Jump-Cancel - Lets art!

Evil Mirakurun

2011-09-19T00:37:00.001-04:00

Been busy coding a flash game, so I haven't had time to draw much. But if I don't draw I won't improve, so here's a quick random sketch of evil Mirakurun (Chinatsu-chan) from Yura Yuri I did for practice. I still can't draw straight lines on the tablet very well.. I might clean it up and color it later, but I should really finish my MHP3 lancer first >.>

MHP3 Lancer

2011-09-10T19:36:00.007-04:00

Continuing with my MHP3 binge. I'll probably do at least one sketch for each weapon type. Here's the one minute rough sketch with a mouse in paint. She looks kinda SD, maybe I'll do her in SD style for fun. Although I should probably try to keep my style consistent if I want to improve.. Better version after dinner!

Trying to swap to Gimp since apparently Paint Tool Sai isn't free and shuts down in 31 days (29 now!). Having to learn the new interface sucked but I think I understand it now. Took a while thou =p. Also lance armor is pretty complicated so it took me a bit to get it sketched out in a way that I liked. The Alateron lance itself was also annoying, trying to get those spikes to look right. But anyway heres the completed rough sketch.

Well it took a while but I finished coloring the armor. Now its just the lance itself. I also changed a bunch of the proportions around and cleaned it up some more. Almost done now!

Leia armour?

2011-09-09T23:08:00.000-04:00

No relation to the Star Wars princess.

In the Japanese games, Rathian is called Rioreia, which is further shortened to just Reia.

Another old drawing that I was finishing up...

MHP3 Jhen Bow Set

2011-09-09T18:57:00.009-04:00

"Rough" version of my Jhen Bow Set lol. MS Paint with a crappy mouse and 2 minutes during lunch break. I'll clean it up and do a real version after dinner.

Cleaned version with armor details. Wow Jhen armor is more complicated than I remember..

Decided to go with the gold ian bow cause I think it looks the best/most bow-like, and ditched the cat.

Here's the finished drawing! Might add the cat back in later. I know you are all in awe of how awesome that cat is.

Huzzah for the Air Brush Tool! Definitely gonna be using that more often. XD Reposted as a png instead of a jpeg so less blurry this time. Background info: Helm is Load Up Piercing, chest, gloves, legs, and waste are all high rank Jhen. I drew it with the Gold Rathian Bow. Gives Focus, Load Up, Pierce Shot Up, and Reckless Abandon +3 (with a + RA charm).

MHP3 Magical HH v2

2011-09-08T23:17:00.006-04:00

Cleaned it up a bit and redid the proportions. Looks much better than the old version imo =p. It's alot easier to draw when you're not half asleep and can erase stuff. I'll do the wings in more detail and maybe add color tomorrow.

And heres the completed drawing!

Done in Paint Tool Sai as per Hawk's suggestion. I colored the "rainbow" parts on separate layers and applied varying hue changes to get the frames for the animation (compiled in Gale). Now in delicious magical rainbowy goodness! This is basically what my MHP3 char looks like in this setup. :D

Background info: High Rank Bug Helm, Butterfly Chest, Naru U Gloves, Guild Waist, and Guild Boots (All full rainbow effect) with the Magical Wand HH (I forget what its really called, but its Dragon element and basically only has Healing Songs =p). Gemmed for Flute, Force Out (shiny blue fist for extra magicaliness), and Perception. So its a cool looking joke set. XD

Lets doooo this!

2011-09-08T21:07:00.000-04:00

Whoops... looks like I've been away for a bit too long. But I can't let the new guy revive the blog all by himself, so here's something I've been working on.

.... Actually this is a pretty old drawing. I cropped it because the bottom part is so sad I stopped working on it for a year and a half.

Well, the time for excuses has come to an end... now its time to get drawing!

