Cera O'Malley is a human/rabbit alien hybrid from the BattleLords of the 23rd Century universe of tabletop games and comics. I was commissioned by @bl23c to draw her to for his new website, Core Space Homebrew (coming soon). This isn't my first time drawing Cera, but it's been a while and I am really happy with how it turned out. If you want to commission me also, check out my commission rates for single characters.

The Wire Frame

I always start my drawings with a wire frame. I draw an oval for the had first and then a few lines to indicate the middle of the face and the angle the head is turned. I make the rest of the body like a stick figure, using lines for the spine, arms, and legs. A triangle for the pelvis, circles for the joints, and I connect them all together to create the outline or form of the characters. Other lines are helpful guide, indicating where the ribs end, mid-drift, and waist are located. Elbows, when they swing down, should match up to the bottom of her rib cage.

The Sketch

Filling in the details of the character design is a fun stage, and it's perfectly fine to get messy and overlap lines. It's kind of like playing dress up. It's important that clothes fold and move with the shape of the body, else they look flat. I knew this piece was going to have a lot of transparent screens hovering all over the place. The background was going to be pretty dark, so the details weren't as important but I did want it to look busy and messy.

The Line Art

The only lineart I made for this drawing was for Cera herself. The background will be drawn in using solid colors and shapes with no black lines. A lot of it will be transparent anyway, so it would look really crowded it everything was rendered with line art. Drawing the lines is one of my favorite parts of illustrating. The G-Pen in Clip Studio Paint is perfect for this!

The Flat Colors

Because I draw in high resolutions, I turn off "anti-aliasing" so that my line art has hard edges. This makes the coloring stage really easy because I can use the paint-fill tool to click and add color quickly. I do all of this on a new layer on top and I create a layer mask so that my colors don't flow over and into my lines. I really like adding different colors to break up the large areas of color, such as her jacket trim and the blue accent to her fur.

The Finished Illustration

Cel-style shading is my standard coloring style and it's even more fitting since this character is from a webcomic series. I had three folders to separate the background, character, and foreground. Everything is layered and I turned many of them semi-transparent to give the impression of holograms. I also used a lot of oval gradients for glows and an image texture over on top of it all for a final touch.