Finally, we are in the tail end of the summer, there’s only three more days before we finally enter the fall season! Heck yeah! I like this outfit that Momochi used in her “Off Momochi in Okinawa” blu ray. I think it really fits the lowering temps. I made two versions, a more realistic version and an anime version where I simplified certain aspects of the face and enlarging the eyes. Using outlines helps make people pop out, but I wanted to see if I could make it look good without them.
It’s Miyabi’s birthday today! Welcome to the 30 year club. I hope this year is more prosperous and filled with happiness, thank you for everything you have given us.
I really liked this photo of her trip to Okinawa. Seen here:
But just making a study is not that special (for birthday purposes) so I modified it a bit by having her bringing her sunglasses down but still having the wind blowing. I was thinking of having Miyabi wink, but the bonus accompanying painting I think fills that aspect perfectly.
The bonus painting is of her dancing with Karin Miyamoto “El Sonidito” Super Mario Bros 3 mix. Seeing Miyabi and Karin dancing Musica Regional from Mexico really made my day. It’s a shame Berryz Koubou never went to Mexico, that would have been a fun thing to watch like when ℃-ute and Juice=Juice did. So this was a nice surprise.
It seems like Miyabi is vacationing in Okinawa. There are a lot of beautiful photos of her trip but this one of her in the aquarium really called out to me. There’s just something magical with this whole composition. The beautiful Miyabi with the clear water in the background is just… I know I’m essentially just copying the photo (I did take off the face mask though so I could show Miyabi’s face), but I really wanted to study it. I’ve mainly worked with warm colors but have had problems with the cool spectrum. This painting really taught me a lot. Painting Miyabi’s face was actually the only section that had me struggling since the first iterations just didn’t look like her.
Reference image can be seen here at Miyabi’s instagram:
This whole painting was made using Anato Finnstark’s brushes. They are quite versatile. They will come in handy along with Toko Suzuki’s brushes whenever I use Photoshop to paint.
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.
There’s this artist named Criisalys that I really like. I’ve seen the art a while ago being used by Macross 82-99. I’m surprised it took me this long to find the actual artists Twitter and Instagram. It can be found here:
I want to try out this style. The model for this will be the beautiful Miyabi Natsuyaki. There are always great reference photos to choose from, but ended up going with this one:
I really like this look, it’s very Aesthetic and would fit with the coloring style I’m trying to emulate.
One other notable thing to mention has to do with my new Xp-Pen tablet/monitor. So I have a set up of multiple monitors and have now added monitor profiles to switch some of them off. This has the added effect though that some of my windows get scrambled, including what monitor is selected for my Xp-Pen. But I noticed that I could move the cursor on other monitors. Today I decided to try it out and it works great (I was cleaning up the drawing). There doesn’t seem to be pressure though… but for simple and quick fixes/painting this works out great.
For the painting of Miyabi in her maid outfit I used a couple of references for the pose, one of them happened to be of Miyabi in her outfit for the Hello Project Winter 2019 Concert. I really loved the pose, the dress and the crown working together to make Miyabi look so beautiful. This time I wanted to hatch and cross hatch. The line art itself was done with my g pen and the hatching was done with my maru pen.
I recently talked about how my monitors were not calibrated correctly so my colors and values were off. I’m going back and trying to fix some of the previous paintings I have done. Miyabi dressed as a maid is of course one of those paintings.
I just had to paint Miya in her maid outfit with the nostalgic Buono! pose. I couldn’t find the whole outfit look from the waist down so I had to make it up.
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.
I was wondering why my artwork was looking a bit blocky when I was resizing it to a smaller size so that I could post it online and just now remembered that I didn’t change my settings that I used for creating pixel art. Changing the resample option to automatic and that did the trick. I think I have about one or two weeks worth of artwork that have been resized using the wrong settings… What’s funny is that I already had a resized version up and ready to post, but I’m glad I forgot.
The line art for this painting is quite old now. Its from way back in June. I remember trying to paint it not long after drawing it but didn’t like what I was coming out with. I decided to go with a Copic/watercolor like style. Using Toko Suzuki’s brush is great since it has both texture and opacity control. I really like the amount of detail and control I can get with it. There’s many ways to paint this Momoko drawing but I have couple others that I can try that out with.
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