Makima

Makima, character from Chainsaw Man.

• It's been ages since I last make a long art post, so I apologise for not following the same format — Honestly, I forgot how I usually write in my blog and decided to change it up a bit.
• Hope you don't mind me sharing some personal stories and short ramblings beforehand!

Alternative Version
(Pandora Voxx colour palette inspired)

Last year, I met new friends from an online bootcamp and I enjoy watching anime and movie nights with one of them. At one point, we were watching Chainsaw Man for the first time and we enjoyed the series together.

Out of all the characters, Makima stood out the most and I can understand why she's popular. However, my favourite characters are actually Denji and Pochita, mainly because Denji looks like my human version of Edge and I sympathise with them from the first episode.

After that, the moment I saw Makima and how she acts in the next episode, I knew and had a feeling that she has "Monika vibes". Basically, her character design reminds me of Monika (from DDLC) and I don't really need to explain anything if you know who Monika is without me spoiling either of the franchises.

Last month, Illousteri (on Instagram) requested me to draw Makima when I opened art requests in my story. Of course, I immediately recognised the character and drew the sketch earlier before drawing other drafts for a possible upcoming future event. Unfortunately, I got spoiled when browsing for reference images of Makima.

---

Step-by-Step Progression

Regardless, I was very happy with my early draft and finally picked it back up this week. During the whole month, I was struggling to draw everything in an extremely large canvas size because I've been planning to hopefully sell this as an A3 print and other various fan merchandise.

I had many downs during March until one of my favourite artists, KarakureRia (kr_krr6 @ Instagram) is available for art commissions — which made my (birth)day awesome after receiving their art as my new phone wallpapers, giving me the motivation to continue drawing.

Also, if anybody checks out their art, you might be able to notice my (sharp) cell shading art style I've been using since 4 years ago was inspired by them!

During the progress, I had a very hard time colouring/shading (anime) hair because I've been drawing skeletons for far too long. Even my friend who watched the anime with me mentioned Makima's hands look a little too skinny, which I didn't realise halfway through the progress as I'm used to drawing skeletal hands.

---

Original Version (no details)

Shockingly, even though I know it'll take up more time to work on a larger illustration, I overestimated how long I spend working on it. It took me close to a week to finish — over 20 hours total with the last 6 hours spending time on the background and final adjustments!

It's been an awful long time since I used my photoshop skills to make such a simple, yet astonishing background that feels nostalgic. I'm also surprised at myself how much I've improved from last year and I feel like a professional digital artist for a moment.

Of course, it's not perfect and I had been very hard on myself to clean every little detail as possible, which leads to my insecurities, self-doubt and my biggest mistake of wasting so much precious time on minor details.

It's unfortunate for me to do, but sadly I have to put my watermark over this illustration because people are luckily going to use my work without my permission. And of course, the watermark will be removed when I sell it as prints and many more!

Lastly, I want to mention that I'm slowly becoming a multi-fandom artist instead of strictly being a scifell artist. While I love scifell and skeletons, I do have many other fanarts I want to draw as well as drawing other people's OCs again — otherwise, I won't be improving my art skills just from drawing skeletons alone!

External Links: Artfol, Instagram, Pixiv, Tumblr, Twitter