Empire Kiku

Another in my series of portraits for characters five years after their regular designs. I decided I wanted to make a full rainbow of faces for this series of portraits… so the natural next fit for this group was little miss spiritual, all grown up… and in her Empire uniform, for the story where that’s relevant.

The first step was to do a pencil sketch. This was followed by lining the portrait and the frame with archival ink. I used my brush pen on the frame, and my finer 0.8 and 0.5 nib pens for the lining on the subject.

Once the pencil was erased, the image looked like this

Empire Kiku-Another in my series of portraits for characters five years after their regular designs. I decided I wanted to ma

It was then time to break out the copic sketch set!

I used an indigo as the color for the frame as it was a little more complimentary to the greens than using a straight purple would have been.

The design of the uniform that she’s wearing is meant to call on some elements of an Earth Empire uniform, but it’s not identical to any of them. That’s intentional, as this character is at that point of the rp’s story the only lava bender in the Empire’s army. I figured that she would have the authority to more or less customize her uniform as she saw fit. You can see one small extra detail in the pin at the center of her ascot. It’s a White Lotus tile.