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.

Hasta la proxima,

-NUBE