My first idea for this contest was fairly simple, I wanted to redraw my first nekomimi character, Lady Poison ( can you feel the cringe). One of my first original characters that actually had a backstory. I created her when I was around 12 years old. The age when I was exposed to anime. The age when animax first came to malaysia's astro.

I began coming up with poses and composition. Ideas began to form and scrapped in my mind.... all of this happened while I was doing my assignment. None of the idea seems fun or practical enough.....

Then it hit me.....

I WAS DOING A 3D ANIMATION THAT REVOLVES AROUND A WORLD OF HUMANOID CATS!!!!

annnnnndddd In our animation we have a couple of scenes that needs a 2d picture of a humanoid cat in the environment. That is like killing 2 birds with 1 stone kind of deal here !!!

So I took the concept from our animation which is Baba Nyonya or Peranakan and humanoid cat and made my own character.

SKETCHING

I wanted the character to portray the Baba Nyonya culture. Something that would make the audience know that oh....this design looks like she came from The Baba Nyonya cultural heritage. So I chose for the character to wear something traditional like a kebaya.

STYLIZATION

I wanted to try something new for the her design. Usually I like to do bold and very pop art style of drawing but for Lisa, I wanted to try a more color blend approach. I wanted to make her look like she's from a painting.

After the base color was done, I needed to put in another key factor to finish of her kebaya look. She needs pattern on her batik skirt. At first, I thought the batik design was going to be the most challenging part since I was never the one that would spend so much time doing detailing stuff.

But for this challenge I was like why not...... and I actually love how the pattern on the batik turned out. It feels like the pattern really fit the her attire.

Last but not least is the touch up part of the scene. The post production. The picking and designing the background was actually the hard part of the piece. The drawing would either be too dull or too chaotic.... But thanks to @hanbun with her suggestion. I manage to find a background design that I like and it's not trying to fight the foreground for attention.

Annnddd TAdaaaa the final product~~

FULL GIF PROCESS

...now my second question is....does this even count as a nekomimi?.....she is a girl.....she has cat ears.....

Oh well~~ bye and see you in the next post!!!

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