For the past few years, I haven’t been completely satisfied with Saki’s design. I kept experimenting with different things, like adding stripes to her muzzle, or adding a blue star to her stomach. But none of these new features really stuck with me, so I just kept drawing her usual appearance. But I was still unhappy with her appearance, so a few days ago, I decided to finally settle on a new design. The design I settled with is what you see here.
I decided to add a blue gradient to her bangs. This is actually not a new feature, as it originated from my oldest Saki drawings, back when I first designed her. After using them for a couple of drawings, I got rid of them because I thought they were unnecessary. So Saki’s hair was completely purple for the next few years. But for some reason, they seemed necessary again for the past few months. So I went and added them again.
Then, I changed her crop top. I still kept her cyan blue color, but I added some darker blue rims so the top wasn’t one single hue. I aslo added a star to her top, and this is a very important detail that I need to emphasize. Here’s why:
See, Saki is more than just eye candy. To me, she’s a real character with a real personality. She’s fun-loving, youthful, whimsical, silly, and energetic, and the blue star on her shirt helps communicate this a little more clearly. It’s also easy to assume that Saki is “edgy” and “cool” just because she’s a shark. A lot of shark girls in the furry fandom often look this way, since they have similar vibes, hairstyles, and overall appearances. But I want to show that Saki is way more than that, so again, the blue star helps show more of her real personality.
Also, I needed to change her belly. As I looked back on Saki’s older drawings, I realized that I wasn’t drawing her tummy big enough. The belly size to bust size ratio wasn’t quite right. Furthermore, her fat wasn’t exaggerated enough. I want to go for an art style (and character designs) that feature exaggerated belly sizes, even when the girls are at their base/default size. This includes drawing the belly shape itself a little differently too. Usually, Saki’s tum had a slight torpedo shape to it; it was heavier at the bottom than at the top. And although I did like it, I wanted to make her stomach even rounded, like a big beach ball going forward. This helps her belly look less realistic and boring, and more stylized and fun-looking.
The belly shape in particular was actually inspired by one of my own drawings, this one in particular: Surfing Pikachu.
In this picture, Wave’s belly looks so large and round that it looks like it doesn’t even fit on her thin body. The juxtaposition between her thin legs and her round midsection helps highlight her big belly even more. Saki’s body is already mostly skinny-ish, so I thought that this was a good reference to use for her revamped design. Same with Chloe (which I’ll expound on my next upload.)
I also used one of Barn-flakes’ drawings as inspiration. This one: Fat Friends.
Barns drew Saki and Chloe’s bellies quite large in this picture. I really enjoyed how they looked in this pic, so I used it to help me picture how big Saki’s stomach should be compared to the rest of her body.
Lastly, I know that I just used an earlier picture of Saki and edited it. I was gonna draw an original picture for it, but since I wasn’t redesigning her from the ground up, there was no need to draw a separate picture.
