This is by far the hardest one out of the five I'll be drawing and I knew that from the start. The amount of smudging (not helped by my cat as she dipped her paws in her water bowl for some reason and sat on my sketchbook for my attention) is definitely proof of that. When I wrote down my ideas in a previous post of mines, I knew she was going to be the hardest one as she was also the one I'll have the hardest to draw normally. I do think a lot of my problems though is my inconsistent line work so drawings feel little more cluttered than usual. This drawing specifically also had the problem of "I wanted to draw clothes that's easy to draw...if the character had a neck." Ngl, the next hardest to draw is no doubt going to be Hollyberry, but she's nothing compared to what I'm doing to myself with Golden Cheese (followed by White Lily, then Dark Cacao and then Pure Vanilla, so you already know what I'm comfortable in drawing just with that order lol). I also feel like if I was a bad digital artist, I wouldn't feel so...self-conscious about the bad sketches down below
So this is why I say, if there is any artists or you know any artists out there that are taking commissions for cheap (my main form of income right now is donating plasma), please let me know so I can ask them to refine these corrupted ancient designs. I get $40 at minimum per donation so that is the max amount I'm willing to pay.
Also I am dedicating this whole sketchbook to this since I know I have a lot of thoughts going on in my head and if I'm going to be changing designs, I need to use multiple pages of my sketchbook. So I figured, why not? This is a small sketchbook after all.
As for her name, it was definitely difficult. The name that @CorruptedData42 has is "Tarnished Cheese Cookie" but I'm not sure if that would be 100% accurate. I decided to just go with Rotten Cheese since...well cheese does spoil and it fit in with her personality. Have you heard of the description of "spoiled rotten"? The main inspiration for using Rotten Cheese as her name
My general concept for her is that she stole so much from other kingdoms and villages and hoarded it for herself that she pretty much destroyed those villages and kingdoms, her kingdom not excluded. Her greed is so much that there's very little food and money for the more common folk, to where they had to make their own trading system behind her back to even get any sustenance. Fortunately, her kingdom is filled with minerals and rocks that other kingdoms might not have that trading for food isn't that difficult and Rotten Cheese wouldn't notice anything happening behind her back.
This was the first plan, and I thought this would give me more room to add more arms to tie in the Kali inspiration. Scimitars also just felt right as a weapon for her this time around since it would make sense for her to be a more hands-on fighter with her brand new Light of Destruction, how she lowkey reminds me of Urbosa from Legend of Zelda, and how cool a more speedy fighting style would look like if she also had the ability to fly. This would most likely make her more into a Charge Cookie rather than Golden Cheese's usual Ranged role. Because of this, I tried to use a more wavy clothing, stuff that wouldn't look as restricting.
My favorite design aspect in characters are wings in the hair, especially if they have fluffy or wavy hair. Its like seeing something coming through the clouds and I just love wavy hair in general. Golden Cheese already had a wavy hair style, but I'm not actually good at drawing that hair, so I wanted to make it look more puffy, with the main inspiration for it other than...just not being good at drawing that hairstyle...are cheese balls, one of my favorite snacks out there.
Don't mind the wings, that's just how I sketch out wings really quickly before I go back and fix it up depending on what I wanted for them. They were just there so I wouldn't ignore them as I added more to the design, in particular, the arms.
This was ultimately scrapped because of the fact that I started accidentally using inspiration from Roman clothing and Roman/Greek gods rather than Kali, who is a Hindi goddess. Not only that, but this was also a terrible position to try and draw multiple arms at, especially when it took me 5 minutes to even draw both of the scimitars in her hands anyway. I also thought that the head shape made Rotten Cheese look too young, when I wanted to make her look like an older woman since Kali is worshipped as a Divine Mother.
As for the references I am using now since its not quite clear in the next drawing I have
This is definitely the main one since this is where I realize the lack of a neck was a problem, especially with the references for Egyptian clothing I found. This was one of the few I found that still had the collar around the neck but wasn't hard to incorporate in the Cookie Run artstyle. Not only that, but when I look at this, I see a powerful woman. Though there wasn't that much jewelry on this design so I had to manually do that myself, which was obviously difficult for me to do as someone who doesn't draw a lot of characters that wears jewelry. I don't wear jewelry myself since I hate how metal feels on my skin, so it was hard to even decide to draw characters I create myself with jewelry. There is supposed to be more of it in the next picture I have. I just didn't want to make the drawing harder to look at than it already will be
The only difference between the two images is that I felt the hair was a little uneven so I added another small golden wing to her hair. I think I made it a little bit too big but as long as I get the idea across, I left it there.
I'm not sure what inspired me to put the Soul Jam in her crown instead of in the face armor, instead replacing it with a square of swiss cheese, but I swear I saw something in Kingdom that inspired me to do so. The extra parts of the stuff in her hair has a winged design, similar to base and Awakened Golden Cheese has with her crown
Using Urbosa more as inspiration, I decided to make it to where she does have a shield attached to the gauntlet on her right arm (our left from the picture) but because multiple arms I discovered is hard for me to do, I decided that the extra arms is going to be detached from her, and act as extra appendages separate from her body, hence the small sketch at the bottom left, with the two lines between the arms being the Rotten Cheese's body. To make the design less crazy outside of battle, the scimitars is going to be held by the extra appendages, while she defends her more vulnerable body parts with the shield attached to her. Keep the defense closer to her while her ghost arms do the offensive work. She's going to be wearing a lot of gold and jewels, so she's going to be weighed down. Since she's not going to use her wings often, except for getting extra air to hit opponents higher up if she's forced to fight closer, I made them smaller. The wings is an important part of Golden Cheese's design so I couldn't just get rid of them. This also makes it to where she can use her wings to push people away to protect herself further and they have to go through her arms again to even get another chance to attack her again. To how this would work for her skirt, I had to specifically point out that she has a white skirt underneath, so she's able to easily take that part off and will be easier to move around in a result. I don't remember where I saw something similar at, but it is my inspiration for why I layered her clothes a little. A longer dress/skirt does give more of a motherly vibe than shorter ones. Shorter ones give more of a young, sporty vibe (take Cream Soda Cookie as an example), and I didn't want to compromise the Divine Mother look
The eye now. I like the idea that she has a constant gleam in her eye even when she doesn't seem something shiny or something she wants (even if its not inherently valuable). So taking into consideration that Kougin-Amann has heart sin her eyes, I changed it to a star. I'm also bad with eye makeup that's under the eye, and I wanted a more mature eye shape, so I change the makeup from being under the eye to being over the eye, like its eyeshadow.
Shield reference
Most recent drawing
I still feel like I could've done more but I am quite satisfied with this now. And all I really did was add the "fake hand" to her side, and shortened the upper part of her skirt to make the idea for the detachable skirt easier to imagine. For now, this is enough for me to decide that this is good enough
