My First Erika Drawing

Hey, lookit this! An actual hand-made drawing! I haven't done one of these in, what, ten months? So yes, this is Erika, my alternate fursona. She's a country gal, often seen wearing her cowboy hat, preferring cute clothing over hot clothing. Despite being a bunny, she doesn't have perfect eyesight, nor do I. We're both near-sighted and need to wear glasses. I've never drawn myself wearing glasses before, I know, but this is the first time I felt confident enough to attempt it. Erkia's physic isn't perfect. She's just a tad plump, though personally, that's the way I like girls. Interestingly, she's a few inches taller than myself. Her breed isn't entirely certain. After some research, my best guess is that she's a french lop, with patches of brown fur at various places. Someday I'll maybe do a reference sheet of her, in which case I'll be repeating a lot of what I just told you.

Now, about this picture. One of the reasons I stopped drawing is because drawing took up a lot of time. Look through some of my pictures, and you'll notice a bunch of them took multiple hours to do, especially the ones with backgrounds. By the time I finished some of them, I was so glad to finally have them finished. My attention span just can't handle so much work.

In my previous picture, I mentioned that I had fun using MS Paint to draw. And this is true, for small images and spritework. But I wanted to get speed out of my drawings, and I can't get speed in MS Paint. Least not without it looking like crap. So I decided to attempt some traditional drawing again. And to speed up the process, I tried to avoid turning back and fixing mistakes, as that's often a big timekiller for me. The result is actually not that bad. Sure, it's far from perfect, but it's still better than any of the pictures from early in my gallery.

The tough part was the coloring. I had a dilemma on my hands. On the one hand, coloring on the computer would be faster, but I'm not sure any of my digital attempts looked that interesting. Using colored pencils would look better, but coloring like that takes a while, especially in the case of backgrounds. And doing a rush-job coloring would just look like crap. Or would it?

Well, that's what I chose to do. The end result on paper didn't look that bad, actually. But how would it translate once scanned onto the computer? Well, I got me a new scanner (CanoScan LiDE 25), 'cause my old one was crap for various reasons (plus I couldn't get it working on my new computer, anyway). And what you're seeing here is pretty much spot-on to how it looks on paper. I'm quite impressed.

I may do my art like this from now on. Dunno, I might do a comparison between pencil-colored, computer-colored, and left as a sketch down the line. But to me, it didn't look as crappy as I was afraid it would. The end result:

Lineart took ~20 minutes
Coloring took ~25 minutes

And that's fine by me.