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.
Continuing on with traditional work, I next moved on to using Copics. It’s been a couple of months since I last used them. I usually have trouble using darker colors because I’m afraid I will mess up in a way that I can’t reverse but this time I decided to push it woth some darker colors in the skin right from the start. Since I have been working with colors more I know how they will react once I add darker values such as with the hair so I felt a bit more at ease once I started working. I’m still not as fast as I would like to be though. This took me a couple of hours but I feel if I can probably do this in a bout an hour once I have a bit more experience. Looking at the reference photo and my version I could have added a bit more of the red tones on her skin but the overall idea was still portrayed which is good. The lips reacted with the ink since I might have overworked it a bit too much so I wasn’t able to portray a more natural lip color, I’ll have to be more careful next time.
I recently saw a video of this other artist using photoshop’s color balance ability to change the color of a black and white painting. So I wanted to try it out. I’ve been craving to do another Momoko art piece so I used this chance to do so. I first painted Momoko using ink and my brushes. When I was content with the final painting I then went ahead and tried out this method. It definitely works, although maybe my painting wasn’t defined as well since some sections were too light and I had to add some more layers to get the right values. Overall I’m quite impressed, although I much prefer to just paint in colors right from the start so I can learn the process better for when I make future paintings later on. But at least now I know new technique just in case.
You can see both versions if you click on either pixiv or twitter.
This drawing was done on the 29th day of inktober 2019. I really like Shiho So‘s artwork. I first discovered it when Night Tempo was using it for his cassette releases. With the linework done it was now just a matter of coloring it in. I really like playing around with these bright pastel colors. Although it looked good just painting Misaka, I wanted to make a background for it that fit. After playing around I started to get different ideas like making it like a manga page with panels. Then I thought I would put in a perverse beastly Kuroko ready to attack. And then things started to flow from there. I used Clip Studio for the manga effects like the screentone and effect lines (what were they called again?). Just when I was about to call it finished I decided to write Misakachu with magenta, and luckily it worked out quite well. The painting it self didn’t take too long to do, it was just the small details and ideas that I came up with along the way that added a couple of hours. Still though, overall it was around 5 hours I think. Not bad. Once I have more practice with this style I should be able to work faster. Which I will do at some point since I really like it.
It’s kind of a shame I didn’t do this one for Airi’s birthday but I was quite busy so it couldn’t be helped. This drawing was done in April 17 of 2019. I tried painting it on the 23rd using the reference picture as a guide for the colors as well. But it didn’t end well. The line art was just not working correctly with the painting. So over all it looked quite unnatural and weird. I then tried again on the 25th after I got frustrated and made the colors simpler and more anime like in an effort to make the lineart work better. But the result wasn’t much better. I just had too much trouble trying to blend them together. Well, after a year of countless hours of painting I decided to give it another try. I won’t lie, I still had that trauma of not being able to paint it correctly but the only way to find out is to just go ahead and do it. Annoyingly I did have some problems when I started painting it. Seeing as the line work was pretty dark and plentiful (when it came to the hatching) it just didn’t look right. I tried flat colors thinking that would work but after three tries I had to stop and rethink everything. The next day though I finally decided to paint it the way I have been painting lately. But this time I decided to make the linework lighter, I left it at around 65% of the darkness. Also, this time I decided to try and not look at the reference photo and just paint it the way I believed would work. Also, since most of my paintings have been coming out quite light (in terms of color and values), I decided to go for a more vibrant and deeper color pallette. And well, I really like the result.
I have noticed I have been working mainly with the warm colors in the yellow and red range, but whenever I try to do another color scheme I mess it up or it just doesn’t look right. I want to try cool colors for my next piece.
I’m amazed at just how much effort Yusuke Murata puts into both the characters created by ONE and the ones coming out (so far) in Murata’s version. One of the characters that really captured my eye is Ring Ring. It’s a shame she only came out for a couple of chapters. I was hoping that she would come out a bit more but the chances of that happening are slim. Maybe she will come back with Suiryu after training to become heroes. One can hope. Another shame is that we didn’t get to see her techniques, she got defeated too quickly… While drawing her I noticed that her design is simple and yet very iconic and cute. The addition of the bells and her hairstyle is a really good touch.
Looking at the One punch man wiki, it seems that Lin Lin was supposed to be Suiryus sister, so I guess there were more plans for her…
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