A bonus painting for Momochi’s birthday. Reference used was from her blog photos. I wanted to try out a cute shoujo 80s anime style. Happy birthday Momochi.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
Momochi Sunset Study
I recently saw an artist that worked with light colors and used that as an aesthetic advantage. Usually when I paint, almost every time it looks really light so I worried whether it would look well to others or not. So this time I have decided to just paint like usual and try to not overwork the painting too much. What I did want to try though is a version where I just painted and let the colors separate the whole piece as a whole. In the second version I added some lighting to the hair, darkened the lips and added some linework. Personally I prefer the original version more although I do like the the linework version as well. I went for a semi realistic/anime style. This mainly entails that one keeps the detail on the face as flat as possible and making the eyes bigger. Of course one can play with the style and how far to push the details which will give different effects. I chose to add a good number of facial details but using very light tonal changes that are noticeable but that are not very abrupt and still keep the coloring style a bit flat. As for the eyes I decided to keep the main shape and colors intact but made them bigger and enlarged the eyelashes a bit.
This study was done using a photo from Momoko Tsugunaga’s last photobook. Happy Birthday Momochi, thank you for everything you have done. Even now your work still makes everyone happy. And this of course includes me. Now that more media is becoming available to us overseas fans and that I can understand a bit more Japanese, I have so much media that I can now enjoy for the first time. It’s a shame my skills were not good enough back when you were still active. Although I love that not only did you have a goal in life (as a teacher), but you accomplished it on top of all your idol activities. The motivation you emanate is absolutely stunning. I truly hope that you are doing well and enjoying life. I can only hope that my art reaches you and makes you even just a fraction of the happiness you have given me.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
Momochi snow coat
I wanted to do a really simple painting of Momoko today. Keep warm and safe out there.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
Momochi Pixel Art
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.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
Sleeping Friends Buono!
The line art was first done for inktober 2020 day 21. This painting was done on Sunday but decided to upload today. For this painting I decided to go for a simpler anime style which can be quite aesthetically pleasing. I wanted to add a good amount of detail but still keep it quite simple and not over work it. I really like this image from Kiss!Kiss!Kiss! I believe this is my second time drawing it but first time painting it. It was a relaxing and pleasant experience.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
Miyabi Natsuyaki’s New Year Temple Visit 2021 watercolor
I finally finished. I guess because there’s so many details it took quite a bit of time. But overal I like the way it turned out. The Holbein Watercolors do exactly what I want them to do, I don’t think I can go back to any other watercolors at this point. And this is using Master’s Touch watercolor paper which isn’t really that good quality (although I highly recommend it since it’s the best paper at the price range). At some point I should try painting on some higher quality paper which I tend to neglect since they are, you know, quite expensive. But I feel confident enough to try it now. Once I again I am using watered down ink for the outlines which works really good when applying color on top of it since it’s also translucent and reacts with the color one applies on top. This leaves it open to apply more color to the outline or ink to make it darker. Although I did add some shadows to give the background some 3dimentinality, I decided to make Miyabi’s colors flat so as to not overwork the painting which I tend to do. Doing so gives the finished painting a much cleaner look that pops out quite nicely (Thank you Little Thunder for showcasing your artwork! I always learn so much looking at it.).
I really love the colors that Miyabi chose for her kimono and her makeup. They really fit well with the background colors. I was planning to add the color variations to the kimono. But as I was playing around with the way Mars Violet interacted with the yellow mixture I used for the Kimono base color, I decided it would look best as a simple color. Hopefully I managed to replicate Miyabi’s beauty through my brush.
We are well into the New Year now, so I will now focus on some winter drawings/paintings before the season ends.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
Miyabi Natsuyaki New Year Temple Visit 2021 line art
Miyabi Natsuyaki New Year Temple Visit 2021 line art
I really loved Miyabi’s New Years photos. She looks really beautiful with her kimono. She mentioned it was a retro look, so I’m guessing this is a Showa era style? It really suits her. She looks so ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ with the shrine in the background. I think an 80s/90s anime style would look good but I feel it will also look good in watercolor. Just recently on her Twitter she mentioned that she has been getting nostalgic for Berryz Koubou. She also gave the impression that there might be a reunion of some kind.
