I started working on this piece right after Christmas and leading up to New Years. But I knew I wouldn’t have been able to finish it so I decided to stop on the 31st so that I could restart after New Years. It took me a couple of days but not as long as I thought it would. This time I wanted to try and emulate the painting style of the original anime. I did try to use the colors from the anime itself but found out that the values and colors didn’t work together so I did have to account for that and adjust accordingly. This process was a real pain in the … before but I have gotten quite used to it. I think I’m starting to understand color a lot more now. I was really worried because color seemed like such a hard concept for me (it still is) but by brute forcing myself to understanding it. I did this by painting and painting even if I didn’t know why something worked… even though there were so many failures that really made me feel inadequate… all the effort is finally starting to show the progress.

The line work itself did give me a couple of headaches since I couldn’t figure out how dark or translucent it should be so I did have to fiddle with that a good number of times. The artwork looked fine to me but I felt that making it a bit blurrier(?) or having it have a layer of light pollution(?) would make it look more like how I remember watching the anime. sometimes having that grain in the quality of the anime gives it more character and look more appealing (but the more I think about it the more it sounds like nostalgia talking huh?).

Anyway I wanted Goku to be in Mexico for this year eating traditional Mexican foods that some of us would eat during this time of the year. So I had him eating tamales, tacos, elotes, and buñuelos. Thinking back I should have given Goku a bigger table and also add some chocolate abuelita (a brand of Mexican hot chocolate) or something. I also was envisioning some fireworks in the background but since I finished this after new years I decided against it. The cathedral in the background is based on one in Durango, Mexico.

Here is the piece (I decided to have two versions):

Tv quality –

HD quality –

here are the references:

and here is the process:

I had fun working on it, though I wonder how long it would take me to do it traditionally and if it would look better?

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE