Arcane - Jinx Flare - Pixelart process

Hi folks, tonight I wanna share with you my process of painting Jinx during my favorite scene in Netflix's Arcane series.

Everything starts with the scene. I knew I wanted to make her iconic moment when she lights Vi's flare out of desperation to summon her sister. She is on top of the highest tower in the town, and I wanted to make sure the top-down perspective helps me portray it.

Next, I moved to adding Jinx. The goal here was to get her silhouette in. I wanted to leave her braids for later since I planned to animate them billowing in the wind.

After being confident that the perspective was as dramatic as possible, I added the billowing hair, which made it so much more epic. I wonder if rain would make the scene better in the series as well. I was urging myself to add it, but I also wanted to be true to the scene as it was.

This is a 12-frame animation, so we could make it really smooth!

Then came the super fun part—SPARKLES! I started by adding a central flare from which all the tiny sparkles could be emitted. White was the right color here as it would help call attention to her hand as the highest value in the scene.

Finally, I spend hours on the money shot, getting the blue smoke rendered in. I made A LOT of bubbles arising from the flare and growing as they reached the top boarder of the frame. Blue was my base color. I then exported each frame to photoshop and added a gradient of cyan at the bottom part of the smoke, to reach that glowy effect. Using some gaussian blur also helped with the ethereal glowing. I also made sure to add blue highlights in the rails, ground, and metal structures just to help me sell the idea of this being a burst of light.

And that's it! I hope you enjoyed it! Let me know what your thoughts are! Did you watch Arcane? What character should I design next?
Best regards,

Galiant