DRAW THIS AGAIN Challenge - OC Timeline Ember Jenna Drawing

Hey guys, I hope you're all having a wonderful day. In today's video I am doing another draw this again. It will be the last draw this again I do for a little while because I don't want to overwhelm you with draw this again videos but I just had to redraw this old piece because I was scrolling through all my old videos just trying to see what I could redraw and I stumbled across this and at the time it was definitely one of my favourite drawings I'd done. It was, it took me a long time, it took me like five hours to paint and I was very very proud of it and I thought it was a very good painting and now I look at it and I don't hate it but I don't think it's quite so good anymore. Like I really like the concept behind it and I really liked the posing but I really thought you know what this is going to be so much fun to redraw especially because it is one of my original characters and I always, I always do drawing your OC's videos but I hardly ever talk about or draw my own characters on this channel so hardly anyone that's subscribed to me will even know who Ember even is so I thought it would be interesting for you guys to see basically me recreate this and also me actually talk about this character for anyone who doesn't know about her already. So the original painting was from two and a half years ago, it was from January of 2016 and like I said I was very very proud of it, it took me five hours at the time and it is quite ambitious for me to recreate in a way because there are essentially when you add up every single character in the piece even though three of them are the same person there are four people and there's three backgrounds and I was fully colouring and painting it as well so I underestimated how much time this would take me which is exactly why this video wasn't out on Friday and is instead out on Monday. It is all because this whole painting process probably took me around 16 hours so about two and a half days worth of work just working on it each day and I wasn't expecting it to take half that long but I'm glad that I took the time to actually paint it and actually make sure I got each aspect how I wanted it even though there are still tiny bits I would change and some bits aren't perfect I'm very very happy with the new piece especially because I feel like I finally captured my character as I've always wanted her to look because I've always had this concept of Ember in my head like this idea of her but I've never quite been able to draw her and capture her exactly the way I wanted to until now that is so I'm very very happy with how this new piece has come out basically the whole concept the whole premise behind the original painting was it actually came from a suggestion a comment suggestion someone said you should draw an OC timeline of one of your characters so a character timeline where you draw the character different stages of their life and I thought that was such a cool idea for a video and a very cool idea for a drawing especially for a character like Ember who has had quite a well a privileged up being being a princess as well so in the first painting you'll notice I drew her being held by her mother who is Queen Valena of the kingdom of Empkel so Ember is part of the royal family she is a princess and she was also born with fire powers as well um I'll talk more about that later but that is partly why I called her Ember in her original design she had bright red hair and I ended up redesigning her last year to have more of like a natural shade of ginger because I didn't quite want the red hair anymore as much as I really like the red hair I just I don't know I thought it was too too intense I wanted to just tone it back a little bit and also as she gets older I you'll see as like as the video goes on when I draw teenage Ember I give her like sort of an ombre a very subtle ombre so the ends of her hair are more of like a brassy blonde and the top is more of a ginger and that way I feel like it evokes more of the visual aspect of flames rather than just being a bright red so I'm very happy with the way I've redesigned her I'm probably going to do a video rather soon about making your own characters and because a lot of people when I do my Drawing Your OCs series they're like I would love to enter the Drawing Your OCs series but I feel like my character isn't good enough or I haven't even got my own character and I don't even know where to start on creating them so I probably will do a video sharing everything I've about creating characters and stuff like that so that I can probably help you guys as well because when I when I created my character I think I created Ember when I was about 12 and I'm 19 now so I have been drawing Ember for oh my gosh that moment when I literally can't do basic maths how did I forget how to do 19 minus 12 sorry it's seven years seven years I've been drawing Ember that was so embarrassingly bad and I got a B at maths GCSE so I don't know how that happened but anyway seven years seven years I've been drawing Ember and she's gone through many redesigns many changes when I was 12 she was like your kind of classic Mary Sue character like oh she has no flaws she's perfect in every way she's got bright red hair and fire powers just just because and stuff like that but as time went on I redesigned different aspects of her to make more sense and be less be less perfect because also that's very important when you're designing a character you need to think about their flaws because everybody's flawed everybody has their flaws everybody has their insecurities and what makes a good character is a character who has depth who isn't just all surface level everything's great things like that and my great art friend Canary Witch she is an incredible artist and a brilliant character designer I absolutely love all of her OCs because they're all amazing and one of the biggest pieces of advice that she gave me which was also really helpful well she didn't give it specifically to me she said it on a stream but she said you need to like get to know your character as weird as it sounds you need to get to know your character imagine