It took me about 3 days to complete this artwork. I present to you a portrait of a girl listening to music with the night city in the background. I originally wanted to design the city with a more futuristic, steam punk like style but decided to go with simple buildings with neon light banners.
While I have been doing Pixel Art for about 2 years, most of my designs are relatively simple ones such as space ships or food icons. I decided it was about time I tried doing something larger than 48 by 48 pixel and this was the end result.
This design has also been uploaded to my Redbubble shop if you are interested in grabbing a t-shirt, mug or sticker.
When it comes to drawing characters, I usually have a hard time getting their poses right. It’s either the body proportion is off or the outcome just look unnatural. Imagine my surprise when I came across Body-chan by SH Figuarts for the first time while browsing around my local game & figurine store.
For those who are unfamiliar with this product, body-chan is a poseable figure released by Bandai. The one that I have here is the female Pale Orange DX version, which comes with more accessories (17 different hand poses, laptop, tablet, flip phone, touch phone, pen, gun and a katana sword). This is definitely a better choice compared to the none DX version which only includes 10 interchangeable hands and no other accessories. There is also a male variation called Body-kun.
The build quality of the figurine is excellent and as you can see from the pictures above, the joints are pretty flexible. There are of course, a limit to how much you can bend the arms and legs which may make certain poses difficult to pull off. However I find those limitations to be few and far between.
To demonstrate the usage of body chan, here’s a short video of me using one of the poses as a template to draw Vicky, a character from my game Def-Op: Codename I.R.I.S.
If you are looking to improve your character drawings, body-chan by Bandai SH Figuarts is definitely worth buying. Before this I had to do a lot of re-sketching because I couldn’t get the pose I wanted, leading to some stressful moments. With body-chan, I can just set it up, snap a picture and off I go to my iPad (that’s where I do most of my artwork).
