Momochi in the beach

Man, this one is already about a year old now. I was planning on releasing it at some point but it never happened and ultimately I decided to release it when it got hot out again. And seeing as the weather has been getting hot lately (plus I haven’t uploaded in a while) I figure now would be a good time to upload it. The painting of Momoko is the same that was done a year ago but wasn’t pleased with the background so I tried out my new pc upgrades with this piece by painting a new beach background. There is no more stuttering or slowing down anymore (although the temps of the CPU are a bit worrisome). I tried out some of the other brushes that Corel Painter offers and saw no problems at all. Last time I tried it with my old components my pc couldn’t keep up. Although it could handle my favorite oil brush it tended to close up (Corel) on me from time to time. The last time when I was painting the Buono piece I lost half an hour’s worth of work which really sucked. I was going to wait on upgrading for a bit longer but after that happened I decided to pull the trigger. And I’m very happy I did.

I really like Momochii’s Yurushite Nyan pose so I went with that when I first drew her. My thought process at the time was to try out 80s/90s style painting which can look extremely beautiful if done right. But as mentioned when I was looking at the old background it just wasn’t up to par so I made a new one that would fit Momoko.

I’m planning on making more paintings throughout the summer ( I actually have had some ideas floating around for a while now). But work and my decision to make a desk computer will be keeping me busy for a bit longer. Hopefully the extra space in the desk will help cool down my cpu and gpu if not I’m going to have to invest in a new cooler…

It has also been a while since I’ve done some traditional watercolor paintings so I hope to get back into that as well.

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

BUONO! Memorial 2020

Let’s start off by saying that I really love Buono! There was just something magical about this formation. Such a shame I will never get to see them live in concert. I’m really jelly of those who got to experience it. Thankfully the concerts are now being released on Youtube for more people to experience them. This premiere that happened last week was the closest I could get to experiencing one of their concerts live. A shame I couldn’t enjoy it all the way through since it started at 3 am in the morning where I live and I had to get ready for work. I couldn’t even get to enjoy Airi’s live video about Buono!… On the bright side this was done on Youtube so I can at least rest easy knowing that it won’t disappear and I can watch it as many times as I want. Man I really wanted to have this painting done on time last week. I actually own the concert but I’m glad it’s on Youtube so that more people can get to watch it and interact amongst fans.

I was working on this since the beginning of last week in the hopes that I would be able to finish it in time for Youtube’s premiere of the Buono! Pienezza! concert. But my other job has been extremely busy so I only managed to get the background and the main outlines and colors of Momochi, Miyabi and Airi. I don’t know if it was because I was tired from overworking or if I just had no idea of how to continue with the painting process but I got stuck and couldn’t continue working on it when I had some free hours to work on it. I finally managed to get some time to work on it again on Tuesday and started to use a new technique (for me) using Photoshop. Which basically just consists of putting in the base colors on one layer, adding a multiply layer for the outlines and another multiply layer for the shadows on them. It took me a while to come up with a system so that I could work faster and more efficiently (although it took me a whole two days to really know what I was doing).

Thank you for the music and fun all these years. It really warms my heart to know that they are still remembered and loved.

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

Rei Sailor Moon redraw

My brother told me about this redraw challenge for Sailor Moon. It seems that people are mainly focusing on on a certain screenshot. But I wanted to change it up a bit, which others have done as well. I would say that Rei is my favourite of the sailor members so I wanted to paint her. I really like the aesthetic of her in the pink overalls so I chose that scene. Background wasn’t too much of a problem but I painting Rei did take a good amount of time. Though since I wasn’t using other references as I painted her had me processing every step.

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

Elsa Granhiert エルザ・グランヒルテ

This drawing was originally done for inktober 2019 on day 4. My first main goal was to make an anime painting with hard color changes. When I was done I noticed that it didn’t fit in at all with the texture background I had started. They didn’t fit together at all. So I was a bit disappointed. It looked amazing with a completely white background though. The colors were really vibrant and had really light and dark tones so I wondered what type of background would fit. After I was done painting Elsa in I thought about it for a while and decided to paint the background with Corel. I had absolutely no plan when painting but after just choosing a base color that would fit with Elsa’s color scheme I just started adding color till I eventually ended up with her sitting on a her comfy seat surrounded by some curtains (I believe that’s what they would be called). But Elsa still did not fully fit in with the background. It didn’t look back bad but the lights weren’t interacting with her at all. So I then put a gradient on her to darken the bottom half of her body and putting the layer on multiply.

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

Little Witch Risako

This was first drawn from inktober 2019 day 3. This time I wanted to do a more simplistic coloring style more in the style of anime. If one uses the right colors it can really pop and look amazing. I really like the way it came out.

