Isabella Donna: The Middle School Magical Girl

Isabella Donna is a 14 year old magical girl. She is very silly and friendly but when it comes to her duties of saving the world as a magical girl, she knows how to hold her own in a fight. As best as she can at least. She is 14 after all. And that sword is huge. But still, she protects her city against evil alongside balancing her normal school life. She has to fight monsters and do homework all in the same week!

To put a long story short (because I typed all this out and my page crashed so I really don't want to type all of that again), she's like if Sailor Moon and Star Butterfly were one person.

Clip Studio Paint Ex and an XP Pen display tablet for the illustration and most of the concept art though a small portion of it was done on Ibispaint on my Samsung S4 tablet.

Okay I have a confession; I did cheat just a teensy little bit. This character isn't completely new, she is actually a character from a past character design challenge thing. But I've been wanting to do something with this design for ages now, so I brought it back for this here contest. She is based off the prompt "A ditzy magical girl that yields a large sword" (or something like that).

This is her original version from 2023.

i used good ol' Milanote to create a moodboard sorta thing. i had a pinterest board as well and i took the most influential bits from it and compiled them here.
in the weapons section it is of course referring to her sword. weapon design is not my forte, but turns out a lot of cutesty magical girl weapons contain very similar qualities, so it wasn't too bad. it was sorta difficult to simplify though because there are lots of little unique details.
in the japanese and western sections, it is mostly referring to the inspiration for her outfits, but there is a little more to it too. The japanese part has to do the most with the outfit while the western section takes inspiration from the outfits and also the characters as a whole. with the outfit, the anime girls outfits were very complex, so i took more inspiration from some of the japanese idols so they were easier to simplify which was very important to me since i was going for a more western cartoon look. i tried to mash the cutesy japanese look of the idols and anime girls with the simplified look and bright colors of american cartoons.
in the overall look section, i was going for inspiration for the overlook of the illustration as a whole, straying away from just the character design now. for the background i knew i wanted some pretty clouds and pastel colors because i'm a sucker for pretty cloudy skies and this illustration is already extremely self indulgent (it contains almost all of my favorite colors). i was gonna add more to the school part of the drawing but i was a bit stumped so i just went with a simple locker and school floor, inspired by random cartoon schools i could get my hands on since it was kinda a last minute addition. in fact, this entire illustration is last minute. i completed the finished illustration yesterday but was so bored of it that i did a new one. the first draft actually didn't include the civilian design at all, and i really wanted to include it because it would've been a waste to fix that design only to do nothing with it.

here's a little bit of exploration for her updated civilian outfit. i liked the original, but i wanted her to look more childlike and cutesty, so i went with the overalls. i also changed the bookbag and turned it into a sling purse. originally i was just trying it out but ended up really liking it. only later did i notice that it was terribly similar to Star Butterfly's sling purse. even though she was a huge inspiration for this character, that was a coincidence lol.

with the eye sketches i was trying to figure out what shape to go with. i ended up going with a mixture of both.

i didn't really change her magical girl outfit too much because i already liked the old one enough. i just simplified it a bit for the cartoony look i mentioned a million times. also so it would be easier to draw the poses.
there's also some sketches of the updated sword and bow. i didn't do much exploration for those either. i went with my first passes for time's sake.

i wanted to include more for the character card like expressions but as of writing this i have less than 24 hours to finish this post XD. but i did do poses for both outfits ;) ;). i did the magical girl poses because the first pass i did with this illustration was just of the magical girl outfit so they are kinda stiff but after getting more comfortable i was able to do the civilian poses with a lot more ease. they came out much better.

i do almost all my personal illustrations' thumbnails on sticky notes or in my sketchbook. this one was no different. it is typically a hot mess of scribbles just for me to quickly get down the idea. i only did a few passes at the thumbnail before just jumpin into it (because at this point i have like 12 hours to finish the darn thing) and doing the super rough hot mess sketch on my android tablet before moving that over CSP. i take the picture i saw in my head and slap down a composition as close to it as possible.

i've also included the two initial sketches of the first pass of this illustration since they technically count as part of the progress.

i forgot to get progress shots for the background since i mostly did it all in one go. i only have the cleaned up sketch, none of the coloring stages.
after the ugly rough stages, there's cleaning up the sketch so it's more understandable. the 1st cleaned up sketch was almost the lineart but i noticed how stiff it was and i wasn't happy with all the lines so i did a second pass and turned that to the lineart. i settled for soft, sketchier lines because clean lines take forever and i had a deadline to meet.
then there's flat colors. pretty self explanatory. i mostly color picked from the little reference drawings i did in the sheets from the character concept stages.
then the shading; i wanted to go for a softer looked so i took a soft pencil-like brush and sorta airbrushed over the parts i wanted to shade and only applied pressure for areas i thought it made sense or looked nice. for the background i did very simple lighting and shading as to not take away from the character as much as possible. i made the mistake of not establishing a light source beforehand but i knew what i wanted the lighting to look like anyways. i always to do the classes yellow rim lighting when i'm making these softer illustrations for some reason. just a habit i guess. i feel like i could've made it brighter tho so it could stand out a bit more. anyways.
final stages; i added the big sun thing in the back (even though it makes absolutely NO SENSE to be there XD) to make the lighting choice make a bit more sense. i also added some stars in the sky to make it look less empty. still looks a bit empty tbh but oh well at this point. i kept toggling between a light sky or a dark sky and ended up going dark to make the characters stand out more.
i noticed that magical girl isabella was kinda being swallowed by the clouds. the colors and values were too similar so i changed them and moved them around. i did not get shots of that progression either though :<. there are still parts of her that are similar values to the clouds that eat her a little bit which is unfortunate but at least i noticed this so i can try not to make this mistake next time.
lastly, i edited the colors and made them a bit brighter and purple-er because...i just love bright purple-y colors.

and voila! the final illustration in all it's pastel-y cutesy magical girly glory.