Susuki Airi Red Hat

I’ve been wanting to make an all ink drawing for a while now. This time I chose to draw Airi Suzuki. It’s a shame I got into ℃-ute (and Berryz Koubou) a little late to the party. I listened to a couple of their songs back in the day but never really delved into all their projects. On the plus side I have plenty of new material that will be new to me. I’m really glad Airi decided to continue singing after ℃-ute retired. I wont lie out of all the ℃-ute members Airi captured my attention the most (although everyone is winning me over when I started checking their songs and videos out, but I still think Airi is my favorite).

One artist that gave me the final push to finally draw this piece is ungrochika an artist that focuses on making art with ink. Her art is quite beautiful do check it out.

here is her twitter

and her instagram

Not only is she an artist but she is also a DJ (and to top it off she is extremely cute too), do check her out.

 

Here is the final piece:

reference used (and a piece by ungrochika that guided me a bit). I don’t know where the photo of Airi is from, if you know do let me know.:

and the process:

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

1st Krita drawing Sayu

I was looking into Clip Studio after I saw a video showcasing the ability to have the program auto color one’s line art. And what made it cool was that not only did it seem to work great but one can have a say on the colors used as well. I couldn’t try it out since the trial version doesn’t make it accessible. But there is a website that does the same thing named PaintsChainer so I played around with that for a bit. While I was reading more about Clip Studio I happened to hear about another program that was open source and free named Krita. I have heard of this program before (quite a while ago) but never gave it a chance. So I decided to finally give it a chance. I’m amazed at the amount of tools and options it has. It really does seem to offer (at least from what I have tried so far) everything most pro programs offer.

One other reason I was interested in using Krita is because Photoshop seems to make my tablet drivers quite after working on it for a while, and the only way to make them work again is to restart my pc. What sucks is that sometimes I only make a couple of strokes and the drivers quit on me. This makes working digitally really annoying, time consuming and messes with my work rhythm. Now to be fair I did have too many open tabs on chrome so I’m sure that was causing my pc to use too much memory causing problems.

In any case I’m glad this all culminated in me trying out this program because it’s quite amazing. It has many pen options and works quite well. Most things work like in any other painting program so making the change isn’t hard. I really like the g-pen to draw. One thing I’ve never tried was using the pen pressure to dictate the opacity. I’ts actually quite amazing and intuitive. I think I might prefer using the pen pressure in this way instead of controlling the size of the brush while painting. It gives me a feel that reminds me of how watercolor works.

I’m still not used to the way to color selector works, I prefer the one from Corel and Photoshop (the Coolorus addon one).

As for the drawing it self I wasn’t too sure what to draw so I just began doodling until at some point I decided to draw Sayu. This time though I just wanted to see what would come up if I just did things from memory and imagination. After doing the line art I decided to try out painting with the program and am quite surprised and pleased at how great it feels and works. I highly recommend it specially since it’s free. I’ll see how far I can push the program in some future works. Hopefully my tablet drivers will finally stop crashing as well so I can just draw and paint at my pace without disturbances.

The 1st drawing/painting:

The process:

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

VF-1A Hikaru Veritek

This one took a while. Made with Sharpie fine tip marker and painted with my Kuretake Gansai Tambi and Nicker Poster Color. I could push things a bit further but I want to work on something else after I rest this weekend. I had a vague idea of how I would end up painting this piece but I just went with the flow.

I had to fix it digitally with Photoshop  where there was an unpainted area left behind from the tape I used to keep the paper in place. Sorry a bit tired so I will leave things as they are.

Finished piece:

References used:

Process:

Digital process:

That’s it for now.

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE