Ducky & LeventeII - humanized LBT

[LeventeII]

Hello everyone! Ducky here! Ever since I made the prompts for the 2019 fanart prompt challenge, I’ve been looking forward to drawing this particular prompt!

Green: Ducky123
Yellow: LeventeII


But as things usually go, I kept putting it off (because procrastination is my biggest enemy) until, one day, I saw a message in my inbox from LeventeII asking me to give some advice since I was also going to do anime-style humanization. As I responded to his request, listening to his ideas and plans, I realized that our objective is rather similar and it didn’t take long before the idea was born: We were going to collaborate! Yes, this is the first time someone does a collaboration for a fanart prompt! Pretty cool, huh? Anyways, enough babbling, here’s our entry for the Nov/Dec fanart prompt 2019: Humanization



1. One beautiful summer day, a girl named Ducky went to the pool with her friends to cool off and have a lot of fun.



2. Petrie was her best friend but unfortunately he couldn't swim very well so he merely watched as the girl enjoyed herself.



3. Ducky noticed that Petrie wasn't having any fun so she swam to the edge of the pool where Petrie was watching.

"Come in too, it is very refreshing, yes it is!" Ducky asked sweetly.



4. Petrie really wanted to join Ducky who he happened to have a slight crush on so the thought was mildly embarrassing, especially since she started climbing out of the water to get up close. If only there wasn't this tiny little problem…

"Me would love to but… Me no can swim…"



5. Ducky wouldn't give in so easily though and a solution was quickly found.

"You can have my pink floating ring so you do not have to worry about going under."

Petrie didn't seem too keen at first so Ducky decided to use her most effective charm.

"Pweeeeeeaaaaaase?"



6. Resistance was futile; no one could say no when a cute girl was begging like that and it was no different for Petrie.

"Oh fine, me gonna go for a swim after all…"



7. Petrie quickly darted off to grab the ring and soon found himself playing happily with Ducky in the water. Water wasn't too bad when Petrie wasn't in danger of drowning and with adorable Ducky after all.

We split up work on these. What you see here is entirely LeventeII’s art, I did the character design and sketched the poses we were going to use as I have more experience with anime style and drawing humans (albeit it is far from being a lot of experience ) but I’ll show one example of what kind of drawing I did in the background at the end I also had the leading role in the development of the story, I guess.

I have got some experiences with paint.net, an open source image editing software, which I use for all my digital artworks or projects like the Land Before Time map. Since it isn't as professional as commercial software, I was still optimistic that it wouldn't affect the end result. I was more worried about the fact that I've got no experiences in anime-style before. I had a plan from the beginning on how I would approach the digitization process though.

I was only able to use my mouse, which made things a bit more difficult because drawing with a mouse doesn’t work as elegant as with a pen.


Before the comic became a thing:

Our first obstacle was inexperience so I put together some tutorials I found on the internet and we did some basic practice like “how to draw anime faces” or “how to draw anime eyes” although we never ended up having enough time to finish the plan I made

I was able to use some free time during school (but also during lessons ) to practice the basic shapes of a character. The tutorials which we watched were a great help on understanding the design and anatomy.
I already had an idea for the prompt in December, that's why I talked to Ducky about help, because I wanted to start working on the drawing. We used some aspects from this idea, as you are going to see.


Our second obstacle was, funnily enough, the abundance of ideas. What we’ve drawn is only one scene of many we considered during our brainstorming and even that idea changed many times during the creation process. I had a rather long comic with over 10 panels in mind for example. At least this means we still have many more ideas to work on in the future

We decided to keep one of our first ideas: A scene with Ducky and Petrie in which two opposites come together: Air and Water. This idea led us to the comic idea and thus to the given pool-environment.


Panel 1:

It doesn’t contribute a lot but we simply had to include such a panel. I mean, Ducky being a swimmer would absolutely LOVE swimming even in human form, right? At first, I tried to draw a side view of Ducky floating on the water but soon realized that it looked… odd A lot of hunting for references was done here but, eventually, I managed to pull it off and even managed to learn how to draw Ducky partly submerged

This panel was the first one which I digitized, that means that I tried every technique which I knew to create a panel as good as possible. I decided to use Anti-aliasing for smoother lines. I had trouble with drawing hair in the beginning, but after a few tutorials and about one week practicing, I was able to draw hair quite well, at least if I think about my first attempts in drawing hair...

This was a very special panel, because it contains a lot of techniques and tricks which I never used before. I already mentioned the first one, Anti-Aliasing, which can be hard to use together with colored regions. I didn't think that coloring would become that time consuming! It costed about 10 hours to colorize the drawing, because I could just use the filling-tool. I had to determine the color-regions first.

