Artist's commentary
Yakyuuketsuki (Baseball Vampire)
Ruth Diamante is a baseball vampire who does not draw sustenance from food, but rather from sucking at baseball. She does not know how to play baseball. What kind of player uses both a bat and a glove at the same time?
“I love baseball!”
Made in Clip Studio
(Design notes below)
This character theme started from some wordplay I had in mind from some time ago (Yakyuu = baseball, Kyuuketsuki = vampire). If I had to use an English equivalent I might call it “Vumpire Bat.” Anyhow, I set out to make a baseball-themed vampire
Starting point: deck out a vampire in baseball swag. It was kind of inelegant, though - mostly looking like a fan wearing a ragged cape, and there wasn’t a whole lot of “vampire” present, so I moved on without finishing the sketch.
“Flying bats! Haha, I am so clever”
Bat wings, while not really traditional features on a vampire, felt like stronger vampire imagery so I used that. However, I still felt that the vampire identity could be stronger. So I tried going the other way, starting from a more gothic vampire base and threading baseball into it.
I liked where this was going, so I gave it one more go
I wanted to keep the wings on the vampire, but it was too much to keep them on the bat as well, so the bat got away with minor embellishments instead to make it look a bit more gothic. I tried the same with her cap, but by this time I was thinking “gothic lolita” and forgot the “gothic” part and was all about frills. Thrillers, frillers…same thing, right?
Somehow she ended up looking much younger than the original design, but I felt like the chibi proportions put a lot more emphasis on the key features (rather than her limbs) was more interesting to look at, so here we are.