Random MHP3 sketch and fail @ using Corel Painter

2011-09-08T20:44:00.002-04:00

I don't understand Corel Painter at all. Why does the eraser function not work... shouldn't it just be select it then left click to erase? Obviously I'm doing something wrong, or the user interface is all sorts of stupid, or I need sleep. Or all three. I also made the mistake of drawing using the Pencil function so the lines turned out too fat and without a working eraser I pretty much gave up in frustration halfway. I think its time to swap to Gimp or Photoshop or back to Paint/Gale =p. Or get some sleep.

My attempt at sketching my Magical Girl Hunting Horn set from MHP3. All the armor pieces get full rainbow effect for maximum magical sparkliness! And the HH itself does dragon damage and pretty much only has healing songs. =p Gave up half way due to technical difficulties so I gave up on details and just did a really rough outline. I'll export it to some other drawing program and finish/clean it up tomorrow I guess. At least the tablet seems to work well.

Random Sprite #2!

2011-09-08T20:43:00.002-04:00

Another sprite, drawn in MS Paint. I saved it as a bmp by accident and it did some weird coloring effect on the random details I had on the dress. Oh well. Female melee character this time. I'll probably make a bigger/more detailed version later once I decide on the clothing. Chinese dress is nice but it could be annoying to animate later. Also I think her butt looks too big and her hair is too spiky.. I should also probably learn how to use this Corel Painter thing instead of just working from MS Paint. =p Layers and the ability to undo more than 10 steps sounds nice...

Random Sprite #1

2011-09-08T20:41:00.007-04:00

Time to get some use out of this new Bamboo tablet now that Hawk configured it properly for me =p.

Haven't done anything art-y in years but I guess its as good as time as any to start practicing again.

I've been playing around on Gale making sprites recently so I guess I'll post some of those first.

Still working on the animation (hair/face) and details. Also I can't tell if this will let me upload animated gifs... Ok apparently you can but you have to click on them. ..Or not! (reposted with "original size" option)

Anyway this was a character in a game I was making before I got distracted. I kept the clothes simple cause I wanted to work more on animation and less on details, and because I suck at clothes designs =p. Made this before I got the tablet so hopefully things will be quicker now. I wanted to do a male character because a) I generally don't draw people and b) when I do I rarely draw male characters. So good practice all around.

Cubey

2011-02-22T04:46:00.003-05:00

No real point to this, his name just annoys me.

I watched a little of Madoka, but despite the amount of raving about it, I don't really feel like continuing with it. Seems fairly likely that
-all the wishes will make things worse
-all the other girls will die or meet some kind of non-dying bad end
-QB will be the bad guy
-Madoka will either sacrifice herself to end things or find a way to fix everything and not die... from the message of the show, probably the latter.

I mostly wrote all that out so I can see if I'm right later, heh.

It probably won't follow that formula exactly but it mostly seems to be heading this way, and I'm not terribly interested in whether or not those things happen, which doesn't seem to leave a lot. Am I misreading it?

Waga na wa Sänger Zonvolt

2011-02-21T02:47:00.002-05:00

Sanger's Grungust Sanshiki. Started this way back before it actually got busted... The Type 3 is way better than the Type 1 and 2, so I was hoping I would be given one of the two available, but nooo, they both get murdered by the plot.

I was kind of happy with how it came out, until I realised that I couldn't find good reference for the details like the shoulders and head spikes, spent ages trying to make stuff up and fixing minor issues until I got bored, spent ages more doing some pretty lazy shading, and then spent an hour or so doing some decent lighting on top. Looks a bit funky in the end...

Anri

2011-01-23T23:53:00.003-05:00

Anri from Durarara. I really liked this scene, and decided to try drawing it with some more realistic-looking cuts to her clothes. Not sure about the blood though... I thought it would look cool but its a little nasty looking.

I started this last year, but wasn't happy with some parts of it and finally came back to it yesterday. The hair shine looks nice for the time it took, I might use that again. Also I was using a different technique for shading, where I do the gradient in B&W and the colour as a flat tone, and combine the two. Its nice for colour adjustment and low-effort revisions.

Happy New 2011!

2011-01-04T19:42:00.003-05:00

It's a bit late, but here's my new years greeting art!

The latest Monster Hunter game made it a bit too easy by including a rabbit-like monster in the game.