･:*+.(( °ω° ))/.:+
Thank you so much for this past year Miyabi, hopefully this year will be great for you.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
Momochi’s Dangerous Upward Glance Watercolor
I’m going to be practicing with watercolors for a bit. I wan’t to see what I can do with the media. The first watercolor of the year is Momochi, using the first drawing of the year. I was a bit worried as I was painting but things were becoming more clear as I kept going. She looks so cute. It’s a bit of a shame the background didn’t get picked up by the scanner.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
Momochi’s Dangerous Upward Glance inked
Happy New Year 2021!
For the first drawing of 2021 I drew Momochi. My original plan was to paint it with watercolors but I decided to make two versions of it, an inked version and a painted one. The painted version I plan to do next. As I thought, the DVD Magazines had plenty of references for me. The upward glance she gave while travelling up the mountain was killer. It’s probably even more potent if she did that in person.
I used a mix of ink and in some sections a more diluted ink for sections I wanted to keep light but still give shadows to. This time I made sure to hatch it slower so that the end result would look cleaner. My plan is to continue doing that from now on. The process didn’t take that much longer anyway. I got really lucky that Momochi’s face wasn’t ruined actually, a huge blob of ink just poured out of my pen below her chin. Luckily that section was supposed to be blacked out and the ink didn’t spread to her face. I won’t lie, it was an agonizing 25-30 seconds while I tried to find some tissue paper to soak up the ink before it began going everywhere. I feel like the drawing wasn’t complete until I added some blush lines, I really like the end result.
Hope you guys had a great start to the year. Here’s hoping for the best.
Happy New Year!
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
Shy cat Miyabi
During this year’s Halloween, Miyabi cosplayed in different costumes. One of them was of a cute cat girl. For one of the photos she uploaded she had a really embarrassed and shy face that caught my attention and I wanted to try and draw/paint it. Looking at several clips of Miyabi it seems she has had various occasions like these where her shyness shows through. I really think that’s one of her charm points.
Photos of Miyabi in her cat cosplay: https://www.instagram.com/p/CHAxrICht-M/
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
Momoko Tsugunaga twin tails
This time I wanted to try out different styles. First, now that I had a stronger pc I wanted to try out the watercolor brush that Corel Painter has. Before in my old system, the program would take a long time to process one brushstroke. And this computer just did it like it was nothing. I then moved over to the real watercolors brush and I only had to wait probably about 1/2 a second for my computer to process the realistic watercolor painting. I do have to practice with them a bit more, but I’m amazed at how realistic the way the paints interact with each other and how I can layer the paint, glaze and pretty much anything that can be done with real watercolors. But with the advantage that digital painting has. I painted rather quickly and that shows, but I’m sure it can be polished to a high degree.
For the second painting I tried the oily bristle brush so that I could compare. It looks good, but I should probably spend more time to blend or make the transitions between colors a bit more cleanly.
For the third painting process I went for a more pop manga style. I’ve been following a couple of artists these days, but I was specifically looking at the art of
__tree_13 : https://www.instagram.com/p/CH0WQnCnsYn/
The artist does a great job of bringing back that 80s style and I really wanted to have a go at it. For this one I used a combination of Photoshop and Clip Studio for the screen tone. I’m really glad that I can open a .psd file with Clip Studio and Painter.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
Momoko Tsugunaga twin tails
This drawing was started back in October 27 when I got some new lead that was 2h I believe. Now that I had some time to look at it again, I made some changes and inked it. I really feel that the ink and changes I made, created a much better drawing that looked more like Momoko.
Reference used was from Momoko’s last photobook Momochi.
Next time I want to try out the pencil with watercolors, but I think in this case ink was the way to go. Momochi looks so cute with twintails.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
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