Birthday Couple Commission

This is work done for a commission for a friend. She wanted an anime drawing of her boyfriend and herself cosplaying as characters from Valorant - Killjoy and Sage. This would undoubtedly and obviously be a heavy-duty and brain-draining task right from the start because of two things: people already have a hard time recognizing themselves when you stylize their face into a minimalistic art style such as and they're supposed to be in cosplay on top. So I've asked myself whether to keep the simplicity of the style and have the two people be unrecognizable or do the exact opposite of that.

After some consulting, I figured out my friend was completely fine with not having detailed facial features and me illustrating the portrait in a style I'm used to. I got to fixing my sketches and soon after decided to color it. Here's some game geek concept: since she's asking me for a portrait with her and her partner, I decided I might as well spring in a little bit of romance. I happen to know the character - Sage, who is actually a healer. And what better way to make something romantic than to hint at the saintess healing the man's heart? Yeah, that sounded a bit better in my head. But here, see for yourself what I had in mind.

The color scheme stayed more cohesive to Sage's outfit and design, rather than Killjoy's. Because of this, I had to tweak Killjoy's design a slight bit to make the colors work better rather than looking horrendous. I opted for a darker background with light only surrounding the two characters to make them stand out and further set the tone of the illustration. The illustration itself had little complexity and after setting down the anatomy it became a breeze. I used a mix of cell shading and rougher painting, as usual, to add some textures and differentiation between forms, but also to make everything seem less flat and plasticky.

The background itself consists of just shattered rocks to make it seem like their surrounding is chaotic. I don't know about how well that succeeded if I'm going, to be honest, but I don't like leaving my backgrounds completely empty nowadays. I've been learning about setting nice backgrounds recently and now most artworks look pretty bad without them.

That aside, the illustration was accepted well and I got another portfolio piece in the process.