I Have Opened 10 Tabs For This Art For References. I'm Amused.

I have opened 10 tabs for this art for references. I'm amused.

Reading the TGCF Manhua and I once again find myself snorting at Xie Lian's "Ruoye! Find something stable to attach to!" and the ribbon wraps itself around San Lang. Like... yep most stable guy out there. Good job. Devotion like bedrock. Ruoye sees your dedication and applauds you, Hua Cheng.

sometimes i forget that my drawing skills were born from the desire to create pictures of something that makes me happy. even if it's something cringe. like, you used to love to draw your silly ideas!! what happened man

Alright, my lovelies. I am calling this done because every time I try to do something to make it better the changes make me angry because I don't like them. Here is Cursed Sophie!Hua Cheng.

I struggled with how to convey "ugly" for several days until I was reading the manhua and came across the line "What if I look vicious, with out-of-place features, as ugly as a demon, and as disgusting as a malevolent spirit?" And it struck something within me. I got thinking about other media (besides drawing) that might have demon iconography in it and then realized I wanted a mask. So, I started looking into the masks of Chinese Opera. And that somehow got me thinking about The Mask with Jim Carrey (please don't ask how my mind works, I don't even know) and I thought. What about features from an opera mask that have become PART of Hua Cheng's face. Thus, we get the red around his eyes and the big wide nose and the black lines at the corners of his mouth. The articles I read talked about the colors of the masks, but not the patterns. So red is a fairly positive color, the color of the protagonist, the color of someone doing something for the right reasons. Black is for decisive characters. I wanted to go farther, but I couldn't straddle the line between something that stylistic and what I enjoyed looking at. The outer robe is blue in a nod to Sophie's blue dress and his clothing is fairly simple in a nod to that dress. I wanted to bring in some butterfly iconography, but I couldn't get it to work quite the way I wanted, so I dropped it and instead used a silvery gray for his sash. I gave him leather braces to tie into the sensibility that I get from Sophie's costume. And he's shorter than Xie Lian, about shoulder height and a little grumpy about it at the moment.

When my skills improve I think I would do some sort of simple but elegant butterfly patterning in his clothing, nothing fancy, but nice still, and I would try to do a more stylized mask face. Maybe something taking more after a mask like this but with my own twist:

I present the character design I came up for for Howl!Xie Lian. This isn't even the final form! Next, I will work on Sophie!Hua Cheng and then I plan on making some art of them both interacting. This is all due to the post @unforth made about a Howl's Moving Castle AU HuaLian.

I had a lot of fun working on this. It has been ages since I have had the motivation to draw.

Some notes. I wanted to draw on some of the elements of Howl's design without just putting Xie Lian in Howl's clothes. So, we have the big coat, which I view as an affectation of Howl's to make himself bigger and more impressive and dapper of course. This coat has golden chrysanthemum embroidery. I usually pick my emblems for a meaning. In this case, the chrysanthemum is meant to represent nobility, new life, and longevity.

I looked at a lot of pictures of both the Fang Xin Guoshi and Crown Prince eras of Xie Lian to kind of figure out what sort of fancy feeling I wanted to go for. I really enjoy the peach to dusky rose ombre of his clothes and the mint accent was meant to keep it fresh. The touches of white are a nod to the main outfit we see him in in TGCF.

The earring is another nod to Howl's design of course.

I will probably reblog this when I finish Spohie!Hua Cheng.

Golden chrysanthemums? Why not! Wait... how do I draw a simplified chrysanthemum? Hahaha... oh boy 😐

I must confess. I don't know how to draw a cursed "ugly" Hua Cheng. That is what his holding up the Sophie!Hua Cheng art... 😅