The Panda and The Boo

Sooooo I haven’t done an art dump recently, life’s been hitting me with the ‘I IZ BLOCK, U NO DRAW’ stick.I’ve got a few things I need to work on aside from the comics (I haven’t forgotten your drawing Moo!) and hopefully will be able to get those done soon!

So I’ve been watching The Legend of Korra lately. Like, a LOT. I ramble about it a lot too, and I’m pretty sure Boo is tired of me fan girling all over it. As I post this, there’s still episodes 9 to 12 of season 1 left to go, as it’s currently airing, and 12 episode of the second season (I’m hoping they’ll release it soon, because once the first season is over I’ll be experiencing major withdrawal symptoms…).

I’ve watched Avatar: The Last Airbender a few more times since I first watched the series with Boo, I love it, but there’s something about TLoK…. Maybe the fact that it’s slightly more mature and has some darker themes, or the fact that this time over the Avatar is female (and she’s a total BAMF.).

So anyway, I was hit by the inspiration stick two nights ago, and trusty graphic pen in hand I took to Photoshop and started sketching… I mainly wanted to draw Korra in the Avatar state, because, well, let’s face is, the Avatar state is awesome. We needz moar of it. I wanted to make this as close to the actual show’s style as possible (thin outline, the look of the fire, water and air, etc.) and the only thing I cheated with is the background. I usually suck at backgrounds and didn’t trust myself to come up with something that would match the visual style. That, and the fact that by the time I got to thinking of a background, the file was taking close to 10 minutes to save, and the final file is over a gigabyte…. So in short, I took a screencap from one of the episodes for the background, scaled it and blurred it slightly. I do like the result!

I’m glad I did this one, as it’s taught me a trick or two to do effects (mainly for the fire and water). That’s something I always struggled with as well, but now that I’ve actually done some with lots of reference from actual screen caps of the episode, I know a bit more where I’m going from that end! And yes, Korra is Earthbending crystals instead of rock (I thought crystals would look cooler, and I’m pretty sure with all the power of all previous incarnations of the avatar at hand, she could pressurize rocks to crystals…or something…)

I hope you like it! (Pardon the filesize… the original is 10500 px by 14280… going smaller than 1300 px by 1768 px made some of the detail difficult to see…)