Black Desert Online: Wukong Creative Competition - Full process!

 Hiya!

If you wish to just see the progress in fast video format, here you go. (I've also embed it at the end of the post, if you wish to stick around!).

    Now that the full illustration has been posted and released, I'll share the full process here on my blog. Apologies for not being active the entirety of June! Summer has hit hard with heat and I'm melting. But, July has come forth with interesting contest.

    As I was preparing to make characters for Art Fight 2025, Pearl Abyss stopped me on my tracks, when the announcement for Video/Art/Screenshot contest for Wukong was made.

The schedule is exactly the same as Art Fight, so AF was put on a back burner. Little did I know, that this project was going to take full 2 weeks! Plus compiling everything together, making the time lapse video, yet another week passed! I will see, if I can manage at least 1 attack on my first year in AF! 🤣

     Ever since it came to my attention, that you can customize your character portraits outside of the game's screenshot feature, I've always dreamed of having my account with full of customized portraits. I've seen couple of others doing the same, with very detailed and skillful art may I add!

Just recently, I made rough sketches for every single one (except for Wukong, he's freshly made character), to start off my project. I realized, that this would be rather perfect place to start with my own portfolio. And soon after the competition was announced.

    Not only this would kick start my own project for character portraits, but a price is also involved. I'm not going to pretend that I'm not in it for the prices; Prices always give that little extra motivation. I'm not going to lie about that for internet points!

But ending the side tangent! Onto the main topic:

This project's target: Wukong!

 

    All of the characters on my BDO account have some sort of dedicated function and/or personality to them, and I wanted the portraits to convey that. I didn't want just the character with their weapon; I wanted depth, so to speak.
Wukong will be the fisher of my account. He'll be accompanied by a Papu pup, who loves to see him fish and cheers him on!

Challenge start!

 On July 4th, I made the very first step: raw composition. It's funny as heck to look at, but whatever gets the job done! For the sake of speed, I used a posing puppet in Easy Pose, to get the angle right.

 

The poser does not have fishing rods, so I used a spear as a placeholder!

 

 

 

    After that, it was time to gather up references. And oh boy, I knowingly picked the greatest hell of them all: Vajra Might Premium Outfit.

This thing has so many tiny little details. I broke it apart in my notebook to its most simple shapes, so I could have a better understanding how the outfit would behave in the pose I made. But did I stop there? Nope!

The game has a rather new item type, which is a backpack. This is purely either fishing or alchemy/cooking buff gear. They come in 2 appearances: Otter and Papu pup. I personally love Papu more, so I picked her for this. She'll be our hero's best friend and companion, cheering him on during their fishing adventures!

These were the MAIN references, but of course I had loads of screenshots of the outfit pieces from closer up, to understand the texture, print etc. Just don't want to bore you with those!

Now, onto the next phase - sketching!

 Rough sketch

At first I thought to use his power pole as the pillar he's squatting on, but due to feet fitting better on a wider area, I decided to use his ascension weapon, jade pillar, instead.

Rough sketch with the clothes on and some cloud shaping for the background.

 

Cloud detailing

At this point I was getting ahead of myself and thinking, that the sky was perfect like this. But, since the process was taking a while, you know what happens? Artist's eye. Sees all the faults and errors, so these clouds eventually got replaced. And so did the sun!

Some solid colors to give an idea where everything is.

My usual style is to do lineart first, however this time I wanted to give the opposite order a go. Color, shade and render first and add lines last or semi-last. Not going to lie, I kinda liked the result!

Some base shading on the clothing and facial features in line art

Sun remade and clouds pulled out a bit for some space.

The sun looked too flat and cheap, so I gave it a re-touch. It's super hot summer where I live, and with this sun, I could feel the heat oozing out of the picture already!

Some more solids and shade

At this point I had to trust the process a lot. Everything looks so awkward still, but not for long! 

First shading attempt on Wukong's face. He turned out a bit burned, but I fixed it after!

Awkward phase passed!

After this point I started moving with confidence. It finally started to show myself the full path, what to do.

Made a flat layer with the design of the jacket and pants.

After making the flat design layer, I warped it to positions it needed to be on Wukong. Don't worry about that sleeve, though! That was just a misplaced print, haha!

