Author: Nube Obscura

I'm a hopeless dream chaser who will continue to create a path filled with art.

Corel Painter 2021 Contest entry

My entry to the Corel Painter 2021 art contest. They had three categories; Illustration, Fine Arts and Photo Art. I guess this most closely resembles the fine art category so that’s what I ended up choosing.

The painting itself was done almost entirely with just the oily bristle brush except in some sections where I used the flat color brush but very rarely in some sections to try out working with some really dark sections. As it turn out, once we reach a certain amount of darkness, the brush doesn’t blend any more and whatever tint is used works in rather weird ways. It was quite an interesting thing to find out. But I gotta say, now I know why old classical artist used a black or really dark background. The colors used on the subject pop out much more and it makes it much easier to manipulate the values.

The subject is my dog. A couple of years ago now he had a bit of an accident and had to have one of those dog cones. Somehow he looked like he was wearing a ruff collar and looked very dignified. So ever since then, I decided that whenever I felt I was good enough I would paint him like he was royalty. Looking online it seems that this isn’t a novel idea although they are focused more on making parody paintings of actual paintings. For mine, I wanted my dog to actually be a dog wearing royal clothes that drape over him.

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

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pixiv SUKI1 Ox 2021

My entry to the pixiv SUKI1 Chinese Zodiac contest. My entry is for the Ox category (the other category is for the challenger animal). This took a bit longer than I thought it would… Although I did learn some new techniques that sped up my process though. But because of all the details I guess it was bound to take a while, specially since I had to research and come up with certain design elements that would fit the outfit I came up with and the contents of the basket. Hopefully it is pleasing to look at.

Happy Chinese New Year!

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

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Karin Miyamoto Self Portrait

Recently Karin uploaded an instagram video of her taking a self portrait which was really cute and funny which I wanted to recreate in pixel form. She looks like an 80s boss with her outfit and pose (a fun one).

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

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Marin and Gojo’s Valentines

Valentines Day will be here in 9 days, so I want to make some paintings to commemorate the day. We’ll start with a set of paintings of Marin and Gojo going on a cosplay shopping [secret date] orchestrated by Marin of course.

I sort of had the main idea right from the start of how I wanted the set of paintings to look. Mainly that I wanted to make three. As I was working on the second one I decided to try out a second facial expression for Marin and that would eventually be used to make the second part of the three part set of paintings. It was done entirely in Photoshop except for the sparkle effects on the third painting, that was done using Clip Studio.

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

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Naoko Kawai UNbalance

An anime version of Naoko Kawai’s UNbalance cover of her 1983 single (if you get the chance check it out).

For this painting I again went for a flat painting style but added in color variations that dealt with shadows and translucence. I still wonder if I should add highlights? will have to try it out at some point. The metallic arch was surprisingly simple to paint.

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

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Akina Nakamori Prologue Static

Akina Nakamori’s anime cover for Prologue, her debut studio album. I of course went for an 80s anime painting style. The static really reminds me of the cellulose that was noticeable in the old airings on tv back in the day and on old prints of classic anime. When I see it appropriate I really like using the static filter effect that Photoshop contains.

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

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Dancing Godzilla

This is a chibi painting of Godzilla, I had an urge to paint Godzilla and was first thinking of painting Shin Godzilla but when I looked at a photo of the Showa era Godzilla dancing I just couldn’t contain my self.

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

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Momochi Pixel Art

For the first painting of February I will upload some pixel art of Momochi. The one with the yellow sweater is from her photobook “Momo16 Momoiro”. It was painted using Pro Motion Ng.

And the other one with the crown is from a promotional photo for the single “Cha Cha Sing”. This one was painted using Photoshop. Photoshop had some advantages but despite painting with the smallest brush size, Photoshop couldn’t pain only one square so it tended to add blend it’s colors onto the surrounding squares. It looked cool when the size was 36×36 pixels wide, but when I enlarged it those colors melded together and created a mess. Luckily I could fix this by choosing the resizing option that chooses the closest color so that the pixels remain intact. This did have the repercussion of messing up certain areas so I had to paint over it again using the wand and square selection tool to fix any areas that had to be retouched. Sadly I save over the original pixel art which I could have enlarged and screengrabbed but that’s just the way things turned out. One other thing that Photoshop has over using Pro Motion is that I can use any colors I want, although I’m sure people like pixel art since people use the limitations of the colors to create cool effects and interesting ways of dealing with said limitations. Personally I like both.

Hopefully I can do some more pixel art work later on.

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

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Punishing Gray Raven Nanami Contest Entry

My contest entry for the Punishing Gray Raven illustration contest. This painting is for the fan art category. While looking at the designs, I was really drawn to Nanami. It seems that at some point they changed her design from the promotional trailer of her and what is now Nanami Storm. I really like the cat ears motif so I decided to go for that version of her costume.
When I finished painting and was getting ready to upload my entry I noticed that there was reference files of Nanami and the other characters from different angles to help in understanding their design. All in good quality… Because I didn’t notice this, I went around the internet and took low quality screenshots from Youtube videos. There is another category where I can design a different variant for one of the characters, haven’t yet decided if I will do it though I am tempted.

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

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