#in-depth
[ID in alt text]
Just finished this art of my OC, Jira! He’s my main OC and sort of serves as my persona in many cases, so I’m super excited to be able to share this drawing. Since this is my first time posting him on this blog, I’m going to talk about his history and share a *bunch* of drawings under the cut (as well as WIP images from this drawing).
Text on his shorts says เสือทอง, or “golden tiger”, and he’s carrying bagged soymilk with tapioca, which is a common way to get soymilk in thailand!
The idea for this drawing is one I’ve had in my head for a few months, but wasn’t sure I’d be able to pull off since I don’t have a lot of practice with perspective shots. I sort of wanted to give him a “casually defiant” look, as well as taking the opportunity to design a fun outfit based around colorful muay thai shorts. Unlike myself, I envision Jira as someone who primarily wears shorts (often with an incongruous top like a long coat), so I love designing his outfits because of the unique balance shorts give.
[ID: Two sketches from previous stages of the first drawing, one being a rough full-body sketch and the other being a refined sketch from the torso-up. end ID]
(^ I like his face in this sketch better than the final, lol…) I’m super happy with how this drawing turned out, especially the coloring and shading. I normally have the instinct to put my shading and highlights on another layer (borne from years of drawing art for petsites…), but I painted all the colors and shading on one layer and I’m really happy with how it turned out. I also added some sort of clip studio filter which gave everything a slight amount of color variance, which looks really cool!
Now, about the character himself: I made this guy back in about 2016 when I was getting back into Animal Crossing for the second time. I needed a secondary character for storage, so I invented Jira (who at the time was named 6480 since that was the username I was starting to switch over to), and gave him a connection to my then-main character (plum/Clove, who I’ll post about later) by way of a sort of flirty friendship. I thought it would be cool if they were like, friends who had houses on opposite sides of the same river and waved to each other and ate breakfast together and held hands and like….. yeah
Jira is super important to me for a ton of reasons, mostly because he developed as I grew up and the transition I made towards using him as my persona instead of Clove represented a lot of changes in my life and my personality. As he developed and I needed to name him, I decided to make him Thai (he started out inadvertently white cause there was only one skintone in ACNL… cringe), which marked a point in time where I became more invested in my cultural background. When I made him a trans man, it represented that I had become more comfortable and proud of my transness. His personality, which was more casual and open than Clove’s, marked the change in my own personality and growth in confidence. And I was able to explore my own ideals of relationships through the one he had with Clove.
Now, it’s 2020 and my new Animal Crossing game has him as my main character and Clove (as well as a couple others) as my alternate! I’m super glad to be able to look back on this and mark the ways I’ve changed over the years, and it’s really interesting that both of my personas since 2014 have been because of the AC franchise.
Here’s some sketches (I haven’t actually made formalized art of him until now, except for one drawing as an anthro monkey which I will not be sharing rofl):
[ID: Digital reference sheet for Jira in Animal Crossing style, in various different poses. He has tan skin and light brown hair. Text on the image says:
name: 6480
gender: [male symbol]
birthday: Oct 17th
personality: smug
occuption: barista
hobbies: fishing, cooking, model making
style: basic/iconic
best friend: Lopez
end ID]
Section of a reference sheet I made for my four ACNL characters, set inside the universe of my AC island.
[ID: Black and white digital sketch of an Animal Crossing character. He’s wearing a long coat, black shorts, and a cow skull on his head. He’s surrounded by a bunch of small mushrooms and weeds, and he’s carrying some fishing poles in a bag. end ID]
Drawing of my ACNH outfit as it was in April (autumn on my southern hemisphere island)
[ID: Colored digital sketch of two Animal Crossing characters. They’re sleeping in neighboring futons. One has pale skin, short yellow hair, and a sunhat, while the other has light brown skin and short brown curly hair. end ID]
Drawing of my ACNH character and my best friend’s :-)
[ID: Black and white sketches of Jira with more realistic proportions. In one he’s wearing a very similar outfit as the first image in this post; in the other he’s wearing a raincoat, a cowboy hat, and shorts that almost reach the hem of the coat. end ID]
[ID: Colored bust sketch of Jira in an orange shirt. end ID]
Aaaaand I think that’s all the good art I have of him. I’m not expecting anyone to have read this far but uhm THANK YOU if you did… you’re my number 1 fan… Don’t judge what I said in this post too harshly, *so what* if I base my personality around a character that only exists in my own head? Anyways, have a great day, and thanks for reading my rambling!