Happy New Year!

10-year progression summary

2010-12-20T04:26:00.003-05:00

I noticed these were appearing on pixiv, and since I'd always wanted to do some kind of progression thing I put one together.

I didn't really put much effort in until 2007 - until then I spent a lot of time on cleaning things up but not a lot on learning techniques.

Comparing 2002 and 2010 is hilarious. The quality went up in places but the style/skill is much the same. And I still can't do hair or faces.

There's also a 12-month version but I don't have enough images for that... :( Actually looking at my neatly-organised files, I only drew about 3-4 pictures per year until 2008, and now its still only about 10. How rubbish. Gotta knuckle down and put some more out.

Chivalry isn't completely dead

2010-11-05T02:01:00.003-04:00

Sometimes, it is the responsibility of artists to convey the truth that cannot be spoken.

But in this case I just like making fun of people.

Click to see the stunning conclusion.

Legends Heroine Roulette!

2010-11-02T16:17:00.001-04:00

Well the contest to select a new heroine for MML3 is over, and it ended pretty much how I expected--although I felt the selection was influenced by the polished-ness of the art, with the winning design also being the shiniest piece in the lineup.
So I decided to draw all of the different designs with the same style... this is the result.

And after producing 9 sets of drawings with the same dimentions/face lineart, there was only one logical next step: ANIMATED GIF!

Megaman Goes West

2010-10-27T10:40:00.003-04:00

Continuing with the western theme, here's one of Megaman and all of the main heroines of the game.

I started off doing heavy outlines for the rough sketch, but then I liked how it looked and ended up keeping the style. Also, I tried to draw some kind of techno-stage coach; some people thought it was actually a tank!

Not sure how I'm going to approach coloring this... full on rendering might be a waste of the shadowy lineart.

Megaboy? Cowman?

2010-10-26T13:56:00.002-04:00

Another Megaman Legends piece... this time of Megaman himself.

The reason for the western themed bits is because one of the leading heroine choices is heavily cowboy/native american styled... If she wins, I can picture the plot/design of MML3 possibly taking a western influenced direction.

Which I wouldn't mind one bit.

Megaman Legends 3!!!

2010-10-24T01:51:00.006-04:00

After a long 10 years, they've finally announced Megaman Legends 3. I totally loved the first two games, so I'm really looking forward to this one!

This time, they've decided to actively include the fans in the design process... so far in the form of polls, the first of which is to decide on the design for a new heroine who appears in the new game.
When the poll went up, they didn't have any information about the role of the character, so I voted on one purely based on the design. But later they revealed that rather than a player character she would be an "operator", a support character for a "digger" (which is what the player usually plays as).

Anyways, the character I chose isn't faring too well in the polls, so I decided to do a piece of fan art for her as a sort of consolation prize.

Heart Warming vs Global Warming

2010-10-18T19:59:00.005-04:00

For some reason, as soon as the idea popped into my head, I was immediately compelled to draw it to completetion. Unfortunately the idea came to me at 1:40am.

Well I completed it. And then I fell asleep. Now that I'm awake, it's going up :)

Enjoy! ...And don't be afraid to turn off your car if you're going be idling for more than a minute or so!

Click the thumbnail to see the whole story.

I'll Miku Miku you

2010-10-06T03:02:00.003-04:00

I've done a bunch of random characters recently, but apparently I've stopped drawing for so long I've lost the ability to draw human proportions, resulting in some hilariously mangled doodles. Rather than try that again, I went for something simpler, where I could hide details under enormous foreground objects, and since I wasn't happy with my previous Hatsune Miku, I did another one.

I liked the lineart for this... I need to try harder with hair, but the colouring is ok otherwise. The BG was fun to do.

Fly me to the moon, and put your hands up!

2010-09-17T21:35:00.005-04:00

I've occasionally been drawing silly things again, so sure, might as well post some of them here... Or at least this one. Some of the others are intended for specific people (i.e. might contain in-jokes for my WoW guildies), so I don't know if it'd make sense to post those here.

