Hey everyone! Actually, I’ve been pretty obsessed these days with my project -you know it, Friends- despite my schedule (I make an illustration once a month) even though I wasn’t planning the composition for my next drawing. More likely… um… won’t tell because spoilers. And during the meantime, I thought I would post some original art before this series came to light.
So, Friends actually originated from an improvised drawing of a random character (and that character was about to be Tadashi) I made during this spring. It was about to be just Tadashi himself, with a bunch of skits. Then, when I took the project seriously, the series was about to be called “Tanuki Boy”, but later I rejected that title because I thought it was too focused on Tadashi.
These were some of the original designs (man, I should’ve kept Osamu’s hair as the original, maybe I’ll redesign him the next illustration LOL).
I changed Tadashi’s hairstyle to make it a bit more spiky so it could adapt himself to shape language (I’m still a beginner with it btw!). Osamu and Mei back then weren’t supposed to be twins, but changed it so I thought that would make the story interesting, the idea being influenced by a concept of The Lion King. I mildly redesigned Mei’s hair because hair is tricky, and I wanted to improve at it.
Oh! And about Chika, she was a scrapped character, along with an unnamed male one who’s appearance idea suddenly got blank in my head when I had to design him.
Also, the reason why they have no clothes on (don’t worry, no nudes) is because I struggled a bit with the school uniform. Fortunately I solved that problem.
andddd, some misc drawing I made while the original concept still stayed.
