"A Hopeless Dream Chaser"
Today is day four. While looking through my references I found a cover photo of Nakahara Meiko’s “Yakimochiyaki Rumba Boy”. In it she is wearing a blazer with the imposing shoulder pads which looks amazing. I quite like the style.
Photo of Meiko:
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Those shoulder pads reminded me of Chizuru Kagura from the King of Fighters. I really like her style and strong aesthetic. I’m surprised it took me this long to finally draw her.
Hasta la proxima,
-Nube
This is an edited version of an older piece I made. After about a year of making some type of artwork for every weekday, I noticed that many of them were too rough and unfinished… Every once in a while I will be going back to some of them and see if I can refine them.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
I didn’t really have any plans when I started painting Terry. I just started painting forms so that I could play with the Real Tapered Wet Flat Brush. Again, I was amazed by how the strokes came out but sampling the colors was a pain. Of course the solution is to have a separate layer with the colors readily available off in some corner. I was thinking of adding some power effects to Terry’s punch but I think keeping it simple this time should be fine. I just wanted to focus on the pose and movement.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
The painting I was working on is now ready to be showcased. It’s K’ from King Of Fighters. This was painted using Clip Studio Paint.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
This drawing was originally drawn on the second day of Inktober 2020 which can be found here: https://darkcloudxero.com/2020/10/02/inktober-2020-02-athena-asamiya/
When it came to painting Athena I was imagining some colors I had seen in what I think was a promotional video of Sonoko Kawai. But when I was trying to find that video I failed. More than likely it got deleted or it might have been someone else but I’m pretty sure it was Sonoko. This is one of the reasons I have started to just back up any videos that I like and that interest me.
With that option out of the question I remembered I had some JR Christmas commercials that had similar colors to what I wanted. I ended up using the commercial featuring Eri Fukatsu. Getting the skin tone correctly took a couple of tries since I hadn’t used it before. I should definitely play around with such lighting more.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
This time I used inspiration from a photo of Rie Hatada’s single cover. When I saw the color scheme it reminded me of Athena. As for the art style, this time I wanted to use Masakazu Katsura’s (artist of Video Girl Ai). I really like the fusion of realism and the manga illustration style.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
Drunken Master II is definitely one of my favorite Jackie Chan films, I’m just really sad I haven’t been able to see the undedited version. I hope to get the Japanese release sometime soon since they always tend to get the better versions of his films.
The idea for this piece came from the berserk modes that come from animes and games like Evangelion (Eva Berserker Mode), G Gundam (Super Mode – anger fueled), King of Fighters (Riot of the Blood), and some ques from Metal Slug (zombie mode). Heck, even in the film there is a scene where Jackie exhales steam like Iori/Leona and Eva unit 01.
For some reason Pixiv stopped working with WordPress, hopefully it will be fixed soon. For now I will use Twitter as well just in case.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
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.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
This was a piece I started last year around June of 2019. I gave up when I couldn’t work out the background. But after doing a couple of pieces using Ranma’s backgrounds for references, I felt more comfortable. There are still areas in the background that can be made better, and the muscles can be defined more with a mixture of hatching and painting but I wanted to give a simple painting style that can be seen in an old anime from the late 80s or 90s. At first was thinking of putting him in a neighborhood but decided to have him walking on a lone road towards South town. I limited myself to three colors for each section of Terry. I could add more details if I added one more color level but I really wanted to see how it would look if I limited myself to just three.
Let’s keep doing our best guys.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
This is the final piece all finally composited together. Making the background sure did take a while. It was all done using Copics. Copics are great but they do have their limitations and require quite a bit of steps in order to have them work the way I want them to. And since covering large areas takes a lot of ink it can be quite an expensive medium. But I wanted to see if I could get a handle on colors and values using nothing but the Copics.
I had to think a good bit about what I wanted the background to be but since I was going for a yanki theme I figured having them in the arcade setting would fit well. I was considering having Athena carrying a bat but decided against that for this one (maybe on another piece sometime in the future). Once I did finish the background I did have to calibrate the colors digitally and also clean up some of the forground objects so that I could place Athena and Miss X behind them. Once I did do that I went ahead and fixed their values so that they fit in with the background and then also added some shadows.
The final piece:
Reference picture used:
Background process:
Digital process:
Hope you guys like it.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
Last time I drew Miss X and during the time after that I went ahead and fixed some of the issues I had such as the really small feet and also added some more colors and played around with the values.
I’ve seen some artwork online of Miss X and Athena together as a team, kind of like if they were yankees. So the project will be something based on that.
For Athena’s design I wanted to draw her in her school uniform that has the long skirt so she looks even more like a yankee. So I used her design from King of Fighters 94. I really love Athena’s design and her fighting style. She is actually one of my mains.
This is the final drawing:
These are the references used:
These are screenshots I took from the game.
And these are from the official artworks:
This is the process:
Now all that is left is the background.
That’s it for now.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
I learned about Miss X a couple of year ago when I was looking at videos about the history of the King of Fighters. They briefly talked about SNK Gals where Miss X appeared. And now she… he? has appeared once again with the announcement for SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy. I haven’t bought the game but it might be a good idea to do so just for the character model viewer. Though I’m tempted to get their special edition version… (≧д≦ヾ) Luckily I can record the things with the PS4 but I do wonder how well the quality would be.
Anyway I wanted to draw Miss X. After I was looking at the finished drawing, I noticed I made the feet too small so I will have to edit that digitally when I use it for the overall project I have in mind (more on that as it all comes together). Some of my Copics such as the darker purple I wanted to use ran out and I don’t have a refill bottle yet so it was a bit tough trying to get some of the shadows. Maybe I should have added some more values but that would have surely messed up the color scheme withe the colors I had (aside from the Copic that ran out).
This is the drawing done using Stabilo pens and Copic markers:
I wanted a rather dynamic pose (though those feet look so small…)
References used:
And this is the process:
This project will have more parts to it so look forward to it.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
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