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She’s always got something up her sleeve... Well, almost always!

Self Critique: I don’t really like how I did the inner bend of her elbow on the straight arm. It’s more apparent on the variants that don’t have her coat.

This pic was a long time in the making. Like everyone else in 2019, I too jumped on the bandwagon to try drawing Jucika once she started making the rounds online. For those not sure, Jucika is a Hungarian comic strip character created by Pál Pusztai. She was created in the late 1950s, with her strip mostly running on Lúdas Matyi until Pusztai’s death in 1970. Fast forward to around 2018-2019, and social media (well, mostly Twitter) picked her as the Flavor/Waifu of the Month. And since I tend to gravitate toward the retro, it fit right in to what I’m mostly about.

When it came to drawing her, the question was what outfit she’d wear. Once that was settled on, I did take some liberties and gave her some stockings to wear. In her concept sketch, I did some stockings shading practice with my then-recently purchased Faber-Castell brush pens. But that’s gonna be a story another day (on top of my failed attempt at using Copics when I shouldn’t, again some other day). So the choice early on was gonna be to have her in a dressing room, but with a mirror. This is where things were getting tricky. At the time, Clip Studio Paint didn’t really make it easy to copy 3D models and flip them (or I just didn’t know). So at first I got the pose from the Sexual Nude Pose Book I had, then matched the pose with a Body-chan model. I tried to approximate what the reflection would look like in my head. But that didn’t get far. So I adjusted the pose a bit, then went to Dollar Tree and bought small hand mirror. I set that up behind the model and got what I needed. From then on, I just had to make sure that everything matched up between the normal and the reflected.

I also took this chance to try out something else: even more retro lingerie, particularly from Jucika’s time period. The bra and panties were easy enough to figure out. The girdle however was a new addition I’d draw on anyone. I pulled up some references for that, as well as throwing in my own designs to it. The one thing I had to keep reminding myself when drafting all this was “remember, you’re drawing both the front and back of this!” I don’t think I referenced any particular comic strip when it came to her blouse and skirt variant. I more or less made an original outfit for that variant that would mesh well with the coat above it, and the lingerie variants under. There were quite a few nightwear outfits she had in the comics that I could’ve done too. But again, since I was drawing both the front and back, I stuck with more outerwear clothing for the clothed variants.

The same would be true for the background. About 90% of the all the clothing on the shelves behind her referenced a comic strip entry. But I kept it to outerwear clothing. In my head I kept thinking that for her nightwear stuff, like babydolls and Pjs, that’d be stored in her bedroom (or if this was a store, another section). The canvas was also another conversion from being 11”x14” to 11”x17”. This meant I could show more of the dressing room, including the lights up top. However this left a large empty space on the bottom (a recurring theme with doing these expansions it seems). So I drew an ottoman, which meant I had to draw that twice too! Regarding the reflected background, I thankfully caught on early to a massive mistake I was about to make. I was about to make that mirror reflect the part of the left wall that is out of the canvas’ view. But I started lining up part of my construction lines and started thinking something wasn’t adding up. Since I was doing the BG now so many years later, I hadn’t looked at the body-chan photo to see how the bg was being reflected. And good thing I did look, because that mirror was reflecting the “back wall” of my grid box. So I redrew the sketch of the shelf in the mirror and went from there. Another thing I had to be careful with was my rim-lighting during the Filters/Effects phase. Since her back would also be visible, bright rim lighting would suggest that there’s a lot of light behind her, which there isn’t. So I kept it mostly to the top of her body, making sure to not go crazy with it. The lighting is soft in general, so I had to ease up on it.

And with the completion of this pic, this wraps up my 2024 artwork.

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Tools and Resources

Done on Clip Studio Paint 2.0

Wacom Cintiq 16 Tablet Used

Body-Chan Model traced for construction lines

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Jucika © Pál Pusztai