Creating a piece: Black Lady from Sailor Moon

Hi friends!

Hope you're doing well today. I've got something new to share with you, I thought it'd be fun to take you behind the thought process of how I build pieces! Today we're going to delve into the above piece, the mystical Black Lady from Sailor Moon!

It's necessary to preface this explanation with a fact about myself: I love fashion. For one of my sketch warmups, I was drawing dresses from Michael Costello's spring 2017 line, specifically this dress in the middle. Gorgeous right? (The whole line is pretty drool-worthy, check it out if you're interested!) This is the finished warm-up sketch I did, but I still wasn't over the dress. It's so freakin' pretty, I was compelled to create a full piece around it. What? It's pretty!!!

I started laying down the sketch, keep in mind I wasn't planning on drawing fanart for this piece. But the more I worked the sketch and the form took place, I thought the dress had a great amount of character. I thought it belonged on someone with a strong image, someone who would wear the dress rather than the other way around. That's how the sketch went in this direction . It's like an alternate version of Black Lady's existing outfit since the two dresses are so similar. An haute upgrade if you will. 

The background came forth rather logically. I wanted to place her in an ethereal setting to elevate the image of the dress. Sailor Moon is heavily influenced by astrology, so placing her on a space runway of sorts made sense. Here's the first shot I took at laying down colors for the background. From there I continued building layers, colors, and shapes to help emphasize, not overshadow, her presence. 

Add a few sparkles here and there and that's the finished piece above! 

Hope you enjoyed seeing behind the scenes of this piece! It's not always this well-thought out, but the general process is the same. 

Much love and till next time! 

<3 vicki <3