Experiment with line and colour

takes you through his creative process, as he paints a character cheerfully falling from the sky using line art and simple colouring

Sai Foo paints a character cheerfully falling from the sky, using line art and simple colouring techniques.

The painting technique that I used for this piece is pretty straightforward, so I’m going to talk about my ideas and decision-making processes that developed while I was drawing this piece.

I started this image for fun during my free time. I got inspired while randomly watching anime shows one Saturday morning. I wanted to convey a floating or jumping character, on a bookmark-sized canvas. After trying out a variety of poses, I ended up with a female student figure descending from the sky. The biggest headache during the initial stage was the skirt. I wasn’t keen to go down the road of doing what’s widely known as a “fan service” piece, so I moved the left knee a little more to the left of shot. My aim was to depict a character loaded with accessories, so I gathered references for a Japanese schoolgirl’s bag, and added it to my vague memory of what other items my school friends carried around with them.

In one of my sketches the character is holding on to her umbrella. It looked a little awkward and so I decided to separate the hand and umbrella. The reason for including the umbrella was to have an interesting shadow cast over the character, and to depict the effect this had on colours that were now in the shade.