The second specialty about this panel is that Ducky is partly submerged. It was our idea to draw her underwater-body-parts transparent because then the water would have looked clearer, but it was way too complicated to think about the underwater-parts.

The third specialty is the color-transition, namely the water in this panel. Never did I use this tool, I always thought it was useless, because it is somewhat hard to think about its potential. It actually just fills a marked region with a color-transition with two colors. I decided to try this tool, because the water looked very flat and boring with only one color.

The result was very satisfying and I also added some waves, which created great dynamics!

I decided not to use Anti-Aliasing in the following panels. It just wasn't worth the effort. It takes hours to colorize a bigger-sized image and the result is not that better. But this doesn't mean the other panels were easier to create!


Panel 2:

Petrie, unlike Ducky, is a flyer and thus not very good with water and swimming. This is the main point in this comic, actually. This panel was actually quite easy to do, especially Petrie.

Without Anti-aliasing, but with more color-transitions! I realized that this tool opens fantastic possibilities if it is used properly.
By the way, the number of layers which I used were that high that my number of 8GB RAM were almost reached.


Panel 3:

Excuse me for a moment but “D’aww, she’s friggin’ cute!” This was my favourite panel to draw and I went all out while designing this. Also, I love the perspective here. Imagine that Petrie is looking down to be faced with this adorable face. Could you resist? I couldn’t

As you are going to see, Ducky's given sketch was phenomenal! I was worried a bit that I may not be able to create a digital version of the same quality. But these worries weren't justified, because the outcome became pretty good. I really like the eyes. Oh! I did forget to mention that I still used Anti-aliasing for the eyes in every panel because I think that at least the eyes, which are a very important part in anime-style, have to be as qualitative as possible. I was willing to spend some hours into the eyes, and I think it wasn't wasted time!


Panel 4:

Petrie can’t resist but he also can’t swim. This is a problem! I had a huge block when approaching this panel and I think it mostly came down to the fact that I’m much better with girls than boys

I swear, I spent an entire evening collecting and searching for images of blushing boys and in the end I didn’t use them because I was able to figure it out the day after, after remembering a scene from an anime where a boy blushes and used that as a reference. Way to waste an evening lol.

There isn't much else to say here. “What should I do?”


Panel 5:

This one didn’t turn out quite the way I planned but we were running out of time so I refused to make any unnecessary changes. Ducky is pleading here, now Petrie absolutely cannot resist anymore. The power of cuteness, remember it! :duckysmile

This panel has got the lowest definition, that's why the lines seem bigger. Nothing else to add considering the digitization process. Only that this panel, even though being the smallest, required the most layers (16).


Panel 6:

Petrie gives in to Ducky and agrees to join her. My sketch for this took like 10 minutes to complete haha, was the quickest to do for me, especially since I found a good reference of the pose during my panel 4 search.

As you can imagine, this didn't take very long. Not because of laziness, but because of efficiency! And then our collaboration even became a name: #TeamEfficiency! Well, looks like not efficient enough to hit the deadline.

By the way, since Petrie is a flyer, I gave him an aviator hat. At first, it looked like a swimming cap, but then I covered his ears with the hat, and know it is looking as it should be.


Panel 7:

The great finale! At some point we were considering only drawing something like this, however it seemed a little boring and out of context so the comic idea was born, derived from and shortened from an even more extensive idea that I had. Finally, with some floating help (it belongs to Ducky, I think it's kind of obvious and at an earlier point we were going to draw Petrie embarrassed while using it but then again it felt bad to use the same expression and emotion more than once) Petrie joins Ducky and the two have a lot of fun

We had some last minute issues with the poses and stuff so they look a bit weird. We totally would have fixed it if there had been more time

Oh yes, time was really pressuring us! I mean, we created this panel only yesterday! But we took our time, we even risked to destroy our (only partly working) sleeping schedule.

By the way, I didn't copy the background from panel 2, it just looks similar. I think this can be seen on the grass, but never mind. I tried a tool in this panel which I never used before. I knew it existed, but I didn't have any situation in which I would have needed it so far.

The tool I am talking about is responsible for Ducky's ribbon. I drew a front-view of a ribbon and then I “rotated” it. With some adjustments, I was able to save a lot of time because it would have been hard to draw the ribbon in this perspective at least a bit properly.


Notes about character design:

Ducky:

This comic only brushes the design of Ducky. Both of us were in agreement with each other about most of her features. The most notable thing is probably her adorable blonde hair and her rather cute face with big curious eyes. As for hairstyle, I actually do believe that Ducky would be someone to use a lot of different hair styles and play around with the vast possibilities long hair provides to a girl like her. For this comic series, I chose this open hair with small braids on each side and added some ribbons for some extra cuteness But, generally speaking, I do not wish to give her only one distinct hairstyle.

