I had finished the first draft of this painting a couple of days before but wasn’t truly satisfied so I gave it some days and had a go at it again today. I think it looks better than the first version. This is a study of one of her photos from her Momochi Zukan Photobook.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
Are you a bad enough dude to join the Red Ribbon Army?
This has been an idea I’ve had for a couple of months now. Originally I planned on having all the main players of the Red Ribbon Army present in the poster showcasing the different locations one could be stationed at around the world but after drawing out a rough draft I felt it was too busy so I went for a more simplistic one containing Commander Red and Staff Sergeant Black. I figured it would be fun to play around with the idea of the painting done in episode 50 of the anime where Black was shortened and Red was taller and had a more rustic and wise appearance. I then wanted to copy the look of the old War World II recruitment posters. The text in the black box is from the Red Ribbon Army theme song. Line work done with one of my diluted inks and using my Holbein watercolors.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
I drew this back in September 30th of 2019, I just didn’t have the confidence to paint it till now.
I originally came up with the concept of this piece after I saw the Dora the Explorer movie. She had all sorts of weapons in her backpack and at one point even used a yoyo as a weapon. And since at that time I was getting into the Sukeban Deka shows and movies I ended up coming up with this idea of painting this crossover.
For the painting itself I decided to use the cover illustrations from the books which are absolutely beautiful. They helped me push in terms of colors so that they didn’t look flat. I quite like the way it came out. I hope to improve further from here on out.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
This is actually the last drawing of 2019 and the first one as well as painting of 2020. I’ve been wanting to do a piece of Airi Suzuki for a while now. I wanted to also practice with my Holbein watercolors as well as try out my Fabriano paper which contains 25% cotton. This is my first time using hot press papers. They are quite smooth. The paper it self didn’t buckle as much as the watercolor paper I have been using from Canson. The Holbein watercolors go on quite smoothly. Thinking about it now I have been doing a lot of first right off the bat this year. I finally tried out the mop brush I bought in mid 2019 but have yet to use till just now. I’m amazed at how much area I can cover with it and how even I can do so. So far I really like the way the supplies I’m using react work. Will have to make more tests to see how much more they can be pushed.
For the painting I decided to make a simple 80s anime style. It was really hard to stop myself from adding more to it (really hard). But it was worth holding myself back because I like the way it turned out. The background color was too close to the skins so Airi looked a bit bland, but once I added more yellow to the background the whole picture and Airi came to life and looked so much better. I do want to do another piece of Airi but push to a more detailed painting with more colors. I just love the way the Holbein watercolors get painted on the paper and look when combined.
reference picture from her instagram:
Happy New year! Let’s give it our best this year as well!
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
I was a bit scared I wasn’t going to be able to make it this year, and to think I was thinking about making two pieces for today…
I am a bit surprised at how quick I was able to finish it in three days (I usually take a week). I was struggling deciding on the colors and the style I would use. When it comes to watercolors I really love Little Thunder‘s art style. I wanted to emulate it but I always end up doing it a bit different. I have to paint more so that it all becomes a natural process.
Merry Christmas everyone.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
I finally bit the bullet and bought a set of Holbein watercolors back in September. I bought the 108 color set. Sad to say but I was too busy to paint more than one painting since I got them. Hopefully I can do another one soon. I debuted the paints with a painting of Sayumi Michishige wearing a long sleeve shirt. I also decided to use my lightbox to trace and ink/hatch/crosshatch to see how it would look.
It was painted originally on September 11, 2019 and drawn originally on September 18, 2019.
Combined, done today:
I should have more time for a couple of weeks now, I’m aiming to do more art during this time.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
By the end of last year I bought a lot of art supplies which included new brushes, a ceramic watercolor palette well and of course the titled Arches cold press cotton paper. But I decided to use them at the time that I created my first cotton paper painting. They are quite expensive so I was a bit weary about using them. I painted all of my mistakes on the old cheaper Canson paper so I figured that I should be ready now that I understand what does and doesn’t work.
So of course I chose Sayu as my first subject. I chose a photo from her Instagram, seems like it was from a photoshoot.
I guess I should mention that I am now finally using my Instagram. What’s great about Instagram is that I can upload sketches and unfinished artwork. So I’ll probably be updating things there more often than here, obviously with less in depth details and pictures about the process.
I decided to play around with the aspects that are unique with watercolors making Sayu the main focus and then fading away as I moved to the edges. After looking at what other artist can do, it seems like I can push things further by using other mediums like color pencils to make certain areas finer/smoother and to control the values. But I want to practice that a bit before I do it on cotton paper.
Here is the final piece:
This is the reference picture:
And here is the process:
I actually quite enjoyed using cotton paper. It has more versatility than paper. It retains more water, paint and it also doesn’t start peeling off after a couple of layers. Although it still bowed by the end, it does react better than normal paper. Next time I will tape it down. I saw this painter on Youtube (named: Watercolor by Shibasaki ). He shows his skills doing just that in this video. where he paints without having the paper bow. I’ll have to work on that.
Now as for the porcelain palette well, I love it. It works much better than the plastic one I had before. It’s set up in a circular shape where I can have 6 different color and a center area to mix up colors. On top of that It’s much easier to clean up.
As for the brushes, I decided to buy some higher quality brushes. Cheap ones are okay but their bristles fall off and also they are also too limp when wet so it’s hard to control the brush.
That should be all for now.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
Back in 2015 I worked on a One Piece Map. And although I liked how it turned out, it was too big for me to scan it with my scanner. This led me to capture it with a camera. The problem was that I couldn’t get it quite squared and since it was buckling all over the place, it would still give me problems even if I did square it. At the time I wasn’t too good with Photoshop so I just did a quick fix, but it wasn’t that convincing.
