Live Brief - Qwertee - Design 5

For my final tee design, I decided to go all out and design something that I believe will be popular with the site's audience (Not that I am entirely certain that it will be though, so we will just have to wait and see once it's put up for voting), and after sharing some of my initial sketches with some of my classmates a little while back, I felt that I just had to go for it. 

The redesign of Batgirl and Gwen Stacy as the new Spiderwoman have been pretty popular news a little while back, and both of their designs were pretty warmly received by their respective fan bases, with I myself absolutely adoring the both of them! Originally, I was going to create two separate designs (One for each of them), but I thought I could try and combine the two of them together instead. Though I can easily separate the designs later on when I put them up for sale on Redbubble.

I was originally just going to do a design for Batgirl alone. It was a pretty simple
concept, where a pretty portrait of her is done, with the Bat symbol framing
the entire thing quite nicely. This was sketched out during February, so when
I finally came back to it, I obviously had a change of plans on what I wanted
to do with my final design.

My first sketch had them facing the side, I realised however that Spider Gwen's (Hehe)
eyes would be hidden away by her hood, and so I had to make some changes.

This second sketch was definitely better, but for some reason I was having trouble
getting their poses to look right. Spider Gwen was... alright, but Batgirl was taking up
way too much space on her side. 

In the end, I went with something that combined the poses from the first two sketches,
their bodies were facing the side more, but their heads were turned enough
so that the details of their faces could be better viewed.

This was where I started painting in the black/darker coloured details then.

 I struggled for awhile on deciding whether I should draw in Barb's eyes,
I was actually really intent on keeping this design as simple as possible, and tried
to avoid any overly detailed shading.

I mean it was a cute idea and paid homage to some of the older Batman cartoons,
but it really didn't work, especially when she is placed alongside Gwen, who doesn't
need to have any changes made to her original design and art style.

The idea of making them both swing in with their respective gadgets came
really late in during the design process.

And so I decided to give her eyes. That covered version just didn't work for me
as she looked so much more cartoony compared to Gwen.

I kept having trouble deciding on what colour the outlines should be too, I was
constantly switching between white and yellow for Barb.

While deciding whether I should giving Gwen a simple fuchsia one, or to simply allow
the white parts of her costume to blend into a white shirt.

Just a little clean up here, seeing that I tend to accidentally use the white brush
instead of the eraser most of the time...

I forgot the cape several times.

Made Gwen's eye mask outlines softer with an airbrush.

And finally...

I really didn't like how the web turned when I first drew it out, so I double checked
on how it is normally drawn by the pros.

And this design wouldn't be complete without a little extra backing.

It was here that I kept going back to the original Photoshop file while I was making up the mockup,
seeing that I had trouble deciding on how the background should look.

By adding in a darker shade, this allowed some details
to stand out better, such as Gwen's shoes.

The final change I made was to give a more distinct shape to the background, with
the background taking the shape of each of their symbols (I mean there's no symbol on
Gwen's costume so I simply went with the original Spiderman symbol,
I also used a different Batgirl symbol to the one that is shown on Barb's vest).

I then showed this version and the previous one to a friend, who in the end preferred this one
as she said that the other one looked like typical portals.

And yup that's about it really! Once voting is done for these last two designs, I will write about my afterthoughts when it comes to brief.