Real to Digital

Here is a side-by-side of my most recent real-media-to-digital picture, since I just talked about doing it.  The image on the left is my unaltered original sketch, ballpoint pen on lined paper.  The one to the right has been altered.

The first thing I did was convert the raw sketch to black and white, altering the blue levels so that the notebook lines almost disappear (if you look closely they are visible in the altered version).  Then I added a color layer underneath my sketch, and a shadow layer over it.  A blah textured bg came next that I don’t particularly like, and last I added the shadow words and copyright.  Voila.  So essentially the end product is the same pen sketch that I came in with, just with more bells and whistles.

Building a Better Ahadi

This pretty much sums up my opinion of the TLK6NA design for Ahadi.

I think it’s ugly, boring, and not creative.  I see his coloring as a putrid mixture of toilet-fillings: diarrhea, vomit, urine…etc.  Other than the colors there is nothing to make him unique, and that’s frankly a uniqueness I could have done without.   Mohatu and Choyo (the “selfish” lion from “The Brightest Star”) each had defining characteristics that made them more than just Mufasa and Scar clones.  Even Udevu and Laika, Simba’s aunt and uncle from the comic “An Unusual Chorus”, are spectacularly hairy.

Ahadi is one of the only two subcanon characters I consciously modify from their published forms.  I think that there is enough leeway for me to do this because the textual description of the character says that he “had a long black mane and bright green eyes.”  Putrid-illustration-Ahadi does not match this.  I find it really unusual, since generally the TLK6NA illustrators have a keen awareness of all the characters in the scene, and pay attention to details like “Ni is a scruffy lion covered with dirt.”  Though I do suppose I have never seen mention of coloring in TLK6NA, so maybe that kind of actual visual description was beyond the artist.  Whatever.

In any case, along with adhering to the 6NA text my fanon Ahadi has:

1. Golden coloring – partly because gold/black is not a color on any movie canon lions, and is more visually appealing (to me) than the other mixed Scar/Muffy combination orange/reddish-brown.  I was also influenced by early fanart designs for Ahadi.
2. Outlander characteristics – because outlander lionesses are so booooring and I didn’t want Uru to be one of those, so I gave the dark hooked nose, angular features, and claws to Ahadi.  This also fits in with my origins for him as a “desert lion” – I have a detailed explanation for why these characteristics help Ahadi and related lions operate better in the climate (i.e. dark eye surrounds absorb sunlight, like grease on a football player’s face or the tear-stripe on a cheetah).
3. Fwippy mane style – Mostly to make him different from other canon lions.  Inspired partly by concept art for Scar and also by the classic “superhero” forelock that springs from the front of the hairstyle.  The sideburns also come from that concept art.
4. Goatee – Because Nuka had to get one from somewhere, and Ahadi, as his double-grandfather in my fanon (the father of both Zira and Scar, his parents) had to have significantly contributed to his genes.

So, I decided to come up with my own design for Ahadi because I hate the illustration version,  if I hate the design, I will not draw the character, and I wanted to draw Ahadi.  Simple as that.