Sailor Moon Redraw

Having just finished Final Fantasy VII Remake when the Sailor Moon Redraw meme took off, I knew I had to put Cloud into it. It’s been a long time since I did fanart at all, and even longer since I drew Cloud, so it was slow going. Here are some work-in-progress pics, followed by my final version.

It’s hard for me to draw straight if I try to do it entirely digitally, so I always draw on paper, scan the drawing, then ink & color digitally.

Yes, I’m using a quirky mix of obsolete hardware & software. Though I bought a new MacBook Pro this year, these days Photoshop is available by subscription only, and I’m a believer in the old “buy it once and it’s yours” model of business.

So I scanned my drawing with my printer/scanner/copier and iMac (both from 2007), transferred the file to my 2013 MacBook Pro, and used my Wacom Intuos 3 tablet (2008) with Photoshop Elements 8 (2009). I refuse to buy a new printer or tablet until the old ones break! Because e-waste is too big of a problem for the environment! And I grew up with Captain Planet!

*Ahem*

That said, sometimes I’ll reach the point on paper where I’m tired of erasing, or I run out of room on the page, but with half the figure drawn in the old fashioned way, I can finish it drawing digitally.

At some point a horrible accident happened, wherein I apparently touched an outline with the paint bucket and it created a red outline in the background layer. I didn’t catch it for quite a bit. It was a pain to clean up.

I’m willing to bet there are faaaaar better ways to go about doing this, but I’m entirely experimentally taught in the realm of coloring images with Photoshop. I don’t even want to say “self-taught” because to me that implies some level of focused inquiry. But all I know about coloring in Photoshop is what my brother told me in the early aughts, which boiled down to “Here’s this program, it has layers, you can color on it.” I pretty much do everything with two default brushes, the paint bucket, and the gradient tool. (^_^;)

Sailor Cloud says, “There isn’t a thing I don’t cherish!”／「大切じゃないものなんかない！」

Overall I’m quite pleased with how it turned out (except for his apparently freakishly short rib cage in the front and shrunken left forearm but alas).

When I first saw the image people were redrawing, I thought it was from the scene when Sailor Moon was kneeling down over the recently de-brainwashed Endymion, after which she went to go fight Queen Beryl. It wasn’t until I was drawing this that I realized that in those episodes, Sailor Moon didn’t have a crescent moon in her tiara, nor a heart on her choker. I looked it up to find the scene was from much later in the series, episodes I never got to see. But I digress. The point is that I thought I was drawing Cloud as Sailor Moon before the big showdown against Queen Beryl, which logically meant that I had to draw Sephiroth as Queen Beryl. She has a Black Materia-looking crystal ball so it makes sense. But…

Maybe it doesn’t quite suit him after all.

I picked an image of Queen Beryl that I thought was interesting, and I was excited about this at first, but…I don’t know, something just isn’t quite doing it for me. Maybe it’s because I don’t think Sephiroth would ever cross his arms over his chest so defensively. Maybe it’s because I don’t particularly care about Queen Beryl one way or another, whereas Sephiroth is my favorite villain and one of my favorite characters ever. So I think I’ll probably table this drawing. I thought about drawing him as Mistress 9 to be more in line with the meme, but eh, that’s even less appealing to me since I never saw that part of the series. And I totally forgot about Sailor Moon Crystal…I know I watched the first season at least, but after Hulu went to a subscription model, I think I just forgot about it. That said I do have some other things I wanted to draw for Sephiroth so I’ll be moving on to that. (^o^)