Clouds re-made!

This is the part, where I started looking at the whole piece from afar and figured, that these clouds were not good enough, they were outright terrible! So, I re-made them! If you view the full timelapse, you can see, how I already attempted to re-place the previous clouds, but failed and moved on. The clouds that stayed are in reality a 3rd re-attempt.
    At this point I've also rendered the jade pillar, but without shadows. I figured, that the fish and waves in front will probably cover majority of it anyways. So, I decided to figure it out after the rest was finished.

A lot of new details!

This screenshot is after a lot of time had passed since the previous one. Now we have fully detailed belt, scarf-thingy, shoes and the helmet piece on Papu's head! And don't forget the fishing rod and basket!
    I realized early on, that this scarf with golden plates is absent, when Wukong equips the fishing backpack. I presume, that since the game now has separate stances for fishing and combat, that the outfit reacts in that way and removes that part. I was thinking of removing it due to this fact, but the result was rather boring. So, I kept it in, to my own demise of high render time of details! I know it may not be canon, and I apologize for that!
 

Papu!

Now the ugly blob of white is gone and replaced with cute Papu! She's maybe my favorite part about this piece. Have a close up of this cute face! She's not completely shaded in this one, but the face makes up for it! On the timelapse you can see her face was a struggle, but I got it, eventually!

Pu!

Now it was time to finish up the hands, jewelry, extra touches on the rod and start on that fish!

Water placeholder

So... I can't draw fish apparently! The fish was a long struggle. At first I was thinking of making a rainbowfish, but it is a rather small species and wouldn't be an impressive catch. Sure, in the game it's one of the highest prize fish, but its appearance didn't quite cut it. Koi fish is also on that list, but way lower. However, it had way more reference possibilities and its size can be quite big, too. So, I went for it with my own spin.
    I DID consider the pink dolphin as well (the top prize fish), but that would have been way too big to fit in this type of frame, unless only its face was included. It would have not worked, sadly.

I broke my own obsession with details and gave up on the reel of this rod. It ended up being just a worm rod, with guide hoops. Please, forgive me!
   

 It's not like BDO itself knows how a rod works, either, to be honest:

Picture credit to FinalsTwin from BDO forum.

Correct, if I'm wrong, but on what kind of rod do you have your line THIS LOOSE, while fishing? 🤣 I'm curious to know, where did they come up with this to reference it in the game. If there's legit reason and BDO was being faithful, I'll eat my words!
 

    From here on out I was in such a flow, that I just straight up finished the piece in one day. From the picture before to...:

As it seemed finished, I've already stamped it with my logo

    Now, here's the thing. It looks finished, but it's not! This is where I started to implement a personal new way of looking at my art; Don't touch or even look at(hard part) it for 1-2 days and come back to look for mistakes and missing parts. While writing this, I'm of course still looking at it. So I will be counting from tomorrow onward. Luckily, it's also a weekend!  

--- 

 

 After 2 (long) days, I came back and looked at it with fresh pair of eyes. Then I compiled the following list of errors (not going to lie, some of these I noticed even from before):

• Papu is missing the green line of fur from chest
• Lighting on Papu is too much from the side
• Papu have whiskers! Babies maybe smaller ones
• Put sparkles/glow on water droplets too (too noisy)
• Contrast between the pants and fish needs to be greater. Now the pants and fish kinda melt to one another.
• Wukong's hairline seems to be too low. Try out to pull the hair further back
• Overall quality of Wukong's hair
• Make more believable bubbles
• White water needs second shadow, in gray 
• Add a distant building as back drop to separate the waterline and sky better
• Glow on light bleeding spots
• Overall saturation

 That's a long list of fixes! But easy to manage.

 I made some fast bubble brushes, but I still liked the main two big bubbles in the air. So, they got mixed together in the final result. The bubbles were made in a separate file, so they're not in this timelapse.

But here we go - The finished piece:

    I am overall happy with the result. Surely there will be something that I will look at in couple of years and just cringe because of it. But for now, it is complete! I hope these two enjoy their fishing adventures; They sure look like it!

    From this project I learned some ideas to implement in the future. If anything, I'd like to be faster! 

 Thank you for reading! And here is the promised full time lapse:

May your dreams persist!
-Rara