"A Hopeless Dream Chaser"
It’s a bit late when I’m posting this so I will keep it short but this is based on the ad campaign called Yes Coke Yes. The reference used is one of the ads that Hayami Yu. I’ve been wanting to do some summer artwork and also utilize the 80s ads that I have. It has also been a while since I’ve done a simpler painting. It was a lot of fun painting this piece, luckily I managed to finish it in time.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
A couple of days ago Airi posted an instagram story of her pretending to drive or should I say race a car while some Eurobeat played in the background. I believe it was Deja Vu but I may be wrong (it was definitely one of the iconic songs). I was actually quite surprised that Airi was aware of Initial D so it was a great surprise. It’s a shame it was a story and wasn’t left permanently on her instagram because I really wanted to see it again.
After watching the video I decided to make a drawing about it. I wasn’t too sure of what car to choose for Airi. At first I was thinking of using one of the cars that appeared on the Buono! music videos but then I figured I should choose a small compact car that was a bit more in the AE-86 class. So a small compact car that fit with the English theme of Buono!… I for some reason like the aesthetic of mini coopers so I ended up going with that. Luckily I had some references of mini coopers in my references collection so I really just had to find some references of Airi and Takumi (as well as his 86 which for some reason I didn’t have many of). I made a lot of mistakes while I was drawing but I cleaned what I could with my Nicker poster color which worked really well. After I was done inking and shading with ink I then used Photoshop to clean up the pencil marks and adjusting the black and white levels. Once I had that going I then used Clip Studio to add in the sound effects that are so iconic of Initial D.
I quite liked the way it came out. Hope you guys enjoy it as well.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
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
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
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
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.
Momoko Tsugunaga ink Colorized #darkcloudxero #ハロプロ #MomokoTsugunaga #BerryzKoubou #嗣永桃子 #Berryz工房 #ももち… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…—
(@DarkCloudXERO) April 25, 2020
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
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
It’s kind of a shame I didn’t do this one for Airi’s birthday but I was quite busy so it couldn’t be helped. This drawing was done in April 17 of 2019. I tried painting it on the 23rd using the reference picture as a guide for the colors as well. But it didn’t end well. The line art was just not working correctly with the painting. So over all it looked quite unnatural and weird. I then tried again on the 25th after I got frustrated and made the colors simpler and more anime like in an effort to make the lineart work better. But the result wasn’t much better. I just had too much trouble trying to blend them together. Well, after a year of countless hours of painting I decided to give it another try. I won’t lie, I still had that trauma of not being able to paint it correctly but the only way to find out is to just go ahead and do it. Annoyingly I did have some problems when I started painting it. Seeing as the line work was pretty dark and plentiful (when it came to the hatching) it just didn’t look right. I tried flat colors thinking that would work but after three tries I had to stop and rethink everything. The next day though I finally decided to paint it the way I have been painting lately. But this time I decided to make the linework lighter, I left it at around 65% of the darkness. Also, this time I decided to try and not look at the reference photo and just paint it the way I believed would work. Also, since most of my paintings have been coming out quite light (in terms of color and values), I decided to go for a more vibrant and deeper color pallette. And well, I really like the result.
I have noticed I have been working mainly with the warm colors in the yellow and red range, but whenever I try to do another color scheme I mess it up or it just doesn’t look right. I want to try cool colors for my next piece.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
I’m amazed at just how much effort Yusuke Murata puts into both the characters created by ONE and the ones coming out (so far) in Murata’s version. One of the characters that really captured my eye is Ring Ring. It’s a shame she only came out for a couple of chapters. I was hoping that she would come out a bit more but the chances of that happening are slim. Maybe she will come back with Suiryu after training to become heroes. One can hope. Another shame is that we didn’t get to see her techniques, she got defeated too quickly… While drawing her I noticed that her design is simple and yet very iconic and cute. The addition of the bells and her hairstyle is a really good touch.
Looking at the One punch man wiki, it seems that Lin Lin was supposed to be Suiryus sister, so I guess there were more plans for her…
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
This was a piece I started last year around June of 2019. I gave up when I couldn’t work out the background. But after doing a couple of pieces using Ranma’s backgrounds for references, I felt more comfortable. There are still areas in the background that can be made better, and the muscles can be defined more with a mixture of hatching and painting but I wanted to give a simple painting style that can be seen in an old anime from the late 80s or 90s. At first was thinking of putting him in a neighborhood but decided to have him walking on a lone road towards South town. I limited myself to three colors for each section of Terry. I could add more details if I added one more color level but I really wanted to see how it would look if I limited myself to just three.
Let’s keep doing our best guys.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
I had attempted to draw this and paint this for New Years but I didn’t really like the way it came out. So I attempted it again, but since I had already painted the original lineart I had no choice but to go at it digitally. I would say that the painting process isn’t taking that much time, but getting references does. I decided to use the coloring style from the movie Macross: Do you remember love. Aside from coloring it I also wanted to edit some other parts of the drawing it self. The first part was the mouth and lips. I decided to take out the linework of the upper and lower lip. I would form it wit color instead. Of course this and all the other changes were dictated by the references I got from the movie. For the mouth, I also resized it and made it smaller while also repositioning it. The Eyes were moved down a bit and I erased most of the eyelash strands. Eyelashes were also thined and shortened a bit. To my surprise, when I was screen capturing the final reference shots I came across a scene that is almost the same background like the Airi Suzuki picture that I’m using. I quite like the addition of the shadow. I feel like I could’ve added something on the left side of the painting. But this works. One thing I do know is that it looks quite good using a diluted ink linework so that the color influences it when applied.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
Was working on this last week but didn’t get to finish the painting process till just now after work. The line work was done using my Stabilo pens. It’s been a while since I last used them. I wanted to see what kind of effect it would have when I underlaid it digital paint. It’s not a bad look, especially in the skin tones but, I think the blue is a little too well blue. I’m thinking using a grey pen on most parts except on the skin tones would work better. But at least now I know. It’s a shame they don’t really work well with watercolors (they smear and bleed). Well at least they work with copics. It’s a shame really because when it comes to traditional painting/coloring I now prefer to use watercolors. As for the digital painting process I tried to replicate the anime coloring style which I just absolutely love. Will definitely try doing it again. I’ll also do try doing this using my traditional paints.
Things have been getting rather hectic lately. Stay safe out there, and never give up.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
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