Azul

Or 

Here for now.

Her name's Zara. She has a band. She sings at night...

...

IDK. I just think she would get up there to get a cool picture for an album.

So, I took a small break from commissions and comics to make this. See, recently a subscriber here made me notice that there's not really an "Entry point" for my characters and lore. I guess I had the notion that anyone following me or subscribing would be familiarized with them to a degree. So I'm working on getting the back stories for them, mostly stuff I have already talk about or shown in a piece but also some new stuff, so there's a place to begin and I started with Zara. 

And I was sketching a bit to make something new that could go with the post so it's not only the old ref sheet again. I also did a sketch that could work for a new ref sheet but I don't know if I have the time to remake the 6 (and more) of them again, though it wouldn't be a bad idea due to the style and character changes.

The point here is that one of the things I drew I really liked enough to actually finish tough more as its own thing than for the info dump, and here it is!

I wanted to give it a bit of a winter Mexico city vibe. The days end earlier, the wind the solar lamp going off as soon as the sun starts setting. 

And I especially wanted to do something out of the blue. I have a tendency to use very warm colors in my lighting and Zara tends to get hit by those due to the contrast. It took me a shameful amount of time to learn to change the lighting specifically for her. But this being a solo Zara piece I can design the whole palette to work for her.

The background is inspired by a real life location in Mexico City, the pedestrian bridge in Vaqueritos. A really tall and long bridge over an intersection that is more like three bridges meeting in the middle. Though this one isn't the same one. Is shorter and simpler in its design.

While not obvious here, another thing this piece is doing is helping me get into the Christmas mood, with all the winter vibe and all that.

I know it's early! But turns out I just discovered this week that I finished all my Halloween stuff to early this year, and in México we don't have Thanksgiving and while we do have Revolution Day in November, we don't really do anything for it, we usually get all our Patriotism out on September so Christmas is the only thing left this year lol.

I'm figuring out what to do this year. I know I'm gonna continue the Christmas series from last year because there's two ideas I left loaded in the barrel and I still want to use but that's gonna be more secondary.

This piece was done completely on Procreate so I'll be posting a Time Lapse Video Later