Finally an interesting page, or at least, an interesting page that will be interesting for someone who is not me.

In addition to an appearance by my one character Captain Jackie, this is the first appearance of an old character of mine, Princess Ball.

Princess Ball is a character I came up with a year ago. Initially I just wanted to try and do a series of drawings of women who had their figures obscured by a sphere encircling their bodies. I think it was meant to be some sort of statement of against the same basic shape, general hourglass figure maybe, to build a female character. Honestly I can’t even remember what my original intention was for those images (Nor why I was attempting to do something with such a distinct artist statement attached to it, usually that’s not my style) but I got side tracked by my own doodles.

The drawing of a woman wearing the sphere caught my imagination, I found the silhouette very interesting and so I wanted to expand it to become an actual character. I think the idea of the sphere/ball-shape conjured an idea of the circus for me, can’t quite recall, but after a few doodles the idea being Princess Ball, a circus-clown Princess took form. I imagine that Ball’s people, other circus-clown ball people, can turn themselves into their ball body and bounce around. Possibly inspired by the Popples, which I used to watch as a kid.

After designing Ball I completed a turnaround of her which I put in my portfolio. However while making the turnaround I realised that Ball’s long hair somewhat obscured the view of her from the back, in addition to obscuring her silhouette from certain angles, making her poses read less better.

This page was primarily me trying to experiment with Ball’s hair, trying to understand how it works. I entertained the idea of shortening it, styling it differently, and just trying to see if I can play with her poses enough so that her hair falls in such a way that her silhouette becomes stronger.

I have more drawings of Ball’s hair that I’ll post next time, and explain a bit more about my thoughts behind her hair, and ultimately why I think I’m sticking with how it is now, despite finding a different hair style that helps clear up her pose a bit. Nothing is set in stone mind you, but I think that for now I’m still going with keeping her hair long.

Also, pointing this out primarily to myself, but the two doodles in the top left corner of the page, the top most face belongs to my Cinderella character, while the bottom face was me starting to think about what Ladon and Tanis’ daughter would look like. Obviously I was playing around with Captain Jackie here too, before Ball’s hair took my attention away.