It has been some time since I last published content on my Medibang channel, which has not seen significant updates for quite a while. I recently completed a new drawing of one of the few meme characters I previously created that goes under the name of "Bushee" that was already getting re-designed by me from behind the scenes ever since the last time I transited from Chasysdraw IES (a raster editing program for Windows) towards Inkscape (an open source vector drawing program available for many platforms). I wanted to take advantage of the perks that come with vector formats like .svg files instead of raster formats like .png or .jpeg. Even after switching software, I still think highly of Chasysdraw IES as an image editing program regardless (the person who made it is also a cool guy too! I hope he can continue his work on it).
It was a long journey.. An arduous one indeed, but still.. Many lessons were learned along the way, I managed to improve and re-design this drawing in a way that hasn't been accomplished before. One of the first things I had to understand what was how the original colouration of Bushee actually looked like, but thanks to the recent incarnation of Boshi from the Super Mario RPG Remake, I finally had a good understanding on how this drawing should look in therms of colours (bear in mind that this is a parody character, so any alterations in design are permissable as long as they are made for entertainment purposes). Originally it was just a bunch of lines drawn on a screen, however, as I moved on with learning new drawing techniques, I began to improve this drawing in a way that wasn't feasible with most raster-editing programs.
The current SVG version of Bushee has been recreated from the ground up not just once, but twice. It was a long and constant cycle of reinvention that eventually led to this drawing to look the way it is now. This extensive and ongoing process of reinvention ultimately resulted in the drawing's present appearance. Body parts were continuously created and discarded to see which ones looked better when compared to others. The original Yushee drawing as it existed before was memorable, yet, imperfect at the same time. Not only I had to make my own judgements on what constitutes a good-looking drawing (at least from my perspective), but I also had to understand if it there was anything to improve out of that same drawing to make it look even better than it did before (sometimes I think of myself as a sculptor, I try to make a precise approximation of the subject I'm sculpting before refining all the features of my work).
As time progressed, I came to realize that having just one single character as the main model was not enough for me to finish this drawing so I thought about drawing a vectorized version of Yushee (the meme drawing that first inspired this one) to see if there was anything to re-implement. At first, they were just two different projects, but then I had the idea to combine them into one single .svg file to keep things tidier. Having everything in one project also makes it easier to manage changes, so I won't have to deal with back-and-forth between the two drawings. Sometimes there might be some simple parts that overlap between the two images, so I always look for differences between the two drawings.
Both Bushee and Yushee's drawings reached a stage where there was hardly anything left to change, but I wasn't 100% sure about it. So, I decided to take a break and focus on something different to see if I could discover more methods to make my drawings look good after being exported (the extra efforts eventually paid off in the end). I hope to finish more drawings soon.
Sadly, I haven't quite figured out how to embed SVG drawings on this site yet (they look far too huge to be embedded as single .png files), but if you're interested, here's a link to check out the drawing yourself: