It’s been almost a month since I had painted this piece, I can’t believe I have been pushing it back by that much…
The reference comes from Momoko’s final photobook.
The ink painting used can be seen here:
This follows my current practice working with ink brushes, the translucence it contains and the application of paint and how it interacts with it. I have a couple of other pieces that I can use to continue this practice. It’s amazing, but it does have it’s limitations on what can be done (coloring wise). On the other hand, the effects and textures are really unique and interesting.
I finally finished. I guess because there’s so many details it took quite a bit of time. But overal I like the way it turned out. The Holbein Watercolors do exactly what I want them to do, I don’t think I can go back to any other watercolors at this point. And this is using Master’s Touch watercolor paper which isn’t really that good quality (although I highly recommend it since it’s the best paper at the price range). At some point I should try painting on some higher quality paper which I tend to neglect since they are, you know, quite expensive. But I feel confident enough to try it now. Once I again I am using watered down ink for the outlines which works really good when applying color on top of it since it’s also translucent and reacts with the color one applies on top. This leaves it open to apply more color to the outline or ink to make it darker. Although I did add some shadows to give the background some 3dimentinality, I decided to make Miyabi’s colors flat so as to not overwork the painting which I tend to do. Doing so gives the finished painting a much cleaner look that pops out quite nicely (Thank you Little Thunder for showcasing your artwork! I always learn so much looking at it.).
I really love the colors that Miyabi chose for her kimono and her makeup. They really fit well with the background colors. I was planning to add the color variations to the kimono. But as I was playing around with the way Mars Violet interacted with the yellow mixture I used for the Kimono base color, I decided it would look best as a simple color. Hopefully I managed to replicate Miyabi’s beauty through my brush.
We are well into the New Year now, so I will now focus on some winter drawings/paintings before the season ends.
I really loved Miyabi’s New Years photos. She looks really beautiful with her kimono. She mentioned it was a retro look, so I’m guessing this is a Showa era style? It really suits her. She looks so ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ with the shrine in the background. I think an 80s/90s anime style would look good but I feel it will also look good in watercolor. Just recently on her Twitter she mentioned that she has been getting nostalgic for Berryz Koubou. She also gave the impression that there might be a reunion of some kind. ･:*+.(( °ω° ))/.:+
Thank you so much for this past year Miyabi, hopefully this year will be great for you.
Since I had some time yesterday, I decided to try out my new calligraphy brush. The model that will be the first to try it out is Momochi, using a photo from her last photobook as reference. I’m surprised at how accurate the brush the brush can be. I really enjoyed the experience. For this painting I decided to do it freehand which can be pretty dicey but it does speed up the process by quite a lot. And sure enough it did, but I did do one mistake. I put the mouth and nose too low so I made the decision to alter that using Photoshop.
Since were are past half way through this month, we are closer to Halloween now. I’ve been re-watching “My Youth Romantic Comedy Is Wrong, As I Expected”. I never got to finish it when it came out. So hopefully this time I actually get to finish it. I’m really enjoying it (currently in season 2). In season 1 episode 8, Yui and Yukino both dressed in cosplay. The costumes used are what I used for reference in this drawing.
Looking at the linework done in the reference paintings that I have of Yoshitaka’s art I believe he was using a brush to get the effect that some areas have (some are lighter, and some are darker). So with that in mind I watered the ink and passed over the areas I wished to darken twice. I wanna try working with this style more and at some point with color.
Last week I started the line art for this painting (finally had some time to work on it a bit on Monday night and the rest on Tuesday night). I wasn’t too sure what I wanted to do so I was just sketching whatever came out. I then had the idea of having Kenshin look up, which gave him a sorrowful feeling. I then wanted some movement so I made his hair to blow in the wind. I was surprised how quickly the drawing came out, I used to take hours just to draw something even if it was simple line art like this one. From there I was looking at reference pictures of what I could use as the background. I found this really cool one of a shrine (turned out to be one from Nagoya when I researched it) but then I started thinking that a shrine doesn’t mean it’s a graveyard (plus it wasn’t in Kyoto) so once I had to work on the space right behind Kenshin I looked around google and found some references of graveyards. I used the impressionist brush for the texture but it looked really weird compared to everything else. But it turned out to be an easy fix when I started glazing and blending the graveyard pillars and steps. I thought of adding writing on them but that would take too much time to research, come up with and paint the intricacies of the kanji. So I just made some brush strokes that from a distance might look like actual writing but they have no actual meaning, they are just scribbles. The overall look I wanted to go for was the style used in the 90s anime which I believe holds up very well. Specially during the Kyoto arc.
Just as I was about to upload this painting I noticed that I hadn’t painted in Kenshin’s iconic cross shaped scar. Good thing I was too tired yesterday to upload it or he would have gone with out it.
I’ve been wanting to do some pixel art for a couple of months now… I recently got reminded again of ThorHighHeels video about the PC98 art style. I have an idea for a piece that I will be working on soon. For the first test I made a new Sayu piece using a photo from her instagram. It seems like there is a way to do pixel art using Photoshop but I would have to change quite a number of the settings so looked for other alternatives. Eventually I came upon Pro Motion which luckily has a free version. It seems that if I were to get a full version I would gain the ability to animate my art, but that will have to wait. After finishing this piece which surprisingly didn’t take too much time I exported the picture as a PNG. The resolution was of course tiny (64 pixels by 64 pixels). I figured I could just enlarge the piece with Photoshop. It worked quite well.
