Making the Split-Spread Sprite

#The Idea

# Let’s see if I can make a sprite version of this awesome pose drawn by KV1NN4 

kv1nn4_salworkinghardc

#Progress

# I’ll start by outlining a similar pose so that the sizes of things are the same. That should help keep the proportions pretty close. I don’t want this to be a straight-on back view, so I’ll add more of an angle.  

progress-1

# This is off to very a promising start! I honestly thought this pose would be harder to pull off. We’ll see how things go when I down-res it later.  

progress-2

# Uh oh! Where does the arm go? It needs to bend, and there’s only one direction it can do that. Need to make room for the elbow above the hip. Maybe nudge the hand left a little.  

progress-3

# This… might work. Shoulder’s getting a little too wide though. I hope I can keep the inward slope of the arm to emphasize the back-arch. 

progress-4

# That should be better. Luckily only the upper arm really needs to slope forward to exaggerate the back arch. And as a bonus, I might even be able to add some under-boob action!  

progress-5

# The body angle makes the right knee move in unintuitive ways. Right thigh bends directly away from the viewer, foreshortening, so right knee should shift left as it bends. Maybe I’ll keep a slight upward angle to the knee to hopefully mirror the movement of the left leg.  

progress-6

# It occurs to me that the torso should move too. Arch the back more. And if I tilt the shoulders at the same time it could look cute as it overlaps the character’s face.  

progress-7

# Now to add some in-between frames to the animation. I’ll have her slow down as she goes deeper. Don’t want it to look effortless. 

progress-8

# The rendering part’s tricky. Have to do a lot of improvisation. But it’s getting there. 

#The Result

# I managed to make it work. The shading and details took a fair amount of improvisation. Let’s just throw a head on there and see the full effect. And for comparison. This is the pose I was trying to re-create. 

# sprite split spread1 4x kv1nn4_salworkinghardc

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