I’m sure most people who have a holiday don’t immediately make a warm up project that is A Lot but I did!
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You’ll have likely seen the colour wheel meme going around on social media where people ask for characters to match the character on the wheel but I didn’t want that pressure so just did my own characters… And then I wanted to animate it in a little GIF form so you can easily see the upside down characters…
Before realising that’s 8 characters you have to draw DO you silly thing. Because I was aiming to go with the animation that did mean that I was therefore deliberately going to limit myself to make this easier to do… And THEN I decided to make them approximately the correct height relatively. I am a fool.
This post is about to get LONG so be warned 🙂
First off this was all inked with SAI’s binary tool. For those that don’t know what a binary tool is, it’s basically a tool like MSPaint’s pencil tool.
A tool that doesn’t do any anti-aliasing to blend in with other colours or transparency like you’d normally find in art apps these days (such as the brushes option in paint, or how nearly all my art is done:
This comes with it’s own challenges but also it’s kind of fun to play around with a tool that literally only exists as “On” or “Off” (and that’s why it’s called a binary tool!)
The final limitation was palette. I didn’t want to make a GIF a pain by compromising on colours so I made the final choice of only the 8 on the wheel, a black, two greys and a white. So 12 colours! I know GIFs can have up to 256 colours, but less colours to use, the easier the optimisation is for a smaller file size.
Anyway all that aside, why was (or even “who are” for some of the more unknown ones) these characters chosen for each colour.
Red: DarkOverord (toy)
Probably not a surprise there, DarkOverord is red! Specific choice of the toy was just
I wanted to draw them lol
Orange: Marcus Fukuyama
While Marcus is mostly browns, they are more orange earth tones. While I use green to contrast, it’s just eyes and leaves.
Yellow: JOS
Now this one may come more as a surprise given JOS not only has a lot of green on him, it’s also that specific lime green colour! However JOS’s fur is actually tinted yellow-brown (like Tails, wow I wonder how JOS came to be). You don’t often see JOS without his clothes to really show off he is still mostly “yellow” so here’s an image from 2014
Green: Malrak “Mystery” V’ragn
You don’t really see Mystery as much (I only gave him the name Malrak last year so it’s going to take a while for me to get used to that lol), mostly just with Simon because he’s Simon’s primary partner so here’s them in 2020 (featuring ancient sprites):
Yes Simon is short but Mystery’s also 7’1″/215cm. He’s obviously not lime green normally, but again, limited palette haha.
Cyan? Light Blue? One of the Two Colours: Lucernaz Occassus
A character who has not had colour since 2008?????? She’s kind of a character that kind of bounced around and never really got anything so this was an opportunity to decide some colours for her. Eldest sibling of the Occassus sibling trio (Herself, Congeria and DarkOverord in descending age order) with a penchant for ice magic (though she’s decent at magic in general but she still breathes fire like her brothers). One day I’ll get round to writing more about her but here’s my spreadsheet full of characters for the Occassus siblings.
Blue: Ferris BruBat
No surprises there. That blue is basically Ferris’ blue. He’s right though, why IS everyone tall? (it’s because he’s short)
Purple: Adjuro Simul
A four armed 9′ tall magical construct in the shape of a tenric. All its alternate colours are purple so that’s no surprise there either. It has shown up before so I won’t go in to much detail here but you can find out more in other posts!
Pink/Magenta: Annai Siru
This one is tenuous. I know. Annai’s white not pink but I shade them with pink that counts right?????
I don’t have any pink characters, it’s not really “my” colour persay so I just avoid it :B