Here is the new edited version:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/45050729932/in/dateposted-public/
I don’t know why, but I’ve always like the old map aesthetics.
Here are the original posts that contains the original process:
And here is the process of the new digital process:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/45099649821/in/dateposted-public/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/44188906005/in/dateposted-public/
I used the puppet transform to fix the buckling that didn’t allow the map to be stretched into the edges.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/45099649591/in/dateposted-public/
After doing that, I had to make sure the edges all had the same length. But this means that there is going to be empty areas which I have to fix.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/31226305868/in/dateposted-public/
I used the old gold background to fill in the empty spaces.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/45099649421/in/dateposted-public/
After that I fixed some mistakes where the ink ran out a bit too much, I believe when I gave it a coffee wash. After that I had to fix the edges so that they meshed well.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/44379542064/in/dateposted-public/
One thing that bugged me was the size and placement of the ONE PIECE text on the right corner. So I enlarged the ONE and then moved all the text a little to the right.
That left empty spaces and obvious seems so I had to fix that. First I duplicated the One Piece banner on the bottom layer.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/30162002467/in/dateposted-public/
Then I had to go over it with the brush tool to get rid of the seams.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/31226309108/in/dateposted-public/
And this is without the fixes.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/44188911995/in/dateposted-public/
And with.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/44188913615/in/dateposted-public/
And that’s that.
I have some new artwork I did this year, but I thought I would try and update some old artwork along the way now that I have a bit more skill in editing. Though to be fair, back in the day I wanted to do it all traditional so I guess I was apprehensive about editing things digitally.
In any case.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
Earlier this year I showed my youngest brother Gundam 0083 Stardust Memory (I also made sure he saw Top Gun first). After seeing it again I was really taken by Cima Garahau, she really is in my opinion the best part and most interesting character of the series (a shame things ended how they did).
One other thing I have really been into are Japanese 80s magazine ads. Over this year I was going crazy accumulating all the references I could acquire. Now my collection is around 1tb of pictures (this is going to be a pain to categorize…). But it is all worth it.
These are the references I used:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/41604180954/in/dateposted-public/
Sayoko Yamaguchi (pictured below):
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/42279220572/in/dateposted-public/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/41424855725/in/dateposted-public/
Sayoko Yamaguchi (pictured below):
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/27457481247/in/dateposted-public/
Up above are two pictures of Sayoko Yamaguchi who I came upon when finding reference pictures, I really feel that Cima looks a lot like her so of course I used her as part of the painting.
In any case, this piece was done both traditionally and digitally. First the painting of Cima. I wanted to emulate the painting style of the original anime and used my Knicker Poster Color paints to paint her but then used my Kuretake Gansai Tambi for the background. I wanted to loose details as I went further away from the focal point (which is Cima).
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/40520424960/in/dateposted-public/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/28454114168/in/dateposted-public/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/40520424860/in/dateposted-public/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/28454114058/in/dateposted-public/
After finishing painting and scanning it I have to fix the colors since the scanning process dulls everything.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/41604614534/in/dateposted-public/
Once that is finished I then went ahead and started working on creating the ad. Since the main painting is done, now I had to paint the product. The hard part was coming up with what the ad would be promoting. After looking through Sayoko Yamaguchi’s reference pictures I noticed that she promoted Shiseido a good bit so after looking around a bit I decided to use their perfume line. And I painted it using Copics.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/40520848640/in/dateposted-public/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/40520848500/in/dateposted-public/
Once they were painted I then used my Gel Writer gel pens to write in the text and paint in the artwork. Thinking back I should have modified it more to make it more Gundam like, or at the very least modify it further.
After this I positioned them in place and modified them digitally by removing the modified Shiseido logo. I had to make a custom Cima Garahau text so that it would fit with the shiseido text style, and also modified their logo with a Zeon emblem that I also had to create by hand and modify digitally.
These are the original Shiseido text and emblem:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/41605114494/in/dateposted-public/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/42280250212/in/dateposted-public/
These are the ideas I had for the modifications I wanted to make:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/42327558171/in/dateposted-public/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkcloudxero/40521281620/in/dateposted-public/
Then I used this ad as inspiration to finish it all off (after modifying it of course).
And this is the final artwork.
Hasta la proxima,
– NUBE
School is just about done… it was quite a tough end of the month in April and the beginning of May, but I managed to power through. Now I should be a bit more free.
Quite a while ago I decided to buy a 24 color set of Nicker Poster Color paints. I read about how Ghibli uses them because they dry quickly, and I can confirm that. On top of that I can make the colors translucent or opaque depending on what the ratio of paint to water is. I haven’t had much time to practice much with them because of school and the construction work, but I did try some whenever I could. This one was done before I started school this semester, but wanted to talk about it a bit before posting it. I just didn’t think it would take about 5 months…
I would say that for a self taught artist, the best way to learn is to try and recreate other peoples work and try to understand their process and color choices. With that in mind, it shouldn’t be too surprising that I decided to recreate a background done by Kazuo Oga, the background artist for Studio Ghibli.
I decided to choose this image for my study (it’s from “Only Yesterday”/”おもひでぽろぽろ”):
I thought that I had documented the process, but thinking back I guess I was just focusing on painting.
As can be seen I didn’t really keep the proportions in place so I just focused on recreating the colors.
There’s an obvious difference in skill and color. But I was amazed at the versatility of the Nicker paints. I wonder just how far I can push them.
That will be all for now.
Hasta la proxima,
-NUBE
