Today’s Pixiv theme is suspenders, which automatically reminded me of the character played by Benny the Jet Urquidez on the film “Wheels on Meals”. What I loved about the 80s was that they had the same love for Hong Kong movies which is always an amazing treat when I find out what they are referencing as I watch an episode. Ranma basing a whole lot of it’s aesthetic in all types of martial arts movies but having that fun aspect that was seen in 80s movies thanks in large part to Jackie Chan. Truth be told I was planning to just paint Benny but I soon just had the urge to paint Ranma. I really like these light pastel colors.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.