I’ve been doing a couple of paintings these last two days but I won’t be showcasing them till a couple of days later. In the meantime I decided to make a simple and quick drawing. At first I was of doing it completely with ink but ended up doing it with a combination of both. Although I’m sure I could have done a lot more interesting effects I wanted to emulate a smooth color coverage.
As for the reference picture I used, surprisingly I came up with the idea of drawing Metal Bat (one of my favorite S rank members) when I was looking through one of my 80s reference folders. I came upon an ad for the Be-Bop Highschool movie poster. If you look at of the actors named Tōru Nakamura, he looks a lot like Metal Bat. I seriously wouldn’t be surprised if he was based off of the actors image in the movie. Which you can look at here: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2691/7222/products/12933_abd05aff-36ce-4d72-84be-65e945c0d7da_1024x1024.jpg?v=1584502254
I had finished the first draft of this painting a couple of days before but wasn’t truly satisfied so I gave it some days and had a go at it again today. I think it looks better than the first version. This is a study of one of her photos from her Momochi Zukan Photobook.
Are you a bad enough dude to join the Red Ribbon Army? This has been an idea I’ve had for a couple of months now. Originally I planned on having all the main players of the Red Ribbon Army present in the poster showcasing the different locations one could be stationed at around the world but after drawing out a rough draft I felt it was too busy so I went for a more simplistic one containing Commander Red and Staff Sergeant Black. I figured it would be fun to play around with the idea of the painting done in episode 50 of the anime where Black was shortened and Red was taller and had a more rustic and wise appearance. I then wanted to copy the look of the old War World II recruitment posters. The text in the black box is from the Red Ribbon Army theme song. Line work done with one of my diluted inks and using my Holbein watercolors.
Just to change it up a bit let’s draw a guy this time, and let’s try a new angle (as advised by my younger brother). For this drawing I decided try out a new technique I saw a couple of years ago. This I believe is what they call foreshortening. It worked amazingly well so that I could draw out Luffy’s arm and finger pointing at us. When I finished drawing I then shaded the drawing by using ink and brush. Now Luffy is ready to move forward and become the king of the pirates.
I wanted to try working with the more simplistic style again today. For my model I chose Momoko Tsugunaga and while looking for some reference pictures I came upon some where she was cosplaying as Rei Ayanami. Which in turn just turned into Rei Ayanami in the end. I don’t have enough blues in my collection of Copics so I’m a bit bummed that I wasn’t able to do much with her blue hair. Looking at my drawing there are still traces of Momochi which I like. At first I had Rei smiling but decided against it. The end result gives her an expression of noticing the viewer and glancing over.
For today’s drawing/painting I decided to try out some of the inks that I created yesterday. Since I would only be doing the lineart with it and coloring it I went with the lightest ink I have. As for the style I went with LittleThunder‘s style and coloring since it is probably my favorite traditional art style. Today before I had begun today’s drawing I saw her latest art video of her painting one of her drawings. So with that in mind I went with a more simple and flat coloring style only adding some coloring in the skin and hair. I really love the way it came out. Although I have yet to try this coloring style with a background which of course would have a lot of variables that I would have to work with. But that will be for another work and day. I quite like the way the ink interacts with the copic markers.
I really liked the photo I used from Airi‘s instagram. It has a retro 80s-90s look which really fits with this coloring style.
I think I mentioned this before but I have been quite busy lately with my other job and building my desk PC which took me 4 weeks to complete. Had I had a bit more time to work on it I think I could have completed it in two weeks but such is life. Now I have more workspace since I added about 6 inches on the contour of the desk (minus the front side) so that I could clamp my three monitors thus giving me all of my original (about) 4 x 3 feet to use with all of my supplies that I would use as I work. I actually just made the finishing touches yesterday so I wasn’t really even able to use the desk till today. So far I’m really happy with the way it is all set up and because I made the outside contours on the sides so that I could clamp down my monitors I can now fully see all of the screen on both sides as I work on my XP-Pen which I of course left on the center. I’ll show some pics of it and the setup at some other time.
Way back in, whoa, May 28th (it’s been that long after all huh) I uploaded my painting celebrating Buono! To my surprise on June 8th I actually got a like from Natsuyaki Miyabi! Man it feels nice to know that the person you decided to make a painting of has seen your work. But to also get their approval of it is quite nice. I’m really glad my feelings of appreciation for her work has reached her.
Here is the painting just in case you missed it. And here is a link to the original post.
