I had a couple of ideas about what the next ink drawing I would do, then when I got back from work I started getting some more ideas. That lead to me preparing a lot of screengrabs for references… so I just started running out of time (I didn’t even finish). I then had to scramble to find something to draw. Looking at the prompt for inktober I decided to draw this cute girl in a bulky jacket.
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.
Ahh finally, my favorite season has begun. Some days have already started to have lower temperatures but it’s still fluctuating quite a bit. Any way, things have been quite busy lately so I just made a quick painting to commomerate fall. Although I wish to make more. Oh wait Inktober starts tomorrow. I guess my time will be taken over by that for a month. The painting is a study of this photo of Sayu: https://www.instagram.com/p/CFE1mDOlsl4/
It’s been a while since I last painted with watercolors. Truth be told, I was really afraid to go at it. But after looking at a couple of pictures from one of my favorite artists, it gave me that push to just start painting. The artist I’m talking about (and that I have mentioned before a couple of times) is Little Thunder. If you haven’t seen her work I really suggest you go and check it out. It’s absolutely beautiful and definitely one of my artistic inspirations. I tend to overwork my paintings and not use color theory to my advantage. I still don’t fully comprehend it but I do know when colors look right when used with each other, so I have at least developed my color abilities to that level. Having said that, I still was guided by Little Thunder’s artwork as I painted.
I really like Japanese 80s music, and one of my favorite artists during that time is Naoko Kawai. Her voice and music are amazing and brings me joy when I listen to it. On top of that she is super cute. So of course I would do another piece of her. This time I wanted to try something a bit more difficult that had various variables, and well I just plain liked the photo of her in the Jeep. I was surprised I was able to finish the painting so fast. It was three days, (a few hours on Wednesday for the rough draft, Thursday I finished the rough draft and focused on inking, I then got all my courage and actually started painting today Friday). I really love the way watercolors look. It changes my art style quite a bit. I’m planning to do more paintings but October is coming so that means Inktober, plus I need to write three essays… It’s gonna be a rough month. But I’ll give it a shot. I was amazed when I saw Little Thunder finished a drawing/painting in 15 minutes. That’s a good goal to aim for.
This is a study from Momoko’s photobook Momoko Momochi Zukan. I actually wanted to try something new but ended up trying to do a realistic take by using hatching and cross hatching. I wasn’t satisfied with the way it came out since some lines came out too thick for the shadows. But I figured if I thickened some of the line art and darkened certain areas to change the values and lighten the hatching I made for the shadows. And sure enough it worked. I could push this effect more if I added more shadows around Momochi. Maybe adding interesting hatching would give it a cool aesthetic.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.