August Pack is Out & Some Commentary

Check your messages for the link if you were pledged in August.

A quick comment from me about this pack: A big part of the workload on this one went into She-Ra and Tohru. Normally the goal is pretty simple for drawing a character for a pack: bulk them up. For these two, they have a very special trait that made this much, much harder: almost no visual fidelity. It's weird to think of, but the characters are great for animation due to simplification. They have clear "core features" that make it easy to say "that's the character!", but not so much in the face department. This is a weird hurdle to run into. Think of it this way: if you saw your family for Christmas, then changed your fashion style and put on 50 pounds of muscle before seeing them the next holiday, everyone would recognize you. You'd still have your face. But if no one had seen your face and just knew "they wear polos and are skinny", changing your build and clothing would render you unrecognizable. So that was the challenge here: figure out what couldn't be changed, figure out what was roughly "in character" compared to the core design, and then change things to get a bodybuilder.

For She-Ra, it's not quite as bad, but she's supposedly 8 feet tall but drawn like she's 5 feet tall, and her design details shift a lot depending on the reference. I went with the final season design, and adapted things from there. I decided to cel-shade her, give her some 80s He-Man bulk, and some harsh western-style shading to try to sell that it's She-Ra more. Her face is more angular to try to sell the whole "Princess of Power" title.

For Tohru, I basically had to come up with a new character concept altogether. This was the hard one with a lot of redraws and a final "Screw it, I have to get this done. I'm going with this" phase to drawing her. She has no facial features to speak of other than "round" and "sunset lizard eyes", and you could smuggle people in that poofy dress. I could put 70 pounds on her and you'd only notice it in her forearms! xD I tried to design a "sexy maid" outfit for her to get around this and show some muscle, and came up with a face that I hope you guys like...but it's definitely not Tohru's face from the anime. Or maybe it is? It's kind of up to the audience's imagination. Tohru might be a butterface for all we know. This is absolutely "Fudge Tohru" though, an attempt at keeping her core features while making it into something that fits the "this character but a bodybuilder in my style" motif.

Anyways, that's my little blurb on the drawings. No clue if anyone wants to read that sort of thing, but it's here!