Fire and Ice

So, here's the latest project for my Illustrator class, which was simply to do an illustration of a character. The professor said I couldn't use any of my existing characters, but I could use multiple characters, and I've had this idea in my head for quite a while now, so I found the perfect opportunity to actually make this. As per the requirements of the class, all work was done entirely in Illustrator, having consumed much of my time over the past week.

This concept actually came one winter when I noticed how bright everything was at night with the Christmas lights on outside and after the snow had just fallen, and how dark it was by comparison once the snow had melted, which of course is caused by heat. This quickly gave the idea for a contrast image of two characters: a sexy fire girl and a cutesy ice girl. I later expanded the concept to give each girl a corresponding animal, hence the iguana and polar bear.

The fire girl turned out more or less the way I originally pictured her: tiny flames popping from her hair and skirt, a jet black outfit representing the snowless nighttime landscape, and having said outfit as just a top and skirt to further accentuate her trim physique. Speaking of her physique, ~KITAJIMA-Art-Lab's site was once again a big help, particularly while I worked on her arms, and overall I tried to mimic the style of artists like *oh8 and ~MattBozon. One change I made to the outfit was that I originally had her wearing closed high heels instead of the open shoes that she has in the final image, then decided the open shoes would suit her better. Another change is that her ponytail started as one single curl, but then I realized it'd look too similar to the girl from Disney's version of Hercules. Finally, her pose is loosely based on this pose on Posemaniacs.

The ice girl was more conservatively dressed than the fire girl (and thus more appropriately dressed for the cold weather) right from the get-go, though I originally had her with shorter hair and wearing earmuffs instead of just a headband. I decided to make her hair longer because the short hair would've made her rather old-looking. The idea for the sparkles in her hair, representing the sparkly appearance of freshly-fallen snow, came later on as I was working on this. After showing this to fellow students, it appears that the ice girl is the more popular of the two.

As for the animal characters, the iguana was originally going to be more of a chameleon-type lizard and didn't have sunglasses. Likewise, the polar bear was at first a seal, but later changed it to a slightly Pixar-styled polar bear cub to avoid making it too Pokémon-ish. Believe it or not, there was a point where I was going to leave out the animals and just have the two girls, thinking that the animals would just kinda be there.

Well, that's enough chattering on my part; feel free to comment on which character you like better.