Donkey Kong Country and Donkey Kong Country 2 bring me a lot of nostalgia. I used to play them a lot when I was a kid. Nowadays I really like listening to the soundtracks when I’m painting. Seriously, everyone involved in these games were geniuses. The atmosphere really captures my imagination and is a mood. I want to do some more Donkey Kong paintings but for some reason I wanted to paing King K. Rool. His pirate attire is really cool. I’d say that it was because of this game that I even grew up liking pirates.
I’m surprised I haven’t painted Meimi before. I had seen glimpses of her in Haro Pro shows when she was still a new member. But it wasn’t till I stumbled upon this music video that I became a fan:
Although at the time it was only the short edit version.
At first I was surprised to find out that she was no longer in S/mileage which I then found out was called Angerme. Then it was her voice. It’s much deeper and really strong. Seriously, her singing is amazing. Because of her I went back to check out S/mileage and Angerme’s discography. I’ve been missing out. But more about that at some later date.
Lately she’s been doing stage plays which I remember she said she loved and preferred doing. Hopefully she will continue her singing career because she’s definitely great at it, and I just want to hear new songs from her (selfish, I know).
Pictures are from her instagram, fromfrom the Rurouni Kenshin stage play. She portrays Sanjo Tsubame, the Akabeko errand girl.
I would link them to her account, but they have been erased (she seems to like deleting old content every once in a while).
But there is video of the performance (she appears at minute 1:19):
I don’t know which version I should go with, the more muted colors version which is the original or the more saturated version which I edited afterwards.
Here is another ink painting using Corel Painter 2023. I do wonder though, can I get similar effects just using the blending sargeant brush? I guess mixing brushes are now part of my style because I wish I could blend instead of having to glaze over and over. Its not supper time consuming, but it would be quicker to blend. Either way, monochromatic paintings are quite soothing.
I really love the ad for the Yamaha SHS-10 or the Sholky (which appears to mean shoulder keyboard) with Yuki Matsushita jamming. The actual CM is even more fun and has some fun poses that I want to draw. I’m no musically inclined so I wonder how a shoulder keyboard stacks up as an instrument?
This is the ad used as reference (seems like there was also another variation):
and this has the CM I was talking about:
On another note, I had long had two things that I needed to do. Buy a new chair and modify my desk. My old chair I bought because it was a drafting chair which was high enough to match my desk but it was super stiff and limited the amount of comfort over the day. It was torture after a while. The desk had a rather tight entrance where I could barely come in with my chair. I put up with it since I didn’t have any arm rests, but when I finally bought my new chair, the arm rests were needed to connect the backrest to the seat. After about two weeks of use I became very aware of the lack of movement I could do, specially with the arm rests. On top of that, the right arm rest was getting scratched up (it has that fake leather), so before it became worse I had to finally address the desk.
The plan was to have the side walls point outward, and that was it. So after my other job on Sunday, I just decided to go straight into it and hack the side walls off which also house to input fans, the i/o and bluray player. Luckily it seems I had the forethought to make it easy to remove when I built the desk. Surprisingly it took me about have a day to modify the desk and get it built up (for the most part). But when I reconnected everything and turned on my computer, the screens were black…
It was already pretty late so I called it a day and would figure it out the next day. So it took me half the day to finally figure it out, the monitor switching program had forgotten all of my settings and was having problems with all five screens connected. I noticed this all before I switched my gpu to the motherboard from the stand mount. That was annoying. The next part was my drives, half of them were no longer visible. Doing most of the basic troubleshooting didn’t work. That’s when I decided to check if it was seated correctly on the motherboard. It wasn’t. The last problem left was the audio. First there was no audio and when I finally got that working, the sound was too low. As of now, I have yet to fix this. I tried resetting the drivers, updating, but nothing worked. Who would have thought that modifying the enclosure of a computer would create so many software issues. Despite everything, for only two days of work it was all worth it. I’m using a super old receiver I got from thrift store which I was planning to upgrade anyway. So I will fix the audio later. There’s some small details left, but the desk is essentially done. Though I have to figure out what do do about my lightbox which will no longer work with these new dimensions.
Here’s a quick painting of Rei Hino in the rain. It has been wanting to rain where I live, but the rain keeps going over us… At least the temps have gone down a bit.
Ahhh man, I’ve been wanting to paint Orochi Iori for a couple of years now. I seriously can’t believe it took me this long to finally do it. Looking at the gameplay animations I decided upon this pose. Having him slash there really isn’t any visual flare, but it seems in the newer games it has been added. So I decided to add a bit of flare. I thought it would look weird to have him slashing at nothing so I added some blood splatter as though he hit his target. cough cough… Kyo..
I wanted the background to fit Iori’s state, since we had a couple of rainy days where I lived I was thinking of that, or maybe a night scene. But while looking at some reference pictures I found one of a sunset that I felt would fit very well.
The Corel Painter 2023 Sargent brushes are so much better since I have more control to their thickness while also having blending abilities.
I can’t believe I still haven’t seen any of Chiba’s Yagyu Jubei movies. But I have seen a lot of posters and screenshots in my references. I really like this one, so I used it as the subject to keep practicing with the ink brushes I mentioned before.
I wasn’t really sure how I would merge these two paintings. I know I wanted them to be back to back, so I flipped them accordingly. The colors were also not where I wanted them, so I adjusted them to their current form. When I put them on the same canvas there was a gap between them which had me stumped. At first I filled it in with some solid colors that made a clear separation between them. But that was just too simple and boring. Then I finally figured out that I could just merge them and have them interact with each other. I first had the backgrounds blend with each other. As I kept working I finally came to the realization that I could have both versions of Akemi back to back with their clothes appearing on each other’s side of the canvas. Then the idea of having hair strands move from the shy Akemi to the hardened Akemi came to my mind. Luckily the idea worked out. There was still something I felt was missing though. That’s why I decided to add the soul gem between the two Akemis. Behind the soul gem I wanted light to be emanating from it, but when I darkened the left side it looked a lot like feathers so I changed the original concept to be a wing motif. I think this version of both of them together looks much better.
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