Oh well. This one here's a silly combination of two new fandoms I acquired earlier this year, so I immediately had to draw it. =p

Retro Reimu

2010-08-01T04:12:00.005-04:00

Long time no see. Been meaning to get back to this... as usual.

I started drawing something at random, then suddenly found myself channeling the 80s. And I found I was ok with that.

Lame Reimu lineart

2010-04-21T04:03:00.003-04:00

Not really that lame, I just wanted to say that sometime.

Couldn't think of anything I could draw in an hour or so, so I just wound up doodling random poses and trying some different line thicknesses and weightings.

Filling in gaps with black looks good for some reason? Using thicker lines on focal points like the eyes and chin looks good too, but it looks pretty weird if all the other lines are uniform, so its not as easy to do as I thought.

I really need to settle on a style for eyes sometime...

Happy New Year 2010!

2010-01-01T15:48:00.006-05:00

Hello again after a year :)

It's the year of the tiger or something like that, right? Apparently it's also the year of biodiversity...

How To Draw Anime CG: Highlights

2009-10-26T02:25:00.004-04:00

My computer got fixed! I got my files back! Now I can finish this off!

...is what I thought a month ago.

This is the last major part of colouring - adding brighter areas to reflective surfaces. Anything that isn't completely matt reflects light to some extent - depending on your style, this might be represented as anything from white spots through to full gradient lighting with correct colour reflection, but things will look better if you add some lighting in the right places.

I usually only do a single subtle layer. Splodge down some white, and erase to make gradient edges as appropriate. Then, adjust the opacity of the layer as you see fit - this is around 20%. Since the core of the white areas was originally opaque, this gives you nice even intensity across all the areas on the layer.
If you want to vary the intensity, you can either use multiple layers, or if you're feeling lazy, apply a large low-opacity eraser to the whole area you want to fade, to maintain your even intensity.

The reflective areas will have a 'bright' spot at the center - you can represent these as small full-intensity white spots at the core of the highlight areas. This is kind of exaggerated - Miku's suit appears to be made of rubber, and CG skin always seems to be highly polished for some reason, but it looks nice and that's what counts, right?.
Even if you skip the previous step, doing the high-intensity spots tends to work well.

For hair, I normally do a simple pointed stripe (as seen here) but since I'm doing a tutorial, I went and looked up how to do fancy zigzag highlights that you see so often. Should I be explaining something I only just discovered?...
Basically, you splodge down a reasonably thick line in the shape you want the highligh to follow, then use a high-opacity smudge to smear it into a spike. It tends to come out a bit transparent, but you can just clone and merge the layer or whatever to make the core opaque. It also needs some deft touches to make it clean and consistent, but its quick and easy to apply.

So, here's Miku with the aforementioned highlight applied. Again, the most intense areas are those facing the camera, so I partially erased the parts that would be at an angle.

It looks a bit odd with just a white highlight, so I applied two more steps.
The first was to group a green layer to it, to tint it slightly green (white is white, but the edges blend into green nicely).
The second was to splodge on some white behind it, apply a gaussian blur, and set the layer to 'colour burn'.
There's a strange effect you can get - if you make a layer folder (the folder icon) and set the folder to 'colour burn', the effect on contained layers is much more intense than you can get by setting it on the layers directly. It looks like Komatsu Eeji's stuff, although I haven't worked out how to use it that well...

A couple more things to finish.
The glow on her lights was just done by a copy, gaussian blur, colour dodge (or overlay? I forget).
Also, I added a slight blush. This was just done by taking her skin colour, adding lots of red, covering her face with it, then erasing down to highlight the cheeks and reducing the opacity of the layer. This lets you represent areas of skin that are normally darker than average - cheeks are an obvious use, some artists apply it to elbows and shoulders, or you could take it to an extreme and produce fairly realistic-looking skin like Masamune Shirow. I wanted to look at it a bit more, but I don't think it turns out well on Miku here, so I might revisit it.

