[120103] – [120107]

This update features the continuation of my Love Hina character doodles.

I noted that the order in which I draw these characters is more of less arbitrary. The order in which I’m posting them is also such. With Haruka, the overall drawing quality starts to increase. I didn’t actually think she was going to turn out too well at the lineart stage, but sometimes it’s amazing what a little bit of shading can do for you. Other times, it’s not so impressive.

With Naru I encountered quite a few situations where I just wasn’t sure how I was supposed to draw something, but surprisingly, it also turned out quite well. Here, as well as in the next drawing, I start trying to fill out backgrounds with hybrid shading. The traditional pencils are really good at texturing surfaces, so it’s kind of unfortunate that I ended up contrasting a lot of that shading away in post-processing.

Shinobu’s figure is only okay, but I think the bushes here are great. The bench is actually based off a Google Images hit for nice bench”.

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[110921/111015]

Well, this update was originally scheduled at least for sometime in September, but with J not making any posts, I’m falling back on a more or less monthly update schedule for now. Today’s update (ultimately completed sometime in September, as mentioned in the last update) is like the fourth for this year.

As with the Tales 2011 painting, the lineart for Makise 2011 is a “complete” drawing by itself. While some of the scratch lines have that did not get contrasted away have been erased digitally, basically nothing has actually been added (unlike some older paintings where the entire lineart was basically redrawn). Furthermore, all of the painting is done on a single layer.

When I first said that I wanted to try doing a “proper” painting this way, I envisioned something on the lines of the character sketches, but I don’t think the last two paintings have turned out anything like that. I think they’ve turned out well in their own way, but it’s definitely a hybrid rather than a straight up “full-painting” implementation of the former.

I actually spent more time post-processing this than I would have thought. There’s a beta version with black gears, which I apparently didn’t like as much a month ago – in retrospect I think both are fine (though it might have been a close call back then as well).

Since we’re kind of failing on the update side of things, I’ll try to add a couple more tidbits into this one to make up for it. I don’t know why this one never made it onto the site, but toward the end of summer, J and I (after our Gatling gun) also made a K’Nex clock, which, although kept time fairly well, only had a run time of a couple tens of minutes.

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[110829]

The third “official” painting of the year (seventh if you consider the character sketches) is my now called Tales 2011 painting. It used to be that all the characters got their own paintings, but obviously times have changed. The last time I had a painting with a comparable or greater figure count was 2007.

I’ve actually been meaning to do a painting in this style since the first character sketch a couple months ago. I just didn’t have a vision of what it should be until more recently (about a week ago), so it obviously didn’t happen ’til then. I think in general the figures are okay and the painting is okay, but I think the tree is pretty good considering it’s the first time I’ve tried to paint a tree at this resolution since basically the year NW started (and that painting was rubbish). I think the ground and the colors turned out pretty nice as well. I don’t usually use yellow as a master color.

There’s a little bit of cheating here and there: J always asks me how I stay in the lines on single-layer paintings like this one, and part of the answer is that I don’t. In some cases here, neighboring, discrete colors across a “hard” divider blend into the same shade of yellow, so I just merge the two colors instead of stay “in” the line. The other part of the answer is just “be pro”. Obviously. The other notable shirk is the fade-to-white background. It’s not that I didn’t want to paint anything in there, it’s just that nothing I put there, whether it be hills or simply a curved horizon line, seemed to give the same suggestion of space on paper so I just blanked the whole thing out.

And of course, since the lineart is basically a sketch in and of itself, it stands alone pretty well:

This painting would have been posted earlier, but I got distracted by one of my occasional urges to move stuff around.

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[110725]

Well, this update really belongs in space week… it just didn’t actually happen during space week.

This is a painting of the ship I was doodling last week. It’s pretty shitty, but I hashed it out pretty quick and I don’t really have much of an idea of how the heck I should paint machines. The lineart is also kinda bleh… but pseudo intentional. I like the rear engine cluster, but that’s about it.

This should be the end of several out of order updates as well. This is d332, which should, if I recall correctly, should actually be the “latest” update. The following notes about storage were nonetheless originally written for d327, but they have moved around a lot since then.

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[110715]

J and I keep having style discussions that I feel like documenting and posting before all the computing stuff I usually end up writing about, so there’s going to be a ton of “out of order” updates. That being said, today’s character sketch is Mio from K-ON.

The reason I chose Phryne, Motoko, and Mio is that they’re fairly similar such that if I did a “direct” conversion of each into “my” style, I think they’d all look about the same. The point of this exercise was to try to make the conversion without getting rid of some of the subtleties that differentiate the three, the whole balance between my style, their style, and the character sort of thing.

Like I said before, whether or not this was successful, I don’t know. They all have some panels that do a fairly good job capturing character and some that, well, don’t. Despite what I say about Akamatsu’s influence, the Motoko page wasn’t actually any easier than the others. If anything the Kyoto Animation moe-blob style was the easiest to replicate. At the same time, most of my reference for the latter was from official art, whereas most of my reference for the former two was from fanart, so I had try harder to maintain a given style, etc.

This method of painting has suddenly become really charming to me, and I think I might invest some time in doing a “proper” colored work in the same way.

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