The Shadow Sovereign
The Shadow Sovereign possesses the power over the dead. His shadows cage an army of over 10 million souls. And despite the connotation behind his name, he is actually called the Greatest Fragment of Brilliant Light.
Solo Leveling
Solo Leveling is a web light novel written by South Korean author, Chugong. It has been adapted into a web toon by Jang Sung-rak since 2018. The story follows Sung Jin-woo, a "hunter" unfortunately at the bottom level of the lowest of ranks, the E-rank. While hunters' powers and capabilities are held back to a certain limit, a certain incident allows Jin-woo to power up. The story is all about how Jin-woo solo levels himself up from E-rank to someone more powerful.
The story | a review
The story is really good, but I have to hand it to the story-telling - it's brilliant! Solo Leveling might have some Gary Stu tendencies, but really, it's easy to overlook with a story as engaging as this. You'll learn to embrace Jin-woo's character, as well as the others.
The pacing is just right, enough to present details and plot devices in just a couple of chapters. It's really easy to love the characters, especially those that surround our main character. The back stories don't fail the readers, too!
The whole series (web novel) is composed of 20 story arcs, then the epilogue which has over 10 chapters if I remember correctly. Each arc is worthwhile and will keep anyone reading on their toes. Sure, I've only read the English version as I do not understand Korean, but the way Chugong writes is very engaging.
The web toon art
Man, the artwork by Jang Sung-rak (a.k.a. Dubu) is crazy. In the very, very appealing way! Below is a screenshot of one of my favorite scenes from the web toon, from which this stylized fan art is based off. That's still not much compared to other scenes in the web toon. He is that good!
Gosh, I can only imagine how awesome it would be to be adapted into an anime (with some Jujutsu Kaisen-kind of crazy good animation, thanks MAPPA) with soundtrack by SawanoHiroyuki[nZk].
The Fan Art
I say it's fan art, but it is also actually my stylized (according to my own) version of one of the scenes from the web toon. The scene depicts Sung Jin-woo as he examines one of his S-class items, the Demon King's longsword. The scene took my breath away that I took a screen shot. I wish I remember what chapter it was from, though! One of these days, I might have to re-read. :P
Drawing the fan art was a spur of the moment decision. I have just finished re-reading the light novel's epilogues (27 chapters) and am still hungover. I think I got crazy enough to actually set my phone's lock screen to a Solo Leveling one. I thought that I wanted it to be my own drawing, regardless that it's going to be a derivative/transformative one.
The artwork is drawn on MediBang Paint for Android and was polished with Adobe Photoshop. I was initially thinking about adding lineart (hence the first frame of the process GIF later on), but I find that my style really does not have space for linearts.
The following images are close ups from the artwork. I wanted to show how details of Jin-woo's boots, because I really enjoyed drawing and coloring it, but I had to blur out details if I wanted it to blend into the background.
I was contemplating about creating a landscape one, and adding in Jin-woo's "Shadows." But... it would take too much time, and I didn't want this to take any more than it already did.
Notes
I got so crazy over this that I completed reading the web toon up to the latest chapter (142 chapters then) in just two days. That's putting it lightly, as I had a research paper due last Tuesday (needless to say, I crammed my way to submission). I might just re-read the light novel. It's that good.
What do you think of my fan art, though? I hope you like it as much as I enjoyed drawing it. :)
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