WIP of the week: precure chibis!

attempting a series where i post one work-in-progress every week! check out some potential precure merch!

#WIPoftheweek #merch #anime · posted 03·06·2024

good afternoon! inbetween commissions, i've been brainstorming more ways to get myself to use this journal regularly. there's the obvious answer of just talking about my personal life at any given time, but that leaves the chance of some stretches of days being complete nothing burgers. contrary to popular belief, life at home without a proper job can get pretty boring, not to mention i still wanna keep this site art-centric.

but other than that, one of the ideas i came up with was pretty good: i make a routine of posting one unfinished drawing every week and talking about it. i can bring up the inspiration behind the work, my art process during it, and maybe why i stopped working on it if it's particularly old.

this routine would 1: keep me accountable of my WIPs (aka not completely forgetting about them), 2: get me to do some regular introspection on what i like to draw, 3: give a little extra value to a few pieces i never posted online, and 4: give you guys an early sneak peek of what i'm working on, before tumblr ever gets to see it! that's a stone that kills a significant amount of birds.

like everything else i do, i have a few worries about being able to keep it up, and a little embarrassment at the state of some of my WIPs. but for my own convenience, i'm not setting any concrete rules for how this'll work; whether i write an essay or even just a paragraph, i just hafta post SOMETHING. i even opted out of calling this "WIP wednesdays" just in case a single day of the week is too hard to commit to. ...but feel free to use that title yourself, the alliteration is too good not to share.

exposition time over, let's get into it!

my first WIP of the week is...

wonderful precure chibis!

precure (aka pretty cure) is a very new interest of mine! it's a long-running magical girl series that gets a new season each year, each with a new theme and set of "cure" protagonists. this year marks the 21st precure season, titled "wonderful precure!", which i decided to start watching right as it began this february, and it's been a lot of fun!

for this project, i'm drawing two of the main characters, komugi inukai (aka cure wonderful), and iroha inukai (aka cure friendy ...or is it friendly?) in the chibi style i use for commissions. komugi is all done, and i just finished iroha's lineart earlier today. they're both in their final poses after their transformation sequence.

i'm really proud of how these are turning out, i always surprise myself with how much detail i can pack into my chibi style (for better or for worse). big poofy precure hair also seems to translate nicely. as for their eyes, while i usually go for a simple one-tone eye color, i decided to make these more show-accurate (mostly because i can't tell which color is their actual eye color!! is komugi's purple or pink, you tell me!! T_T)

i don't usually heavily watermark my work the way i did here, but this time is a little different: once i get these two done, i want to sample them as potential merch! i've been eyeing a manufacturing company called vograce that can do some cheap single samples of things like stickers, keychains, and standees. i've actually ordered their sample pack before, as well as a custom keychain with some shrimpshipping art i made last year. you can customize your merch in a lot of ways, plus the quality seems pretty good as far as i can tell.

all that to say, i want to see if these two cures hold up as stickers or acrylic stands! and if all goes well, i'll figure out how to open some sort of preorder system and try to sell a few. it'd be my first time doing anything of the sort, but i want to try it, tweak it, and make more in the future. i also plan on making chibis of the two other cures from this season, cure nyammy and cure lillian. i may also branch out to cures from the other series! but merch may vary depending on the results of wonderful and friendy.

to talk a little more on the series itself, i realized that a main draw for the precure fandom is mapping out the similarities and differences between each season. there's a whole laundry list of tropes and cliches that the show usually adheres to, and it's almost like fans make a bingo game out of predicting what big changes are made to the precure formula. this year's season defied expectations for a couple reasons; the first is that the leading magical girl, komugi, is a dog (shown on the left). while this isn't the first time a non-human became a cure (ie. fairies, mermaids, and aliens), it happens to be the first time a non-human was the leader of a precure team. this may not seem very significant to the average watcher, but this is the kind of subversion avid fans pick up on.

one other big difference this season has compared to the others is that there seems to be no physical fighting. when the series began, precure stood out from other magical girl shows through its fighting segments. not only do the cures wave wands and shoot magical beams, they would also punch and kick enemies in high-speed action sequences. this held true with every consecutive season until this one; wonderful precure's monsters are defeated by hugging and calming them down.

a fraction of fans are disappointed by this change, seeing it as a sign that precure is "going soft", or they're turned off by the season entirely because the action is what they come back for. while nobody is forced to watch a season they aren't interested in, i think those who choose the former argument are missing a little bit of context.

first, this is a show for children (surprising!). that doesn't excuse a lack of fighting entirely, but in addition, this precure season is themed around animals, specifically the relationship between humans and animals. the monsters are called garugaru, and they're essentially regular animals from a magic garden that turned into monsters, and the goal is to turn them back to normal. with all that in mind, kicking and punching these monsterized animals to turn them good may give the wrong impression to children. worst-case scenario, it may teach children to hit "bad" animals until they behave! "that's obviously not the point, the kids should know better," you say, but unfortunately, no five-year-old mindlessly watching tv while eating their breakfast is gonna understand context as well as us adult uber-fanatics do. we just have to make peace with that, and take that into account as we think about why the writers of this season would make such a change.

i, for one, don't really mind the lack of fighting, which could just be because i wasn't super into precure going in, and don't have a firm grasp of what a "normal" precure season is like. but again, the appeal of precure seems to be the recognition of patterns and tropes, and categorizing what changes and what doesn't. who's to say that the next season doesn't go back to normal, punching and all? and as of writing this, wonderful precure is only 5 episodes in; who's to say that there won't be any fighting later on, maybe with non-animal enemies to work around our animal abuse dilemma? it's fine to say that this season isn't for you, but it seems a bit silly to abandon hope now.

i think that's enough anime talk for one day. thanks for checking out my WIPs! those are planned to be done sometime this month. look forward to seeing more WIPs in the future! or at least hold me to them.

viviraptor signing off.︎ ❤︎