These days, despite the stuff I have to do irl, I am having so much fun with the collabs I am participating and while I continue with the great Homer collab (one of my favourite) I also need to take a break from it by sketching some drawings for future works that will appear here. One of them is a tribute to Manas (I love Central Asia culture and more in general all Asian cultures along with many other cultures across the world) the 10th century legendary hero of the Kyrgyz people. He is said to be based on Bars Bek, the first khagan of the Kyrgyz Khaganate. The plot of Manas revolves around a series of events that coincide with the history of the region, primarily the interaction of the Kyrgyz people with other Turkic, Mongolic and Chinese peoples. The mythic poem has evolved over many centuries, being kept alive by bards called manaschy or manaschi. The oral epic have been included on the UNESCO Cultural Heritage list on 2013.

To make a tribute to this epic figure (literally and non) I am doodling a sketch:

Recently I am learning to use different colours when sketching multiples characters and different elements in the composition thanks to a work I saw here, more specifically Sonic World Adventure made by leroyalmess. As you can notice I use a lot the triangle composition to guide me during the sketch phase, in the next image you can see it better:

The horse's body has been built on a simple triangle, the arrows you keep seeing in my animated WIPs I post on my works help me to guide my mental creation of the overall structure of the drawing. Manas himself is built on a triangle:

extremely rough lines that allow to build the more polished sketch of the armour:

When sketching I always suggest people not to be precise and neat, the polishing phase will start with cleaned linearts (sometimes even a rough lineart may be necessary if one then wants to change something. As you can notice in the purple sketch phase (let's call this way) there was no sword but just a hand pointing to a specific direction but then I changed idea and I used the sword held by Manas statue in Ala-Too Square (central square in Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan) to better represent his warrior nature and brave character.

Fun fact: the statue of Lenin, which was placed in the square's center, was moved in 2003 to a smaller square in the city, and a new statue called Erkindik (Freedom) was installed in its place. Later in 2011 it was replaced by a statue of Manas, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Kyrgyzstan's independence.

I find this choice very fitting. The natural asymmetry of triangular arrangement makes the composition quite appealing on a visual level hence I tend to use as main base for my more recent drawings. I like it. Hope you enjoyed this silly journal, have a nice day/evening^^