While I was getting some supplies for my desk PC I stopped by a nearby dollar store and came across some small vials with cork caps. I got a set of two of the 6 packs so that I could store some pre mixed inks and watercolors that I could use when working with linework/outlines. For today I made a set of ink that got lighter and lighter for when I want to use different levels of black to gray inks. I have my diluted ink that is still quite dark in my original container and a set of 5 vials containing the newly created ink. I also made a reference sheet to show me the intesity of the ink within each vial and a date of when they were created just in case one of them runs out and I have to create a new batch which of course might not be the same as the previous one. Since it was running a bit late when I was completely done getting my worspace ready I decided to make a quick drawing. Since it was all about testing the desk I of course decided to go traditional (plus I also got to try out my inks, although I only used my base ink for this drawing). I’ll try to see if I could make a quick drawing every weekday for the rest of the summer on top of whatever new paintings I decide to work on. I already have an idea of the first piece I will be working on (hopefully starting tomorrow).
Here is that Goku drawing I did. Maybe I should have made some lines to express movement but overall I’m quite pleased with the results (was a bit scared that I wouldn’t be able to draw as I liked since I hadn’t done it in about 4 weeks).
Man, this one is already about a year old now. I was planning on releasing it at some point but it never happened and ultimately I decided to release it when it got hot out again. And seeing as the weather has been getting hot lately (plus I haven’t uploaded in a while) I figure now would be a good time to upload it. The painting of Momoko is the same that was done a year ago but wasn’t pleased with the background so I tried out my new pc upgrades with this piece by painting a new beach background. There is no more stuttering or slowing down anymore (although the temps of the CPU are a bit worrisome). I tried out some of the other brushes that Corel Painter offers and saw no problems at all. Last time I tried it with my old components my pc couldn’t keep up. Although it could handle my favorite oil brush it tended to close up (Corel) on me from time to time. The last time when I was painting the Buono piece I lost half an hour’s worth of work which really sucked. I was going to wait on upgrading for a bit longer but after that happened I decided to pull the trigger. And I’m very happy I did.
I really like Momochii’s Yurushite Nyan pose so I went with that when I first drew her. My thought process at the time was to try out 80s/90s style painting which can look extremely beautiful if done right. But as mentioned when I was looking at the old background it just wasn’t up to par so I made a new one that would fit Momoko.
I’m planning on making more paintings throughout the summer ( I actually have had some ideas floating around for a while now). But work and my decision to make a desk computer will be keeping me busy for a bit longer. Hopefully the extra space in the desk will help cool down my cpu and gpu if not I’m going to have to invest in a new cooler…
It has also been a while since I’ve done some traditional watercolor paintings so I hope to get back into that as well.
This drawing was originally done for inktober 2019 on day 4. My first main goal was to make an anime painting with hard color changes. When I was done I noticed that it didn’t fit in at all with the texture background I had started. They didn’t fit together at all. So I was a bit disappointed. It looked amazing with a completely white background though. The colors were really vibrant and had really light and dark tones so I wondered what type of background would fit. After I was done painting Elsa in I thought about it for a while and decided to paint the background with Corel. I had absolutely no plan when painting but after just choosing a base color that would fit with Elsa’s color scheme I just started adding color till I eventually ended up with her sitting on a her comfy seat surrounded by some curtains (I believe that’s what they would be called). But Elsa still did not fully fit in with the background. It didn’t look back bad but the lights weren’t interacting with her at all. So I then put a gradient on her to darken the bottom half of her body and putting the layer on multiply.
This was first drawn from inktober 2019 day 3. This time I wanted to do a more simplistic coloring style more in the style of anime. If one uses the right colors it can really pop and look amazing. I really like the way it came out.
For todays’s piece I decided to color K’ with Copics, but this time with a background. I really wanted to make a piece with the raining stage in King of Fighters 99. As I was working on it I decided to have some empty spaces so that the piece would look a bit more interesting. The drawing of K’ was originally done for Inktober 2018 day 10. But I didn’t use the same piece. I transferred the original drawing to a new watercolor paper by using my lightbox. As for the background I wanted to give just painting it a try without any lineart. It worked alright but I think I would be able to have a better color selection using watercolors. Copics are cool but they are really limited by the colors one owns and the ink that one has.
I wanted to do another copic piece, but this time I wanted a more manga styled one with a more simplistic coloring scheme. I’ve been drawing a lot of girls lately so I wanted to draw a guy this time. For today’s subject I drew Suiryu again. I just barely had a chance to see the second season of One Punch Man. The animation is not bad, but it truly has degraded compared to the first season. I also noticed that they rushed some scenes quite a bit, but it’s not too bad (specially compared to what they did to To Aru Majutsu no Index III). It was really fun seeing Suiryu get animated, I just hoped to see more of him.
As for this piece, I wanted to have Suiryu actually training after the tournament incident but I still wanted a bit of humor. So for this drawing I used the pose of the Cat’s Claw from the Jackie Chan movie Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow. It’s a powerful but hilarious style. You can see it here.
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