SHANTAE | Colored Pencil Fan Art

Since I felt inspired to draw Konata in pencil, I’ve been drawing a lot more lately. My results at freehand drawing have been pretty satisfying, and two days ago I decided to tackle another character. For no reason in particular, I chose Shantae, a popular video game character.

I did a Google search to find some reference images to use, and came across one with Shantae wearing a bikini and lying on a beach. Although naturally eye-catching, I felt it would be too challenging to attempt. I usually only draw the top halves of people—full-body anatomy is waaaayy beyond my level, or so I thought. Even my full-body drawing of Konata was far from perfect—although it isn’t obvious, the proportions were a bit off. I really didn’t think it would pay off to try drawing a character in such an elaborate pose as this one.

But I decided to give it my best shot, and over the course of the morning I laid out a rough sketch. The legs were the most challenging part, and I left them mostly unfinished until a day later, when I finally completed the line art. I was surprised and delighted with my results—the proportions were practically perfect, and the cute, playful expression was totally on-point!

I was very happy with my results at this point, but I felt like doing more. I hadn’t done any shading using graphite yet, so I decided to finish it with colored pencils instead. I’ve only used colored pencils (or any colored medium) a handful of times in the past, and my results have never been very satisfying—it’s much easier to make impressive line art and pencil sketches than to create realistic colors and shading with colored pencils. I also had a limited range of pencils to work with—only a set of 24—so I’d have to settle for colors approximating those of Shantae’s skin and hair. Still, I thought it would be worth the effort. After all, I wanted to learn and improve, not merely create one decent picture.

So after another hour or so, I had finished the background and added color to the image. As expected, my shading isn’t the best—probably partly due to having so few colors to work with, but also to my lack of experience. But as a stylistic art piece, it isn’t half bad, and I’m really rather delighted with it.  ^_^

Fun Facts About Shantae

Did you know that Shantae’s character and game series were created by a husband-and-wife team in the late 90’s?

Shantae was originally invented by Erin Bell, wife of video game developer Matt Bozon. During their engagement, she got inspired with the idea for a shapeshifting magical girl based loosely on oriental legends, who bellydances to summon and charm animals. As a former camp counselor, she named the character Shantae after one of her past campers.

Erin’s husband fleshed out Shantae’s character and mythology, giving her the ability to attack enemies by whipping her long hair. The first game was released in 2002 for the Gameboy Color. However, it was not a financial success, and a second game wasn’t released until eight years later in 2010. Since then, the series has had a total of five games. The most recent, Shantae and the Seven Sirens, was released in 2019.

One of the coolest things about Seven Sirens is that it features animation developed by none other than the legendary anime studio, Studio Trigger! Trigger is famous for shows like Darling in the FRANXX and Kill la Kill, which is one of my top favorite anime of all time. You can see some of the excellent animation they made for Shantae in the game’s trailer below!