[100426]
A few updates ago, I mentioned NW was shutting down as a joke… well, these days that doesn’t seem so far from the truth, eh?
I watched the Haruhi movie recently. I thought it followed the book pretty closely, but my memory of the book is hazy, having read it a long, long time ago. For all the crap with Endless Eight, the movie was pretty good. Good enough that I’d take two and a half hours of my time to watch it again when I can get a DVD copy.
That leads up to this week’s illustration, Yuki, 2010 version.
The next illustration was really supposed to be DMG, 2009 version, but I was swayed by said Haruhi movie and wanted to do something relevant. Who knows, it might be a good seller at Fanime, too. This is the third such Yuki picture, but I think (and hope) it’s an improvement over the last one
I wanted to combine some of the fancy lighting from Mikoto, 2009, and the figure lineart/painting from the tales series, 2009, but I don’t think either quite got there. On the whole, though, I think this might actually display Tear/Raine 2009 as “best illustration”. Historically, I think it’s rare for me to have so many displacements in a row.
Some of the colors here (those of the books and Yuki’s hair) are somewhat oversaturated. I dunno if that’s a good thing; I noticed whilst looking through a bunch of old paintings that I really do use a large number of the same colors over and over again. I tried not pulling colors straight from reference pictures, and I didn’t use a palette other than the 16-color dot you get with OC 1.1. So 16 colors and then I have to remake old ones from scratch.
Lineart was pretty good right off the bat; besides cleanup, I actually didn’t have to change much going to the “ink”. Props to anyone who can figure out where the lamp on the left came from. It’s not Haruhi. I like doing hair these days. I think better lineart helps make coloring easier, but I feel like I’ve noticed the most with hair. I think with regard to coloring the way I do hair really leverages the strength of the OC brush engine.
I guess overall, art quality is fairly consistent, if not slowly going up, despite my failure to draw any significant volume lately. At the same time, I could say it’s stagnating, but it has really been flat for the past few years. I dunno, this method of painting might be getting kinda stale too. I dunno what else I should do, though.
That’s all for now.
