Eldritch Idol release!

Hello everyone!

I'd like to introduce you to Eldritch Idol: An idol-raising statsim with a Lovecraftian twist. (by ebi-hime)

I did the characters art for Eldritch Idol; it was very fun! ^o^ I hoped that the characters' emotions were well conveyed!

I'll show you some of my favourites:

Yes, they're taken on different playthrough. And I'm not too proud to show my, um, her stats haha. I got better now though! I've unlocked 18/28 endings by the time I wrote this. I got the good ending, some funny endings and bad endings. Some very specific ones seem to be harder but it's probably because I'm not very adventurous...

One of the earliest ending I unlocked. They're so cute together!! Look at Karen's blushing face...

A fluffy route! She's so adorable I want to squish her tentacles and get strangled and smoosh her blushing cheeks.

Wait, I just realised at this point that my favourites are all featuring blushing faces. I cannot help it – it's probably my favourite expressions hahaha.

Also:

An upset cute girl is also very adorable... I'm not good in coming up with this combo, but I got the opportunity with Eldritch Idol. Her dissonance is very cute.

Overall, it was a very fun experience. I learnt a lot in workflows to make sprites, especially layering the sprites and utilising it for the combinations of various poses and outfits.

Sketching & designing

So, in summary: ebi passed the initial sketches, concepts and ideas and then I tried to interpret it with my sketches. After passing a few doodles and designs back and forth, then I started working on the sprites right away.

She's so cute to begin with! Serafuku chou kawaii >///< After receiving the first sketch, I opened a new canvas and let my hand imbued some idol poses on her (second sketch). Meanwhile, I started to work on her proportions; especially reducing her head size so she wouldn't be very deformed (third sketch) and lastly, I refined the line and applied all the little details (final sprite).

I did my best to work around the colour palettes and stayed with it without adding more hues. For her idol outfit, I worked with the themed elements with the colour palettes. I worked from ebi's original design and tried to sprinkle some idol + mahou shoujo elements here and there. At some point I was unknowingly making it slightly brighter, but then I reworked it to keep her darker outfit look. I drew her with a cute maiden appearance in heart although her personality is something different – but nevermind that's for the details. ^^

Drawing her sprites – especially this idol outfit – felt like doing decora; she's so sparkly and cute.

Working on the spritessss

I wanted to give Kuku more poses in adjacent to her expressions, with the reasonable amount of effort. I worked on the arm changes instead of changing the entire pose. This helped saving quite some time to work on various poses and outfits!

I have Kuku's base body with the arms set. Then, I just need to draw the outfits on top of those bases:

I thought this flow was quite tidy, but since I'm really horrible in organising my layers and everything, it was still a bit chaotic. This is a preview of the layers structure for one of the file:

It's embarrassing, my apologies...

Expressions

Probably my favourite part of drawing! I think I'm just naturally leaning towards bubbly and happy cute characters making. The art style that I do can be one of the main reason of it, though. I really, really want to draw cooler characters too, hopefully one day I have the skills for it. I want to make them blushing and cuddly. Drawing moe characters are still my favourite, so it will stay... forever, hahaha.

Overall it was a really fun experience. Drawing for Eldritch Idol was very rewarding... Cute characters overload. <3

If you're interested to help Kuku reach her dreams, feel free to try Eldritch Idol! Also, check ebi-hime's other works: there're lots of cuteness, fluff, drama and many more!

Thank you for reading!
- Konayachi