Today’s theme was blade, there were many options but for some reason I wanted to draw Makoto Shishio from Rurouni Kenshin. Definitely one of the best villains. His character design is also really unique and awesome. One of the coolest techniques he has is the Tsui no Hiken: Kaguzuchi, you know, the one where he creates a swirling fire stream around his sword. I looked at the manga and the anime and they both had a forward view of Shishio performing the technique. So I wanted to change it up a bit and draw Shishio from the side. Since I had a bit more time today I decided to add some hatching and inking. Hopefully I can do some more in the drawings to come.
Didn’t have much time today either but I somehow still managed to draw something. I had a bit of a different idea in mind when I saw the prompt yesterday. I was thinking of having a cholo and a yanki having a boombox battle trying to impress a cute girl. But due to the lack of time I had to scrap that idea. When I was looking through my reference collection I saw an ad with Phoebe Cates holding a portable stereo and I knew that it would be the reference picture I would use. This is the one I’m talking about: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/5e/0d/8a/5e0d8af9940bc91dee1021a525068556.jpg
I was wondering if I would be able to convey that her hair was wet, but I think I did.
I had a couple of ideas about what the next ink drawing I would do, then when I got back from work I started getting some more ideas. That lead to me preparing a lot of screengrabs for references… so I just started running out of time (I didn’t even finish). I then had to scramble to find something to draw. Looking at the prompt for inktober I decided to draw this cute girl in a bulky jacket.
This time I used inspiration from a photo of Rie Hatada’s single cover. When I saw the color scheme it reminded me of Athena. As for the art style, this time I wanted to use Masakazu Katsura’s (artist of Video Girl Ai). I really like the fusion of realism and the manga illustration style.
October has finally arrived, and that means that Inktober has as well. I had some ideas on the past days but just yesterday I had an idea of Goku kicking me in the back sending me flying like in a gag manga. I thought the idea fit this year and the start of this Inktober quite well. I wanted a simple style much like the one used in the original Dragon Ball. Once I was done I was tempted to add more details, but I really have to contain my tendency to overwork pieces. I think this will be a good starting piece, I’ll try new ink styles over the coming days.
Ahh finally, my favorite season has begun. Some days have already started to have lower temperatures but it’s still fluctuating quite a bit. Any way, things have been quite busy lately so I just made a quick painting to commomerate fall. Although I wish to make more. Oh wait Inktober starts tomorrow. I guess my time will be taken over by that for a month. The painting is a study of this photo of Sayu: https://www.instagram.com/p/CFE1mDOlsl4/
It’s been a while since I last painted with watercolors. Truth be told, I was really afraid to go at it. But after looking at a couple of pictures from one of my favorite artists, it gave me that push to just start painting. The artist I’m talking about (and that I have mentioned before a couple of times) is Little Thunder. If you haven’t seen her work I really suggest you go and check it out. It’s absolutely beautiful and definitely one of my artistic inspirations. I tend to overwork my paintings and not use color theory to my advantage. I still don’t fully comprehend it but I do know when colors look right when used with each other, so I have at least developed my color abilities to that level. Having said that, I still was guided by Little Thunder’s artwork as I painted.
I really like Japanese 80s music, and one of my favorite artists during that time is Naoko Kawai. Her voice and music are amazing and brings me joy when I listen to it. On top of that she is super cute. So of course I would do another piece of her. This time I wanted to try something a bit more difficult that had various variables, and well I just plain liked the photo of her in the Jeep. I was surprised I was able to finish the painting so fast. It was three days, (a few hours on Wednesday for the rough draft, Thursday I finished the rough draft and focused on inking, I then got all my courage and actually started painting today Friday). I really love the way watercolors look. It changes my art style quite a bit. I’m planning to do more paintings but October is coming so that means Inktober, plus I need to write three essays… It’s gonna be a rough month. But I’ll give it a shot. I was amazed when I saw Little Thunder finished a drawing/painting in 15 minutes. That’s a good goal to aim for.
Right now I’m in a Hello Project art mood, I can’t help but want to draw the members whenever I want to try out a new style. But I figured I should try to draw some new subjects, so I was looking through my reference folders and decided on drawing a Honda CR-X which I quite like. Once I had the line art done I decided to try out a new shading style which consists of just laying it down with parallel lines. I quite liked the aesthetic of this style. But once I was done I wasn’t too sure what else I should do with it. Then I started thinking about maybe implementing someone in front of the car. Then it hit me, I could use that Sayu picture I drew where she has short hair. Once I cleaned up the background I resized Sayu so that she would fit the size of the CR-X and well… I really love the way it came out. I guess things were just meant to be. Somehow that short hair and hat make her fit that racer look.
This is a study from Momoko’s photobook Momoko Momochi Zukan. I actually wanted to try something new but ended up trying to do a realistic take by using hatching and cross hatching. I wasn’t satisfied with the way it came out since some lines came out too thick for the shadows. But I figured if I thickened some of the line art and darkened certain areas to change the values and lighten the hatching I made for the shadows. And sure enough it worked. I could push this effect more if I added more shadows around Momochi. Maybe adding interesting hatching would give it a cool aesthetic.
Today was a busy day but I somehow was still be able to draw, ink and edit this piece with photoshop. I wanted to give the ink style of the previously uploaded drawing again. But this time five times. Today (yesterday in Japan) was ℃-ute’s Day. So that is the reason I drew this drawing. Thank you ℃-ute for all the years you’ve given us.
I had drawn this back in I believe June 3rd of this year. Back then I had no idea of how to color it. I did at some point wanted to make it with gray tones but couldn’t figure it out. Today on my Youtube recommended’s list was a video featuring the art of tourniiquet, this one here.
After seeing it I decided to give it another try. I liked the way it turned out but wanted to add more contrast and texture somewhere so I eventually ended up using some paper texture for the background. I really like the way it came out.
Last week I started the line art for this painting (finally had some time to work on it a bit on Monday night and the rest on Tuesday night). I wasn’t too sure what I wanted to do so I was just sketching whatever came out. I then had the idea of having Kenshin look up, which gave him a sorrowful feeling. I then wanted some movement so I made his hair to blow in the wind. I was surprised how quickly the drawing came out, I used to take hours just to draw something even if it was simple line art like this one. From there I was looking at reference pictures of what I could use as the background. I found this really cool one of a shrine (turned out to be one from Nagoya when I researched it) but then I started thinking that a shrine doesn’t mean it’s a graveyard (plus it wasn’t in Kyoto) so once I had to work on the space right behind Kenshin I looked around google and found some references of graveyards. I used the impressionist brush for the texture but it looked really weird compared to everything else. But it turned out to be an easy fix when I started glazing and blending the graveyard pillars and steps. I thought of adding writing on them but that would take too much time to research, come up with and paint the intricacies of the kanji. So I just made some brush strokes that from a distance might look like actual writing but they have no actual meaning, they are just scribbles. The overall look I wanted to go for was the style used in the 90s anime which I believe holds up very well. Specially during the Kyoto arc.
Just as I was about to upload this painting I noticed that I hadn’t painted in Kenshin’s iconic cross shaped scar. Good thing I was too tired yesterday to upload it or he would have gone with out it.
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