Cheer Ahri

(zooming in makes this much nicer to look at, I promise!)

Skins suggestion, anyone? If we can have a beach Leona, we can also have a cheer Ahri xD

My little sister's birthday is coming up in a few days. I didn't know what to draw for her, so I decided to combine her obsession with cheer with her passing fascination with Ahri (her name can be shortened to Ari so she's been asking us to call us that... which is weird, considering the character she's trying to imitate eats people's souls but anyway).

Despite wanting to cry after doing all her tails (WHY NINE) I actually had a lot of fun with this. It took me like an hour alone just to figure out what her face was doing (after flipping it horizontally I finally figured out what the problem was- the nose was at this weird diagonal to the rest of the face- so I will now never NEVER skip on flipping horizontally omg), and while I'm not convinced by the hair on her head, I do like how she's turned out in general <3
I also tried being more conscious of colors and ambience for this one. Ahri and her uniform have both the blue light from the magic ball as well as some green from the forest reflected on them, and I had drawn a little color guide to the background before I started colouring her. The background itself isn't very complex, but there is a lot of thought put into the colors (I had a version without the red and then I thought, hmm, wouldn't opposite colors make it more dramatic? ). So there is progress.
I also like the kind of messy brush-style thing going. I didn't use a textured brush; once I find a good one I might experiment with doing brushstrokes on things some more!

I love League of Legends <3
Time taken: ~5 hours (I did them all at once oops)
Tools: GIMP 2.8 and literally just the one hard brush

In the future, when I decide to do a bigger project, one of my focuses will definitely be in getting my stuff to be lineless! I seem to have lost that skill for some reason (it probably has to do with my patience, haha).