Hakuryuu: Belial

I have been a fan of Magi for quite a few years, and after re-reading some of the manga recently I was inspired to draw some new fan art for it. Hakuryuu is my favourite character from the series, and I’ve always liked the design of his Belial form so I decided it was finally time to draw it myself.

I’ve done quite a lot of pencil sketching recently and this piece started out as one of those random sketches I had no intention to turn into a finished painting. However, once it was as ‘finished’ as I could get it at the small scale I’d drawn it in my sketchbook I still wanted to refine it further so decided to scan it in and finish it digitally.

Several years ago I would often start my digital pieces with an initial sketch on paper, but I don’t do that very often now. Largely because starting on paper creates extra steps to the process. The scan of a traditional sketch is a lot less ‘editable’ than one drawn digitally to start with so I have to trace over the entire sketch to ‘digitise’ it rather than just edit the parts that need refining. However, once past the sketch stage the process is much the same as usual.

The Japanese text in the top left corner is mostly there for decorative purposes, but it does also mean something. The first line is his name, but with the surname first as is traditional in Japan, whilst the second line is the Japanese spelling of ‘Belial’.

Here you can see a comparison of the pencil sketch side by side with the finished digital painting. Most of the drawing didn’t change that much compared to the finished version, but there are places like the face where I could get much more detail in digitally.

The text in the corner is also ‘different’ as I was writing it from memory in the traditional version and had to fall back on the phonetic spelling of Hakuryuu’s name rather than the proper kanji.

This piece was nice and ‘simple’ in a way – compared to other paintings I’ve done with complicated scenery and lighting - which made it very relaxing to work on. As a result I ended up doing the whole piece from start to finish in just a couple of days.

Something I did find challenging about this was finding a way to naturally pose a character with four arms! I had tried more than once to draw this Djinn Equip form before the final pencil sketch you saw earlier, and all of those had ended up not working because of my struggle to pose the extra arms in a way that didn’t look too unnatural.

Below is a GIF image showing a few stages of the process for the painting.

I have also created a speedpaint timelapse for this painting which can be watched below or on my YouTube channel:

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Time taken: 4.5 hours

Computer Type: Windows

Program: FireAlpaca

Drawing Tablet: Gaomon M106K

Character: Hakuryuu Ren (Belial Djinn Equip form), from the manga ‘Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic’ by Shinobu Ohtaka

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