Was planning on having this work with the remake contest on Pixiv but the dates didn’t align. Oh well.
Here is the final piece for this painting. Attached will be the old version. I changed quite a few things and also the posture. I painted based on my current memory. Overall I feel pretty good with the end result. Brute forcing the acquisition of skill takes time, but I’m now finally seeing some of the result of my training. Making colors more vibrant really helps make the painting pop more than just trying to mimic reference photos. I know that’s obvious but I wanted to understand why that is the case.
I used to have a tough time blending colors for the sky but using the blending tool makes that super easy. It’s kind of hilarious it took me this long to figure that out.
I just noticed looking at the old painting and the new one, but I flipped the hand position…
I wasn’t too sure what to do with the background, but as I was looking through my screenshot references I came upon a couple of a sunset that I wanted to replicate.
Reference here:
I was wondering whether to change the colors of the outfit from the reference of Kyôko Koizumi:
But I quite liked this color combination so I decided to keep it. As for the color of the sneakers, I was playing around with the idea of various colors like purple but I ended up with this black accent ones.
I started this painting back on Saturday and worked a bit on it Sunday morning but for some reason felt like I wasn’t making much progress. It started to become a slugfest, so I decided to take the rest of Sunday off and not work on it on Monday. I felt a bit guilty but when I continued working on it today I definitely felt more refreshed and the wall I was fighting before was suddenly non existent. Although the background and the poses were mostly left finished on Sunday, there was still quite a bit of work to do figuring out how I wanted the colors for Ranma and Akane. But once I got the base colors done, the work just flowed after that. It was just a matter of working and tweaking things. I’m trying to render things a bit more so that they don’t look too rough. I’m also gonna play around with the line art digitally. Doing so I can get a my style that I’m currently developing and traditional anime working together. Judging by how things tend to work out, I’ll be adjusting and hopefully refining it as I go along.
Background is a mismatch of different ideas and photos but the ice was from a photo I took a while ago:
The idea for this painting was mainly jus to have Akane skating when I saw this photo of Yū Hayami (I of course used the opportunity to change the K to an A):
But I felt like Akane would look too lonely so I added Ranma. I remembered that he had trouble skating in the first seasons (did he ever learn?) so I wanted to paint him struggling. That’s how I came upon this pose reference (Can’t find info on the model for some reason):
Ranma’s outfit:
I was pretty much done when I suddenly by the end felt it would look even better if I had Ryoga in his boar form jumping off of Ranma. Then I noticed that Akane looked too stiff so I decided to have her hair flutter as if she was in movement.
For the background I once again used some of the new oil brushes for the background. These are made by Martina Palazzese (used brush 04). They add some really cool textures, but sadly they don’t blend. I’m really missing Corel Painter in that sense. Of course I went with an 80s painting style and added two layers of shadows and one of lighting on Kodachi. I was debating on whether the background should be during the day or a sunset. I ended up going with daytime lighting but it does give me an excuse to do another Kodachi painting.
This painting is influenced by the poster of “Maboroshi no mizuumi”, it reminded me of the first episode of Ranma where we were shown how diligent Akane was in her training. Looking at the plot of the movie though, it has a rather sad plot. That was a bummer. I wanted to do an 80s anime style where I try to replicate Ranma 1/2s look.
Today’s Pixiv theme is suspenders, which automatically reminded me of the character played by Benny the Jet Urquidez on the film “Wheels on Meals”. What I loved about the 80s was that they had the same love for Hong Kong movies which is always an amazing treat when I find out what they are referencing as I watch an episode. Ranma basing a whole lot of it’s aesthetic in all types of martial arts movies but having that fun aspect that was seen in 80s movies thanks in large part to Jackie Chan. Truth be told I was planning to just paint Benny but I soon just had the urge to paint Ranma. I really like these light pastel colors.