you were sat there interviewing them how would they feel about different things that you were asking them how would they answer the questions even down to the basic aspects of body language if you were interviewing your character how would they sit in a chair you need to think about stuff like that so I never used to think about that I was just like I want to draw this pretty princess girl with red hair and fire powers and you know what if you want to have a character that has no depth go for it like if that's what you want to do that's completely fine because at the end of the day I can give you as much advice as I want about creating characters and you should do this and don't do this and follow these rules but there are no rules when it comes to creating a character like at the end of the day they're your character they're your design and you can make them however the way you want them to be and you shouldn't ever let anyone make you want to change them in any way so anyway that's my little rant about characters over back onto this piece so it's basically I wanted to this time around give the whole painting much more of a magical feel I wanted you to look at it and kind of understand the story that was being told as well I really really used to love the way I drew Ember with her mother in the old piece so I wanted to recreate the like warm feeling that there was in that old one in this new one as well so I really did try and do that and I had a lot of trouble with child Ember's hands because they just didn't look right it's the only part of the piece that I really hate because I just couldn't get them right I probably will go back in and repaint them later but I just wanted to say I'm very aware that the hands don't look right before I get a million comments saying oh the hands in the middle one look off um I am very much aware and I probably will go back in and repaint them it's just they were really difficult to do and you have to understand I was sat here for like 16 hours painting this piece just trying to get every bit right and it was very draining and it did take a lot out of me there were so many points as well I wanted to give up like I was like I don't think I can keep going with this painting anymore like it's really taking a lot out of me but I'm really glad I kept to it and I'm very happy with the final result because like I said I feel like I finally captured Ember the way I wanted her to look so in her redesign she has a lot more she uses a lot more muted colors now and it's all much more of a cohesive design I would say her old colors of her dress used to be so oversaturated in fact the whole old painting that I'm redrawing used to be very oversaturated and every single time I drew Ember or her mum they looked like they'd gotten a fake tan or something because I used to oversaturate everything including the skin they're actually meant to be very pale so I didn't want them to have that kind of fake tan look to them anymore so that's why I kind of took away from that and like I said as when I redesigned Ember's character I made her whole dress and everything much more muted and everything to be a very warm color palette because I want her to have a very cohesive color palette it all fits together so that the blue of her necklace and the blue on her headpiece pop out to you more because they're the only bit of saturated color in her design other than her eyes as well her green eyes are also a very important aspect so this time around I did that I also when I when I was talking about redesigning her in my live stream I did mention about how I looked at a lot of medieval clothes for inspiration because when I made her old character design I looked at no character I looked at no clothing references at all I think that's one of the main reasons were the main ways I went wrong with her old design so this time around I looked at medieval clothes and kind of took inspiration from that I also looked at elven clothes as well you'll also notice that this time around when I drew her fire powers I completely changed how they look I wanted them to look way more kind of fluid and like like they were really curving around her I wanted her to look like she had absolute full control over them and it was something that kind of just glides seamlessly through the air around her this fire kind of like looping in around her rather than like this weird little thing of flames that I drew in the old painting like it looks so bad I hate it but um for the castle the castle is the only bit I I did photo bashing on basically photo bashing is where you get a photo you paint over it and use that for your digital art I don't normally do that that's something they taught us how to do at university but because I thought well because the castle is something so small in the background and I wanted it done quickly and I'd already spent so long on the painting I did a bit of photo bashing so I painted over the photo to put the castle into the background so that's the one bit I probably might go back in and paint over again so it looks more like a painting rather than a little castle that's just been pasted in but um like I said it was just something I needed to put into the background for the time being as like a placeholder you also notice that when I do hair now I like to add a luminosity layer with this like little textured brush to add strands of hair throughout and I like how that looks so much more than the old way I used to do hair I probably will do an updated hair tutorial maybe next week um if that's something you would like to see then definitely let me know because I'd love to do a hair tutorial um because the way I do hair is completely different now so probably within the next week I will do a tutorial on that anyway we're coming towards the end of the video it's a very long video because I didn't want to speed up too much because there was a lot of painting going on in this so I really hope you guys enjoyed this video don't worry this is the last draw this again for a little while that's unless you want another draw this again but um I will see you again in my next video bye guys and I hope you have an absolutely wonderful day bye