Ah the first blog,
I think i'll keep this more art related than about my personal life.

Was working on a female character the other evening for the new Youtes comics. Quite impressed with how she came out. Her name is Bagmi. Basically whenever I start with a new character I can usually get the design I like by the third or fourth time. But with girls, it takes me a little longer. Especially when I know them. Now if you go and read the old strip at www.youtes.com you'll notice that there was three other girls that I added to the series from the beginning. Lauren, Alley, and Renee. The problem with Renee, is that I sort of added her into the story just because I knew the person and I thought it'd be cool to have her in there, yet it served no purpose to the story. Alley was sort of the slutty mean girl who would use all the boys to her advantage and then dump them. Lauren was supposed to be the anti Alley, but over time she became just a girl with a beach tan fettish and her passion for soccer died out after the first few months. She just became the butt end of all the bad stuff to happen and she just came out as this real jerk of a woman although in real life she's quite sweet. Out of all the girls introduced to the series from the website, the one that still has the most potential is Alley alhtough Lauren had more comic strip time. Now I thought about it and Bagmi has the potential to work and be successful in this environment with the three guys on crazy adventures. Because she's funny and cooky in real life I can easily bring that to the character and it'll fit better. I need to be careful not to make her out to be another Lauren. What's also great about Bagmi is that she's Indian (from india). Something that I've been having difficulty adding to the strip is cultures and races other than whites but for the longest time Black people would be hard cause they would always come out weird. I hope to change that with the new Youtes.
This sketch took me a bit of work to get something pleasant. Two days of thinking about it how to make her keep her indian traits yet in the youtes style... ouch. Kept starting with the head but it would always come out wrong. It wasn't until I tried drawing the entire body that it finally worked and came together. I love the hair. It's all one thing but it could easily be made amazing in photoshop. Don't you hate it when you do something really neat and you don't have a single idea as to how you did it?
Inspiration for Bagmi came from multiple places. I looked heavily online for pictures of Princess Jasmine, Juniper Lee, and some former characters that I've created before. The pictures were used more as references than guides in order to create Bagmi. The raised eyebrow seems to become more of a common trait among my work. Hope you enjoy