There are so many drawings of Momochi that I want to give a try. This waitress outfit is hella cute.
Currently I can only use my surface pro to create art. This will be a perfect test to see what flexibility it can give me. I love that I can use my fingers to resize and can tilt the whole tablet to change the orientation of the workspace physically so that I have a more intuitive experience when drawing and painting. It’s giving me flashbacks to when I was a kid and used to draw with a clipboard. The only problem is that I don’t have express keys, I’ll have to see if I can add them digitally otherwise I will buy an express keys controller.
Took me about three weeks… but I finally have the first pass of animating my drawing of Momochi in her “Ai no Dangan” outfit. There are a couple of things I need to still edit, I also feel that making it twice as fast will help. Then there is the whole stretching and compressing when Momochi moves to make it more dynamic. There’s still so much I have to learn.
I’ve had the idea of drawing a piece in different styles. After telling myself that I finally did it. It’s amazing how a couple of details can change the whole drawing. This is a good exercise to increase my skills and develop my style.
For the Momochi Pose line art I decided to ink it and hatch it.
Yesterday I went to Meow Wolf. Inside was an art display by Future Fantasy Delight. The black and white art really popped and looked amazing. It was obvious that the artist had a lot of inspiration of anime/manga and Mexican culture (such as with the Mijo Miho character). I really need to make more black and white drawings.
There were a couple of areas that I did have to edit digitally and other areas that I had to clean up. Cheap Paper is cool to practice with, but I should seriously stop using it with my dip pens. The sharp tips lift up a lot of of the paper fibers. The areas that I inked were done using a brush. One thing I don’t like when I scan my artwork is that the light from the scanner exaggerates the dimples/texture in the paper. To the point where it creates blank spots. This happens as well with watercolors. I wonder if this is why some artists prefer to photograph instead of scan.
I finally finished making my new lightbox so I can now transfer line art as many times as I want so that I can practice more traditional styles.
Since I want to use my lightbox but don’t like having to move everything over and over again, I think it’s time that I finally make the lightbox that will fit in the desk opening. For that, I will scavenge the light and parts of my old lightbox. It took me a couple of hours but it was worth it.
This painting was done using my Holbein Watercolors. I like that I can play around with the opaqueness and vibrancy of the colors. But it’s obvious that I need to practice more. As I was painting I noticed that Momochi’s left (to our right) eye was misaligned. So when I was done painting I modified it digitally. I was going to leave the background blank but decided to add some blue brush strokes to emphasize the cold temperatures.
I want to try using the brushstrokes and colors that Alpay uses. They are amazing. But I also want to do ink drawings… Meaning that it would be a great if I transferred my line art to another paper. This calls for the use of a lightbox.
So I have a lightbox I built quite a while ago, but it takes a lot of space. It no longer works with my current setup. But, the desk I built has a place left open so that I would slide in a lightbox but I never built it. I think it might be time I scavenge the lights and built a smaller version that can dock into my desk.
Time was limited today so I drew a quick sketch. It has been snowing pretty consistently lately where I live, so I want to make more snow based artworks before we move into the spring season. This time I wanted to draw Momochi skiing from her time in Country Girls. She was really in her element it seemed when she was doing it in the DVD Magazine vol. 2. I wonder if she went skiing often?
I’m not sure what I will do with this line art. I could shade it with pencil, transfer it to another paper and paint it with watercolor or paint it digitally. We’ll see.
Every once in a while I check out the Goodwill auctions and was surprised when I found a Surface Pro 5 being sold. From the pictures shown it seemed to be in pristine condition and had the keyboard cover included. So I decided to take a chance and bid on it. And to my surprise I won. It took a while to get to me which sucked but in the mean time I ordered the accesories that were missing (these being the charger and the surface pen). Luckily I managed to find a genuine used charger and the pen was on sale for that week I was searching for it. When I finally received it I was surprised that it came with the original packaging. The actual surface pro was a bit dirty but looked almost new after I cleaned it. It has me thinking just who bought it and why they decided to donate it. I got the i5 with 8gb or ram which worried me since Corel Painter works better with stronger specs.
You know it’s funny, I was a bit stressed since I had to remind the Goodwill to send it. Which made the wait time longer than it should have been. But by the time it arrived, it was pretty much already October… meaning Inktober. It wasn’t till just the end of last week that I had a chance to finally test it out.
And the first model to be painted using my new Microsoft Surface Pro 5 is Momoko Tsugunaga. This time I used some screenshots I took from her last Photobook where she was inside an ice cream parlor. There were many amazing scenes to choose from, but I decided on this when where Momochi was looking out the window pensively as she was reflected off a picture frame. I painted the background first, then to Momochi and finished with Momochi’s reflection. I think she came out super cute.
So, how did the Surface Pro handle Corel Painter? To my surprise it was quite smooth. Although some things were a bit slow to react (such as making successive brush strokes or changing the brush size using the bracket keys), it wasn’t really by that much. All in all, as long as I have it in high performance during painting sessions it works without any problems. I’m actually quite amazed. Now, I haven’t really been keeping track but painting nonstop with High performance enabled gave the battery about 3-4 hours of life before I had to recharge it. Recharging is also quite amazing, it takes about 30-45 minutes to fully charge it. After a full days worth of painting the Surface Pro did get warm but it wasn’t uncomfortably hot at all which again was also very surprising considering just how thin it is. I already made a second painting so this quick first impressions is taking into account both experiences. What’s great is that it works as a tablet with the power of a computer at all other times. I was worried that I may have had to upgrade to a new stronger version but this works amazingly well.
For the fifth day I drew Momochi. I finally got to see parts of “Momo Play” (a dvd series where Momochi cosplays various outfits). Among them was one where Momochi cosplays as a maid which is just freakin cute. I just couldn’t resist drawing her. The reference used was from where she was walking down the stairs. I went for a manga look.
This painting is somewhat bittersweet. On the one hand, it is the first painting done with my new drawing tablet but that is because my old Xp pen was no longer working properly after the latest Windows update. (I’ll probably talk about it more later at some point). I recently got a third job so time for painting has decreased by a good bit so I will probably be posting less than before. Maybe that’s a good thing though, it will give me some time to step away from a painting and look at them with fresh eyes.
Although I have only had my new tablet for a couple of days, I am enjoying it. The new monitor setup is a lot more comfortable as well. Man, it feels great being able to use Corel Painter again. I’m still a bit rusty with the oil brushes so this whole painting was mostly done using the sergeant brush. The model that will be the first painting is Momochi. I got the reference from a screenshot that I took from the making of “Hatachi Momochi”. Video Photobooks are great because I can get more references. Man, I’m glad I live in this amazing era. Thank you Momochi for making so many video appearances!
I wanted to try another pixel art piece, this time with Momoko. I used a photo of Momochi camping from her “Momochi Zukan” photobook as reference. I started with a 200×200 canvas, but it was a little too big for the effect I wanted. So decided to make it into a 100×100 instead.
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