The second notable thing about her doesn't even come into play here. I do believe that Ducky is a dress|skirts person as it fits her overall cute image very well. I guess an one-piece for swimsuit is also more befitting of her than a bikini. We added the odd gimmick here and there but most of these were Levente's input

My image of Ducky as human, which I made in December, hasn't changed really. It was only a rough idea though. The hair, the clothes, all these things didn't become much different from what I was thinking about. Our ideas of Ducky weren't much different and therefore we were able to agree easily.


Petrie:

We didn't have a 100% matching image of Petrie but generally speaking we managed to find a good design we could both agree to I think the glasses and brown hair are obvious features that just scream "Petrie" if you ask me and those were things we agreed on readily. I gave him a rather round face too (I actually dunno why exactly, might be due to my image of him being derived from a character from an anime I like lol) but I still don't know exactly what eye-style he should have (we were always able to get around it with the expressions chosen xD). While I can draw girl's eyes rather well, boys are tough for me

I think our biggest difference is that I didn't picture Petrie with a hat on his head. As for hairstyle, I also have it a little bit different than shown in the comics but those are compromises I was quite ready to make, yep yep yep

Clothes would be rather casual or nerdy for Petrie, nothing fancy or the like.
 
Petrie's hat was one of the things which were instantly in my mind when I thought about an idea for this prompt. My view was that it would perfectly fit him as flyer. I imagine how he loves Airplanes and other aviation technology like balloons. Petrie's hat was,together with the “Big Water” sign, the only idea which I really wanted to include.


Future of this project:

This is just my personal opinion but I had a lot of fun doing the humanization project and I definitely learned a thing or two about poses, Anime style in general and, in particular, perspective as a few of these panels actually apply rather interesting and unusual perspectives. Having someone else to work with gives a whole different motivation and drove me to do a lot of work in the span of barely two weeks. Due to the vast amount of ideas we had (only using this swimming pool setting, mind you) I am positive that we will be able to draw more of these without the pressure of a deadline and perhaps with improving methods and experience

At the very least, I wanna draw Littlefoot and Ali too LOL. Whether future projects will be joint projects or single pictures submitted by only one of us, we'll use this thread for our humanization concepts and drawings in the future, yep yep yep

This project was a great experience! It was very difficult sometimes and very frustrating, especially the fact that we just couldn't bring our pictures, which were in our mind, at the paper. but the positive feelings were much bigger! Not for a moment was I thinking about canceling the project. It was a lot of fun and and really worth the experience. It let me go deeper into the world of animes, and even watched my first series. I really felt the drawing process itself and I'm satisfied with the result and it was great to draw together! 


Time taken:

For me, I'd probably say between 20 and 30 hours if we also count the many hours spent on coaching and researching poses and what not. I probably spent less than half of this time actually drawing

Since my task was it to digitize the comic, meaning visualize the ideas, it took a lot of time for me. Only the first panel itself took about 15 hours, but mainly because of the fact that it was the first panel and because it contains Anti-aliasing which needed enormous micro-managing. After that, ever panel had an average creating-time of about 4 hours, some less some more. Thus digitizing took about 39 hours. If one took the time of practicing and watching tutorials into that time, it would get over 70 hours easily. But it was fun, even if I didn't have much time left for other things 

I am more than motivated to draw dinosaurs again, but I think I will keep on anime characters too! I wonder whether this project improved my drawing skills and how it affected my ability in drawing dinosaurs. 


I hope you like our little project, please let us know what you think

[Ducky123]

Just wanna add my best sketch so you get to see a little bit of my work too Also done digitally on ArtRage light

[Mumbling]

It is really cool that you worked together on this prompt, and the story you guys developed is pretty cute! In terms of humanizing the LBT characters, I can totally see Ducky as a girly girl as well. It makes sense for her to do stuff with her hair, though I'll be honest if I say keeping two braids on the side of your hair isn't very realistic

As for Petrie, I honestly thought it was Spike at first glance due to the color of his swimming trunks. However the rest of his character design makes perfect sense for Petrie.

I'm personally not a big fan of the anime art style and I don't feel like I know it well enough to give any helpful comments on that front. I just want to complement the amount of effort and time you put into this and want to say it is cool you make it a group effort

[Ducky123]

Thanks for the feedback.

It is a hairstyle I've seen while browsing through Google in search for cute girl hairstyles though the braids might not be correctly sized or placed. It did bug me too but I'm just glad Levente was able to learn a technique to draw them digitally to begin with. Drawing braids is tedious and you can see on the sketch I made that I only scribbled them pretty roughly. The way we ended up drawing them probably looks a bit weird yeah but the hairstyle really exists.

