Hamel with Bread: an anime vs masters study

[magicofthepiper]

This is a sketch of Hamel from The Violinist of Hameln based off an old painting by an artist who is only known by his signature "Rossi". It's a simple painting but I liked it and it seemed like a good piece to practice from. During the sketch process, I was conflicted with whether I should lean towards the manga or the anime canon as inspiration. I started out with anime inspired, with Hamel in Staccato Village, but as I continued, it became more manga inspired.



Part of what made me favor using the manga's canon was the tilt of the hat. I feel that it's important to the composition, so I wanted to keep it as is, but it affects my decision on how I draw the character. In the anime, Hamel's horn is hidden by glamour, but it's a significant part of the character's identification. However, the age of the character presented here might be an issue for manga readers. In my personal revision of the manga canon, I push the timing of the Anthem Massacre of occurring later in Hamel's life, so I don't really mind, but others might.



Changing to the manga does help with clothing options. While the anime tries to appear to adhere to a medival setting, the manga varies greatly in where it draws inspiration. It can visually appear to be set anywhere between the fall of Rome to 1999. The clothes that Hamel wears as a child in the manga look to be from about the 1920s at earliest.



To start, here are my preliminaries for setting up my composition. I have my reference, a higher contrast and gridded copy, and traces, one contour and an anatomical breakdown. I have a freehanded sketch of the character in the pose and thumbnail of color concepts.


My materials for this will be Canson Drawing paper and colored pencils, primarily prismacolor. This will lean towards earthy tones, so I'll use light brown for my base sketch. I start by referring the original, and then referring my sketch, trying to recreate the best parts of each.



I'm going to experiment with this piece with "French Grey 20%" and "Pale Sage" as the first layer of flesh. The green is supposed to help create a more realistic flesh tone. I've had mixed results with the technique.



Remember the days back when "tumblr style" meant the characters looked like they had cold? I still think that adding a ruddy complexion is a sign of youthfulness. The green seems to have blended in well.


This is a series full of blondes. In the manga illustrations, everyone has the same shade of yellow. But there's actually a lot of nuance to blonde colors.


I need to practice to match the right type of blonde and be able to recreate it, but for this piece I decided to go with a pale blonde, composed mostly of "cream" with touches of "goldenrod" and "dark brown".


This might be a controversial decision, but I don't think Hamel's canon black and white outfit was ideal for this piece. I opted to go with red-tinted vest and hat.



Since I was moving away from the canon color pallet, I decided to use brown colored pants. I asked for help from the community with a poll on Anime Amino.


In that poll a user by the name of Howl Pendragon brought up valid criticism that I was using too much brown. Therefore. I decided to host another poll to decide the background.


While no option won by a large margin, absolutely no one seemed to like the brown bg option. Ultimately white seems to have won. I'll be basing the white grunge texture off this image:


Before that though, the point of having a red vest and hat was to help the character stand out against a dark background, now that I'm going with a white one, I wanted to go darker.



So, I layered "true blue" and "indigo blue" over the red. It succeeded in darkening it, but it does leave a purplish hue. This hue does look closer to the canon, but it does bother me because purple is associated with royalty, and Hamel is a very impoverished commoner. Still, it's not as vivid as lenten purple, and creates some impression of mixed fiber, so it's probably fine.



At this point I'm happy with the subject, now to try a background.



I didn't intend to have a shadow, but having a faint shadow should help to create the impression that Hamel is inside somewhere, making the image feel more finished than if I left it blank. Rather than eye the shadow, I used tracing paper to trace the contour of the subject, rubbed grey on the other side and traced the lines again to recreate an outline to fill in.



I then tried to create a grunge background and I'm done.






Criticism:

I need to work on getting used to drawing the head at different tilts. I don't feel like tilted Hamel's head far down enough. It was also supposed to be a simple exercise but it took too long. I should probably practice different color pallets so I can feel more comfortable with manipulating Hamel's black and white colour scheme.

I should also practice interiors. I'm not too happy with the background on this. More practice with interior settings should help me better capture a cozy atmosphere.

But overall, I'm content with this piece.

Any additional criticism is appreciated.

Thank you for reading.