Commissioned by  backlash

Abby 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 Zak, his sister Kira and their friend group 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, arch-side, 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).

An example for Abby's sneakers. In the general character reference, they're depicted as generic sneakers, as no specific model is defined -- as per her owner, she just wears sneakers. For the purposes of this ref sheet, I found the closest real-life style match in the Adidas 'Grand Court', which itself is as generic a low-top sneaker design as you can get. The shoe color is sampled from the real-life model, but an alternate swatch is provided to match the shoe color of the original reference sheet if desired. Another detail is the use of white diamonds to represent portions of the tongue that show between the laces. Since most depictions will have the shoes too small to render individual laces, these can be left out as I did on the full-body model of Abby, only depicting the lace loop in the center of the tongue.

Technical:
Refer to the first pic in this series in case you're curious. The info stays the same across the submissions.

Digital drawing done in Clip Studio Paint EX. 27 layers (mostly text objects), 20.6MB .CLIP file. Part of Project ID# 511