I thought Petrie was pretty obvious haha. Would Spike really be so thin?

That's very fair for you to say you can't give any critique here. Anime style has a lot of unique ways to express feelings and emotions and it likes to exaggerate. Unlike with LBT art, I'm at a stage with anime style where I begin to realize when something looks off but not everything could be done in the time frame we had. Besides it was Levente's first time even using the style so I didn't nitpick on anything. I feel nitpicking should come when someone has learned the basics at least so they can understand better why certain parts need fixing.

[Flathead770]

The scale for this prompt is pretty crazy! It was impressive enough that Stardust went and did 2 drawings for his let alone the 7 you guys tackled! It's also awesome to see a collaboration with this as well! Your thoughts and comments on making each frame was insightful and interesting was a nice touch too.

I agree that the character designs are a good fit for each character. Not surprising that Ducky's eyes are the standout feature here as I know that's something that you've practiced quite a bit Ducky. I would say that it would be nice to see more detailed eyes for Petrie as well but the way it is actually fits his original look better so that makes sense.

I don't really have experience with making any large scale digital artwork so I can't say too much on that topic, but based on the sketch it looks like you did a good job working on the transition Levente!

Awesome job you guys! 

[Ducky123]

Thanks a lot Flathead

I know Littlefoot will get proper eyes and same for Spike whenever we get around to it. Indeed I'm quite good at drawing female anime eyes at this point but male eyes are different from female eyes and the issue is this doesn't really matter for kids but it still kinda does so I have to balance the "making the eyes cute and big because they are kids" with "but it shouldn't look like a girl"

[StardustSoldier]

Wow, nicely done, guys! This was certainly an ambitious project. Thanks for sharing it with us.
 

[Ducky123]

Thanks for the compliments

[StardustSoldier]

Is this something you guys would ever do more of in the future?

[LeventeII]

Of course!  We already have got a storyline, we just need some more time which is the most important factor actually since we know what we want to draw. This project will continue, that's for sure! 

[Ducky123]

One day it will lol like pretty much anything I put my mind on. I have finals to worry about and a lot of anime practice drawings to do before we can actually get serious here

Right now, I have several ideas but no time to try them but perhaps it will make up for the lack of content that I share some of the ideas|random musings?

Let's see...

We definitely have a few more scenes planned for Ducky and Petrie, they're going to be great! I am thinking about how to improve the designs though. As for Ducky, I'm not sure if I want to keep the current style for her. It's cute for sure but I think it doesn't fully capture her character. I am toying with the idea of using the character Alice from Kiniro Mosaic (a very moe slice of life anime series  )



As for Petrie, he's basically a mixture of both our ideas how he should look and as a result I feel like he looks a little wonky. His base design is also derived off an anime character from a series I love.




Littlefoot & Ali

These two are on my mind a lot these days and I keep pondering how to draw them. I generally prefer drawing girls (because they're cute, boys usually aren't (in my opinion)) so I rarely get to draw boys and as a result I kind of suck at it on a very basic level that comes from the sheer lack of experience with the subject. There are a lot of styles I could use for Littlefoot and I suppose it'll have to come down to me just trying a few one day and having people help me narrowing down what styles might work for him. Generally speaking, I have an image of a boy with somewhat messy hair in my mind, a boy that naturally has a kind and upbeat aura.

Kinda like this (guy walking in front, Jintan from Ano Hana)      Tomoya Okazaki from CLANNAD, a bit old fashioned in terms of style though
or this

As for Ali, my biggest problem is trying to draw her in a way that doesn't look like a 100% rip-off of the anime character that inspires my current vision of her. Because, let's be honest that she is really adorable. Shy, kind at heart and yet determined to fight for the things that are important to her. That's how I see Ali anyway and the characters design would represent that imho.



I haven't yet done a lot of thinking about the others yet.

Cera would obviously have either a tomboy-ish look or lean more towards the bratty side of girls (wearing hot pans, ripped jeans and stuff like that) oh and short hair.

Spike should be somewhat younger of course but I'm not entirely against making him a sort of big brother for Ducky who's just huge and super chill. Just like Spike 

Chomper would be even younger than Spike but old enough to talk and all. That's about all I have.

Ruby should be a little older than the rest, probably the only one in her teens. I have no ideas about her clothes or haircut though.

[RainbowFaceProtege]

Aww!! You guys' versions of Ducky and Petrie are so cute, and the story is super adorable! Squeeeeeee

[Ducky123]

Thank you