Commissioned by  Backlash

Roxy and her friends are something of a rarity in the fandom in that they all wear shoes as part of their default outfits (well, all except for one, but we'll leave him for later), and not only that, sometimes using specific styles of real-world footwear. As such, artists commissioned to draw Roxy and friends would benefit from references showing a standardized view of what these shoes look like when drawn on these characters, since a lot of otherwise competent artists have trouble drawing shoes "correctly". This is seen even among manga artists, where many schoolgirls' penny loafers look strangely blocky in contrast with the technical accuracy of the rest of their uniforms. This revelation long ago prompted me to learn how to draw shoes "correctly" on my own OC's, or at least recognizably based on real-world styles. Hence this series of commissions intended to help...other artists commissioned to draw these characters :D

Some characters in this group have specific styles made by a particular company (like Zak's Birkenstocks) while others have more generic examples not based on any particular real-world model. In the latter case I picked the closest real-world equivalent and adapted the drawn version from that. The character is drawn in a full-body view wearing said shoes with their default clothing, along with close-ups of the depicted footwear in outside-edge (lateral), arch-side (medial), front and top-down views. Where applicable, I added notes pointing out details that are often missed, mostly limited to those that can still be included in low-detail renderings (say, in comics or group shots).

As an example, one such detail are the straps across Roxy's ballet flats. Most descriptors would refer to these as 'maryjanes' because of that strap. The way I see it, the strap is so thin that 95% of the rest of the shoe is still "ballet flat". But maybe that's because I'm not a fashion writer. No one said this stuff is logical :D. I provided a top-down view mostly to show how a four-toed plantigrade paw can still fit within the confines of such a shoe, and another detail view showing how the sides of this shoe still splay out from the foot whenever it's bent.

Technical:
While not artistically groundbreaking, I did attempt to keep with the streamlined character models I started this series with (a bit of a challenge given the time since I last worked within this series) which was in-turn inspired by an earlier set of character references done by  Finimun.

As one last touch, I added a white outline to the standing character, a visual frill I haven't used until comparatively recently. Simply put, I made another layer under the character lineart. With this done I set the lineart as a reference layer, so when I magic-wand select the blank layer below, it would pay attention to the lineart layer and make a mask out of everything outside the character silhouette. Next I inverted the selection, (making the mask just the character silhouette) then enlarged it by about 8 pixels before flood-filling it with white, leaving a sharp halo around the character and setting them apart from the neutral-colored backdrop.

Digital drawing done in Clip Studio Paint EX. 34 layers (18 were text objects), 10.9MB .CLIP file. Part of Project ID# 511