Domain Expansion: Malevolent Bakery.

Ending this 2 week long art break with style, aren’t we?

This is the first of what I can only assume to be many drawings stemming from my newfound Jujutsu Kaisen brainrot, and I believe I really outdid myself with this one.

So, besides the apparently magical properties of taking a break for a couple weeks, I think what made this turn out as good as it did was not really trying to reference any of my past works - a pretty bad habit of mine that I believe holds me back when I could otherwise experiment more with style and whatnot.

I just kinda winged the whole thing, with only a frame from the show’s second season as reference for the hands, and a couple shots from the Ultra Trailer MV I kept alt-tabbing back and forth to - I didn’t add those as references on the canvas because I wanted to avoid directly referencing frames from the MV, I feel like that just makes me wind up tracing said reference without even realizing it.

As you might’ve noticed from the (unusually for my works) tall canvas, I wanted to play with composition again here, but in hindsight I’m starting to believe the canvas could’ve been even taller to make more room for the baguette and improve its sense of scale… but I guess I’m just nitpicking now.

Another thing you might’ve noticed coming from most of my other stuff is all the smooth and glowy effects. It’s not something I do usually at all (if ever, until now?), since I find these effects to be kind of a pretty risky move. On one hand, they can really elevate a drawing and it sense of polish, but on the other they can look extremely cheap if the base drawing isn’t already solid on its own (talking about lineart, etc), so I’ve used them extremely rarely thus far, especially as much as I did here - that’s a first for me!

I also believe I treaded dangerously close to the line between having a good number of effects, and excessive visual noise, but I think I stopped adding stuff just before that could begin to turn into an actual problem.

That’s an oddly positive art post for this site’s standards, so let’s bring the post back in line by going over a couple problems and other nitpicks I have with this work.

• Something I could’ve left cooking in the oven for a little longer (no pun intended) is the baguette - it could’ve used perspective to enhance the sense of scale (together with, again, an even taller canvas).
• As per tradition, clothing folds and wrinkles are still pretty much entirely gut feeling, not backed by proper theory knowledge. Then again, that gut feeling has definitely improved to some extent over the past year or so, seeing as how the clothing dynamics don’t look distractingly wrong, flat or anything.
• This one’s a classic: the head and especially the drills hint at a higher-up camera facing slightly downwards, but the body doesn’t reflect that. Again, I don’t think this is noticeable enough at first glance, but it’s something I should work to avoid in future drawings regardless.

I’m really, really glad such an experimental drawing on so many levels (hand focus, rim lighting, tall canvas, eyecandy effects…) turned out so well! I just hope this sudden, random success won’t be balanced out by sudden inability to draw decently until next year.

Now that I think about it… sudden, random, impactful… we could even call this, like, a Black Flash. Heh, Black Flash, get it?

…that’s it, I think my hands are gonna be shattered by some divine intervention so I don’t type out any more forced references like that.