Thats pretty much it for Miku... I don't think she came out spectacularly as a piece, but I think she works as a tutorial. I think I've covered the major technical stuff I do when drawing, but like I said at the start, don't take this as a list of 'stuff to do when drawing' - play with the steps I've suggested yourself, and also think about them when trying to work out how your favourite artist did a particular effect. It'll be more effective than just aping my stuff :p

And so, back to proper artings for me!

How To Draw Anime CG: Colouring 3

2009-08-30T02:34:00.007-04:00

We have some basic shading down, but it looks a little flat. This last shading step will add a bit of depth to it.

Start off by making another layer to hold the new shading.

Pick a region, and make a new deeper shading colour. You'll want something darker than your first shading colour, but you'll also want to change the hue more this time, since shadows are tinted by ambient light.

Select the original mask you made for it. Then, go to your first shading layer, and choose 'intersect transparency mask'. Make a temporary layer, and flood fill with your new colour. (This is to help avoid colouring over areas that weren't shaded on the previous layer; however there's nothing wrong with just painting a blob and erasing as before if you prefer).

Now, erase the new layer to reveal the previous shading. You want to leave the areas of heavy shadow untouched, and blend the rest of it into the previous shading, so the gradients will be a lot more gradual than before. I was using a 200px brush a lot here, as well as reducing the opacity of the eraser.

Keep doing this for all your masked areas. The shadows are a lot deeper and more subtle than before; keep it simple if you don't really 'get' the places that should be shadowed, but it will almost always look better with this. I also added a little of the 'shadowed edge' I've seen in other pictures - its another element I don't quite understand, but on curved surfaces, a lot of artists have a dark highlight along the edge of the transition beween light and shadow.

One point is that the skin is shadowed with a slight purple tinge - the skin colour has had a slight blue tint added to it. You see this a lot (try sampling!); I don't understand it, but it looks nice so I'll run with it.

How To Draw Anime CG: Colouring 2

2009-08-29T04:00:00.004-04:00

Now it's time for the biggest step: shading.

To start with, make a new layer to store your finished shading. You might want to make one per colour or one per area; however since you have the masks that you made in the previous step, I find it more convenient to just put all colours of shading onto one layer and use the mask to seperate them if I want to adjust colours.

When shading an area, the first step is to choose your shading colour. Grab the base colour and adjust it as you see fit; typically you'll be reducing both the saturation and brilliance, but it's often nice to change the hue a little as well. The hue changes due to the effects of ambient light; it's particularly affected by unusual lighting conditions too, such as moonlight or otherwise coloured light (go look at other art or photos).

Another case where hue is affected is skin colour; skin is slightly transparent, and so the red colour from capilliaries tints the shadows slightly red - ever tried shining a torch behind your hand? Here's a basic description; it gets kind of technical when applied to human skin, so try observing photos and so on, or just wing it.

Time to get started. Make a new layer, and throw a blob of colour on that is bigger than the shading you want. Use the mask to trim the unwanted bits, and manually trim anything that overlaps inside the mask where you don't want it to (its easier of the initial blob doesn't overlap, obviously).

Now, grab your eraser, set it to be a soft brush of appropriate size, and trim away parts of the blob to give a nice gradient edge. Use different sized brushes to give different gradients - here I used a 65px, 35px and 17px brush, with strokes as illustrated in the 2nd picture. This gives you a good amount of control over the shading - I find that its much easier to form smooth gradients by removing colour with the eraser brush rather than trying to add it with the colour brush.

I don't want to force my opinion of how to actually perform the shading, since I don't think I'm particularly good at it; still, basic advice would be to keep in mind the position of your light source, since you are effectively drawing shadows, and that when it comes to anime-style CGs, its generally both nicer-looking and faster to keep things simple.

Another odd rule is that it looks nice if you erase a little of the shading where it meets the lineart (as with the lowest 17px stroke above). I'm not sure why; something to do with ambient light and reflection? But you can see it a lot on professional drawings; it looks nice, especially with skin.

