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.
Darkcloud Xero's Online Shop 
