Honored One

“Throughout SynthV and UTAU, I alone am the honored one.”

This drawing marks the turning point in my JJK+Teto dual brainrot art: I’m no longer making these as self-contained shitposts, but as stepping stones to reach the honorable goal of recreating the one video that singlehandedly compelled me to watch two whole seasons of an anime I had never heard of. AND a feature-length movie on top of that.

I initially intended this to be just a quick doodle or whatever, but evident lack of self-control turned this into a full 4-hour drawing.

This one went pretty differently than usual, seeing as how I winged pretty much the entire thing without much reference, nor a lot or wireframing - the best process really is no process.

The scarce usage of reference here actually gave me some unexpectedly great results with the Teto’s hair. At the time of drawing, I barely remembered how I standardized it in my style, but I tried to go off memory regardless. That, coupled with my unusually good state of flow while working on the drawing, resulted in a really nice, messy yet “puffy” look especially on the twin drills, something I really doubt I would’ve done entirely intentionally.

As for color, Eleakuma’s influence carried on from the last JJK-themed big drawing over to this one. I committed more thoroughly to a lighting style more similar to theirs this time - or at the very least, what I tried here was washing out, hueshifting and brightening highlights more than usual.

Now, the eyecandy effects: like last time, I gave the highlights some slight blur. A way to use blur that I feel is fitting in my style and that I’ve settled on so far, is to overlay the blur on top of the hand-drawn highlights: this preserves the crunchy, aliased look of my current artstyle while also allowing me to use blur to enhance highlights and whatnot. The best of both worlds!

The final experimental touch on this drawing was the usage of a Burn layer effect over the whole thing, with its color set to an extremely dark yellow-orange. That served to improve the contrast while also giving a boost to those warm color tones, kinda doubling as an integration pass.

…what’s that? Oh, my bad, I made this post sound too positive again. Well then, time to make up for that by relentlessly bashing on these 4 hours of work!

Teto’s face looks… odd for some reason? I can’t quite put my finger on it - it looks fine enough when zoomed in, it just looks off in some way when looking at the zoomed-out drawing as a whole. Probably has to do with some of its lines (especially the mouth) defying perspective. Speaking of the face, something I instead really like here is having those slightly longer shadows on the bottom row of teeth, it’s a small touch but it really sells the 3D-ish look.

The hand looks weird too. I seem to have completely missed the part that “connects” the thumb’s side of the hand to the side with the rest of the fingers, and this just makes the hand look really off.

But those are nitpicks compared to the background - my old process for those, dating back to this year’s Daily Doodles, is undeniably showing both its limits, and my own general lack of background practice.

Overall, even with its flaws, this is another drawing I’m really happy with. I feel like I’m starting to reach a consistent amount of time to finish a high-effort drawing like this, which is around 4-5 hours. Could I get any faster? Absolutely, there’s still a lot of time I waste redrawing lines over and over again from time to time. But just as confidently, I can also say 4-5 hours is a typical amount of time per drawing that I’m very much satisfied with.