Every time I update my portfolio I inevitably go back to these two pieces of Ikaruga fan art. There’s still various old versions of them floating around the internet on different sites. In general I don’t like revisiting old work, but I seem to have developed an ongoing relationship with these two portraits so here’s a quick post to document how they’ve changed over the years:
Starting in the top left, this is the original from 2008. It looks pretty goofy to my eyes now but I remember being proud of it at the time. I forget when the change to the top left version but the bottom left is from 2017 and the bottom right is from today. The outfit and a lot of the pixel clusters in the hair remained untouched, in the first update I was concerned with increasing the colour count and refining the shading, then the final two updates I focused on trying to fix that blank expression.
In 2020 I managed to reduce the colour count and add some more interesting colour ramps in to the palette.
Is it finished now? Who knows how I’ll feel 10 years down the line…
I must’ve been pretty happy with this one as after the 2008 original I only made one update until now. It was a much better piece from the off which had more of a sense of character from the off. The second update just adds more colours, contouring and lots of soft edges. I’ve fallen out of love with that style of very soft aliasing so for the final version I hardened up all the edges, cleared up some ambiguous volumes and pixel clusters on the neck and ears and reduced the colour count and reworked the palette. I also tweaked the expression, took out that slight smile, but stopped short of a full scowl.