The first painting was after I edited the values and saturation. I’m never really fully satisfied after I finish painting so I always end up playing around with the editing. In the end I’m never really sure which way it looks best…
I really like her new single, hoping her the best.
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.
It was also a bonus that her hairstyle was specially cut for her end of the year °C-ute concert. I was just about finished yesterday painting Airi when my brother walked in and asked when I would make a painting that took longer. I was wondering if he meant that I was rushing through this painting and was leaving it too rough. But it seems he just meant that lately I have only been doing line art which takes only a couple of hours (Airi as well). That’s when I decided to add a background. Using the wall background would not do so I decided to make a winter scenery. I ended up mashing up a couple of reference photos (including some from Airi’s photobooks). It looks like the road crossing the train tracks is heading straight to the sea huh? I guess the idea is that there is a ramp for people to drive towards the beach.
I was a bit apprehensive about the details in the sweater when I was just about to start, but luckily with my current experience I know that it’s just a matter of painting and now stopping. Once that flow starts, it doesn’t take that long to finish. Once I added the background, I did have to tweak the saturation and values on Airi though.
I started this painting back on Saturday and worked a bit on it Sunday morning but for some reason felt like I wasn’t making much progress. It started to become a slugfest, so I decided to take the rest of Sunday off and not work on it on Monday. I felt a bit guilty but when I continued working on it today I definitely felt more refreshed and the wall I was fighting before was suddenly non existent. Although the background and the poses were mostly left finished on Sunday, there was still quite a bit of work to do figuring out how I wanted the colors for Ranma and Akane. But once I got the base colors done, the work just flowed after that. It was just a matter of working and tweaking things. I’m trying to render things a bit more so that they don’t look too rough. I’m also gonna play around with the line art digitally. Doing so I can get a my style that I’m currently developing and traditional anime working together. Judging by how things tend to work out, I’ll be adjusting and hopefully refining it as I go along.
Background is a mismatch of different ideas and photos but the ice was from a photo I took a while ago:
The idea for this painting was mainly jus to have Akane skating when I saw this photo of Yū Hayami (I of course used the opportunity to change the K to an A):
But I felt like Akane would look too lonely so I added Ranma. I remembered that he had trouble skating in the first seasons (did he ever learn?) so I wanted to paint him struggling. That’s how I came upon this pose reference (Can’t find info on the model for some reason):
Ranma’s outfit:
I was pretty much done when I suddenly by the end felt it would look even better if I had Ryoga in his boar form jumping off of Ranma. Then I noticed that Akane looked too stiff so I decided to have her hair flutter as if she was in movement.
I’ve been working on this painting for a couple of days now. I first drew the line art with a combination of my brush and my g pen for Airi’s base body, not including her clothes. I did this because I feel I make clothes look to stiff with the pen. For the background I used a lighter mixture of my ink while Airi herself was inked using a more concentrated ink mixture.
Over the last couple of weeks I have been playing around with the shortcut keys I feel I need most to make paintings more efficiently. I’m really glad I did because it made the painting process flow much smoother. The painting was much brighter but I feel this darker amber atmosphere fits the scene a whole lot better.
Merry Christmas everyone, and Happy Holidays! I think I’m going to take a three day break and just chill for a while. Hope you guys have a great time.
A redo of painting I did back in March 2020. I only did a couple of touch ups of the background and changed some of the lighting and color. The main changes were made to Terry in terms of the values and hues. The main part I mainly spent repainting were his arms.
One of the great things about inktober is that I get to a lot of line art that I can paint. I have lots to choose from, but lets start with Mokocchi sporting her makeover done by Asuka when they first interacted.
I’ve been wanting to paint Sayu in this outfit ever since it was uploaded. She kind of reminds me of a Team Rocket member.
This is the second Microsoft Surface Pro 5 painting. This time around working with the surface felt a lot smoother. The next test will consist of me working in portrait mode. I know it works since I tried to see what would happen if I tilted the whole screen, although it did make Corel crash… I’ll have to play with it a bit more.
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.
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!
This is my second entry for the “XP Pen Reconstructed Masterpiece” contest. While looking for famous masterpieces I had seen the Napoleon painting before I had decided to paint the Van Gogh painting I made prior. I know I wanted to do something with this recreation, but I didn’t have an idea until this past weekend. I started with the motorcycle first which took the longest since I was mashing different motorcycles together until I arrived at this design. Next came Napoleon which went faster than I thought. I debated whether to have his face uncovered or at least his eyes, but decided to go with a closed helmet in the end. When I finally finished the background I was about to call it done but felt it needed something more when I was looking at the soldiers in the background. After some thought I decided to add a jet which fit perfectly in the blank space and to top it off, also merged well with Napoleon’s hand gesture.