I want to walk you through the Apple of Mine Eye process from beginning to end. My absolute favorite part of illustration is always going to be coloring hair, and I especially love adding patterns and colors to it. I just find it both challenging and addictively fun. In Apple of Mine Eye, I had more room to really play around with adding textures and colors to the silver hair verses the dark blue. I feel that subconsciously, I was going for a softer mood with the dark blue haired character and really wanted to try my best to add extra touches subtlety.  As for the light silver haired girl, no matter how hard I try I always have trouble when coloring light colored hair. I guess I always find myself saying, “It needs more cowbell! No, I mean, it needs more color, . . . Let me try this!” . . . and in the end chaos! LOL, but it turned out well right?

Any who, another thing that I loved about this work was coloring the characters in contrasting skin tones and trying to figure out the best ways of making them stand out. I wanted to try shading skin using blue and I am really pleased with how it all came out. The effect was really nice. Plus, I like the grey lipstick. It was a nice touch for the gothic theme I was going for. It would absolutely not look good on me, but it works here so I’m cool with that.

Reference(s) Used

The theme I personally wanted was a bats vs. butterflies theme and was also inspired by Ayumi Hamazaki”s cd cover.

Mirrorcle World CD cover | Apple of Mine Eye | Coloring

Ayumi Hamazaki’s Mirrorcle World

Wrapping Things Up!

If I really wanted to be critical with myself, I am sure that this article will go on and on for days. As always, there are things that I want to improve upon as an artist. but, let’s not go there. So, now that several years have passed since I’ve worked on this, I still love this work  so I will leave it here for now.

In the end, prisimchan really liked it and I was happy that everything turned out great. I really want to revisit this work again except with my own character(s) this time and possibly with a different themed outfit. Hopefully, fingers crossed, if all goes according to plan, I will get this done sometime within the new year.

So, until next time everyone, cheers to blissful happy days!