Bop Alloy/Yama crossover wallpaper

It’s been a long while since the last wallpaper I’ve drawn: during all this time, I moved on to a somewhat more consistent artstyle and my skills have improved. Not to mention, I’m not restricted to a tiny phone screen anymore, since now I have a proper drawing tablet. So, I decided to make a new background to flex with on as many devices as I could. Okay, fine– AND also to get a sliver of attention from my favorite singer.

My ideas for what to actually draw were pretty vague at first: I initially considered trying to redraw some particularly cool shot from one of Yama’s concerts, but that would’ve probably been a gigantic pain considering my lack of experience drawing heads from more complex angles. In the end, I settled for something much more manageable and that would’ve given the drawing another reference to the music I listen to: a parody of sorts of Bop Alloy’s album Another Day in the Life Of…’s cover art.

The background being split in dark and light halves gave me an excuse to draw two extra variants of the drawing, with the dark one using Yama’s less common dark-blue hoodie and mask. Nonetheless, I believe the “main” drawing with the halves mixed looks best.

Speaking of the background… that sure was a pain to replicate. I didn’t exactly have much to go off of in terms of reference, the cover art of Bop Alloy’s album doesn’t show too much of its background. The light half was relatively easy, since it boiled down to a repeating pattern that I could easily extend… then came the dark half. That was a tough one. I had to open a new file on Krita solely to analyze the wavey pattern from the original cover art and try to figure out a good way to extend it. Fast forward an hour or two, and I finally had a rough replica of the pattern to redraw in a more polished manner on the real drawing’s canvas. To get the dark-only and light-only variants, as you can expect, I just mirrored the relevant background’s half I had drawn and applied some minor tweaks.

There’s a big parallel between this work and the old Gusare appreciation drawing: they both took a ridiculous amount of time to finish. Probably 1-2 months for each, and for mostly the same reason. Procrastination, that is.

On a more positive note, I believe that this drawing works much better as a wallpaper than the Gusare one. No need to do weird crops to make it fit decently on a screen or anything. Another new thing I’ve done here is use a ridiculously large canvas to achieve smoother lineart.

Overall, I’m really happy with this drawing! The fact Yama liked it on Twitter definitely contributes to the feeling.