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

Suiryu Cat’s Claw Copic

I wanted to do another copic piece, but this time I wanted a more manga styled one with a more simplistic coloring scheme. I’ve been drawing a lot of girls lately so I wanted to draw a guy this time. For today’s subject I drew Suiryu again. I just barely had a chance to see the second season of One Punch Man. The animation is not bad, but it truly has degraded compared to the first season. I also noticed that they rushed some scenes quite a bit, but it’s not too bad (specially compared to what they did to To Aru Majutsu no Index III). It was really fun seeing Suiryu get animated, I just hoped to see more of him.

As for this piece, I wanted to have Suiryu actually training after the tournament incident but I still wanted a bit of humor. So for this drawing I used the pose of the Cat’s Claw from the Jackie Chan movie Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow. It’s a powerful but hilarious style. You can see it here.

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

Sayumi Michishige Copic

Continuing on with traditional work, I next moved on to using Copics. It’s been a couple of months since I last used them. I usually have trouble using darker colors because I’m afraid I will mess up in a way that I can’t reverse but this time I decided to push it woth some darker colors in the skin right from the start. Since I have been working with colors more I know how they will react once I add darker values such as with the hair so I felt a bit more at ease once I started working. I’m still not as fast as I would like to be though. This took me a couple of hours but I feel if I can probably do this in a bout an hour once I have a bit more experience. Looking at the reference photo and my version I could have added a bit more of the red tones on her skin but the overall idea was still portrayed which is good. The lips reacted with the ink since I might have overworked it a bit too much so I wasn’t able to portray a more natural lip color, I’ll have to be more careful next time.

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

Airi Suzuki Color pencil

The plan was to try out the other color pencil set I had but the colors weren’t right for the drawing I decided to do. But my Prismacolor set did have the right colors so I decided to use those instead. I was surprised at how amazing they were. I was having a lot of problems with them back in the day I remember, but I guess that was just my inexperience. Having said that, I’m nowhere near as good as the artists that specialize in color pencils. I was recently looking at the artwork of michaelfreemanpastelartist. He specializes in using pastel pencils it seems, and his art is photo realistic. It’s really amazing. I guess if I practice for a bit I should be able to improve a great deal my self, but my plan is to focus more on watercolors when it comes to traditional art. Instead I will use my color pencils as support. This has been the plan for a good bit, but I’ve never really used them together before. Maybe I’ll make that my next project.

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

Momoko Tsugunaga Pastel pencil

It’s actually been a couple of years since I last used color pencils. I actually had bought two different types of color pencil sets before I guess I decided to move over to Copics. Now understanding colors more, but being out of practice with color pencils I was curious to see if I could even use them.

So for this drawing I used the Faber-Castell Pastel pencils >>Pitt<<. They are quite amazing, they apply to the paper quite easily and spread out quite evenly. But they also smeared quite easily and were quite chalky. Plus they didn’t really like getting layered. But if I planned things out correctly they worked out quite well. I like them, but they smear far too easily.

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

Momoko Tsugunaga ink painting colorized

I recently saw a video of this other artist using photoshop’s color balance ability to change the color of a black and white painting. So I wanted to try it out. I’ve been craving to do another Momoko art piece so I used this chance to do so. I first painted Momoko using ink and my brushes. When I was content with the final painting I then went ahead and tried out this method. It definitely works, although maybe my painting wasn’t defined as well since some sections were too light and I had to add some more layers to get the right values. Overall I’m quite impressed, although I much prefer to just paint in colors right from the start so I can learn the process better for when I make future paintings later on. But at least now I know new technique just in case.

You can see both versions if you click on either pixiv or twitter.

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

Misaka level 6 shift

I’m currently watching the To Aru Kagaku no Railgun T anime. I’m really pleased with it. Unlike with To Aru majutsu season 3, they didn’t rush the series and the animation looks really beautiful. There were a couple of shots that used cgi that were moving a bit too fast and weird at the beginning but it seems they got used to it in the later episodes.

I really like Sogiita Gunha’s character so seeing him fight right next to Touma is amazing. Because this is one of my favourite scenes I decided to paint it.

Surprisingly this piece only took me three days to do. I guess I have been improving…

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

Misaka-Chu

This drawing was done on the 29th day of inktober 2019. I really like Shiho So‘s artwork. I first discovered it when Night Tempo was using it for his cassette releases. With the linework done it was now just a matter of coloring it in. I really like playing around with these bright pastel colors. Although it looked good just painting Misaka, I wanted to make a background for it that fit. After playing around I started to get different ideas like making it like a manga page with panels. Then I thought I would put in a perverse beastly Kuroko ready to attack. And then things started to flow from there. I used Clip Studio for the manga effects like the screentone and effect lines (what were they called again?). Just when I was about to call it finished I decided to write Misakachu with magenta, and luckily it worked out quite well. The painting it self didn’t take too long to do, it was just the small details and ideas that I came up with along the way that added a couple of hours. Still though, overall it was around 5 hours I think. Not bad. Once I have more practice with this style I should be able to work faster. Which I will do at some point since I really like it.

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE

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