[091222]
This week’s update is the painting that I mentioned last week, and the first of two – maybe three – for this “cycle”.
It’s actually been a whopping eight months since I last did a painting, so I figured I damn better do one or something. Ever since I started doing paintings, I’ve never had such a long hiatus between two of ‘em. Especially through 2006 and 2007, I was pretty much turning something out every other month, but things started to taper off in 2008, and a helluvalot in 2009. Even if I do three paintings in the current cycle, that’ll make a grand total of five paintings for 2009, compared to 8 for 2008, and 11 for 2007.
Anyway, I was messing with a couple of things this time around, and I thought I was going to end up with something significantly different from any previous work, but… it wasn’t. Well, ok, it’s more like I still feel that this picture gives off a different “feel” than any previous picture, but I don’t really feel like anything drastic happened at a lower level.
So here it is, Raine and Tear 2009 versions. This is more like the “benchmark” illustration for the year, as I don’t have a DMG 2009 version, nor do I plan to do one as one of the three.
The last Raine illustration was February of 08 and the last Tear illustration was November of 07. You can kind of see what I mean when I say that the painting style really hasn’t changed much. I’ve been doing the same patchy kind of thing since 071120, and I think I’ve mentioned that it gets pretty bad in 080126 before I struck a balance somewhere.
Lineart quality (and I emphasize this word to make a point later) is actually most similar to 081015 in that I only use a 1pt pen to do everything and go over lines a lot, rather than the fairly neat 2pt deal used in Raine 2008. At the working resolution of about 3400 by 2500 (iirc), this is actually fairly messy, but at the standard posting resolution of 760 x 1112 you really just see a single line. More on that later.
So if quality of the painting and the quality of the lineart – in the sense of “properties”, rather than “good or bad” – are more or less stuff we’ve seen before, I’d love to say that it’s lineart content (as in the actual drawing itself) or coloring content (not sure what this would refer to… the colors themselves maybe?) that has improved, but that might be a little optimstic. I did spend a lot of time tweaking this lineart after the initial scan, so I won’t totally discount it though. I still strongly believe that I solid lineart hella makes up for shitty paintjob.
With fanarts like this (the majority of my painting these days – hey, it’s fanart that sells at like Fanime), most of the colors are actually taken straight from the reference drawings. If the reference drawings don’t give me enough range between the light and the dark, I will tweak the colors a bit, but I think they’re fairly faithful for the most part.
I did add extra red to the picture though (at the painting stage – I always increase red a little bit during the color adjustment stage), and I think it really helps add some – in J’s words – “visual interest”. The lighting kinda got ambiguous towards the end cuz I wasn’t paying too much attention, but these days I really think that I good paintjob has less to do with how it’s done than with the colors themselves and how they interact with each other. The previous three “best piece”s 090129, 080702, and 080126 all have a set of secondary (and more in the case of 090129) colors mixed into the base colors, and they were all “best” paintings despite fairly different painting and lineart styles. So color I feel is a big deal.
So where is this going – I guess the suggestion here – and I actually didn’t think so far ahead at the beginning of this entry, so this is new material for me too – is that color and lineart content, that is, the colors and the drawing themselves, are more important than how they’re put onto the paper or whatever medium you’re working with. It doesn’t matter if you have a nice, clean lineart if the drawing itself isn’t that good. I guess the same goes for color, but it’s kind of hard for me to give examples as I can’t quite draw the lines between good color, bad color, good coloring, and bad coloring.
And this is where I’m going to segue into one of the main pillars of my current theory of “good drawing”, but I think I will save that for next week as this week’s entry is getting long. The point that I wanted to make was that this’ll surpass Mikoto as “best picture”, but I’m not 100% sure what I think I’m doing right.
Ok, that’s it for now.