Once you are done with the blob, you can merge this layer back with the rest. If you are happy with it you can merge it back into the main shading layer; I tend to keep a main layer for the whole masked area that I'm currently working on so that I can touch it up before I merge it back to the main layer. Be careful that you don't accidentally merge layers badly and ruin your base colours or masks! Plus, be careful to apply the mask to the area before merging back into the main shading layer or you might end up ruining completed work - I haven't found any quick, practical way of preventing this, so you'll just have to be dilligent and keep a large undo stack...

Keep making layers, trimming blobs and merging back until you've completed each masked area. Since the brushes have a limited size, you can save some time by doing several blobs at a time, spaced apart enough that you can erase one without overlapping with the next one. For example, I painted half the fringes on one layer y doing every other spike, then the other half on a second layer, instead of making one layer for each spike.

And so, we have a shaded Miku. We're not done with the shading yet though...

How To Draw Anime CG: Colouring 1

2009-08-26T02:14:00.006-04:00

The lineart is done; now it's time to start colouring!

The first thing I do is set a grey background. This is partially so I can see colour bleed more easily, but the main reason is to set the overall tone of the picture - white is very distracting when I'm trying to choose colours.
Since I want pale colours, I go for a fairly pale grey.

A quick note on choosing colours. If you're not used to colouring stuff then it might be a good idea to sample pictures that are similar to what you want, at least to see what colours are typically chosen - its somewhat hard to guess the RGB values of a colour just by looking at it, at least at first. Make sure you sample the base colour though, without any shading added to it.
If you sample colours from various galge CGs, you'll probably notice that whatever the hue you're choosing, the colour is always very saturated - towards the top and right sides of the colour picker. CGs always seem to use vibrant saturated colours - even when a grey is seen, it typically has a large amount of saturated colour in it (often blue or red). It's pretty rare to see a true grey (ie. no hue / saturation) used. This isn't a rule or a recommendation, just an observation.
The usual colour associations apply (blue for cool, red for passionate, etc) but you'll probably notice a lot of complementary or opposing colours being used.

Time for some colouring. The REALLY important thing here, rather than just colouring the areas, is to establish a mask for each area of colour. You could do that with layers and masks, or by using a layer per colour; the method I tend to use is to paint all the colours on one area using the pencil tool (which has no blending). This gives me a bunch of areas of solid colour that I can select. This mask allows you to adjust your colour scheme easily, and is also used extensively for shading.
Obviously, you can use the flood fill tool and your lineart to speed things up a little. You can also use the masks you have already completed to easily create the mask for neighbouring areas, since implicitly there won't be any overlaps.

Keep going until you fill in all the whitespace in your lineart. Once it's all masked, you can fiddle with the colours until you're happy that they work together.
Note that even though she is wearing grey, it's actually tinted blue - compare it to the background grey. I used blue to complement her green motif and skin colour. Or something.

Thats all we need for base colours and masks; next is the start of shading!

How To Draw Anime CG: Lineart

2009-08-23T23:50:00.010-04:00

I always wanted to do some kind of tutorial covering the stuff I've picked up from scattered other tutorials. And since I'm too lazy and uninspired to draw anything else I guess its a good time to put one of those together!

I'm not intending this to be a 'do this for good art' kind of thing, since I'm far from being an authority on either art or techniques; this is just going to be a summary of the basic stuff I go through to make a picture, in the hope that people who already draw and are exploring ways to make clean art find it useful.

Some general comments before I start:
I use PaintTool SAI for lineart - it has some really nice control settings for lineart, so you can do nice crisp thin lines - Photoshop has some settings for that but it isn't convenient for doing both lineart and colouring. SAI is god for painting, but I don't tend to do that, and I still prefer Photoshop for CG colouring.
I have a 1200 square canvas (so it's roughly screen-sized at 100% zoom), and draw the roughs at 100% and the final lineart at 150% - this is to speed things up without it looking crappy, and also so the lines are a good size on screen (a couple of inches on a tablet - this is more important for me than resolution). I have a layer with a block of colour on it that I use to crop a nice view of Miku before saving. I'm also using a hard 12 pixel brush, but due to pressure variance I'm probably usually drawing a 5-6 pixel line - for the resolution, even this is probably quite thick, but I tend to resize the image a little to hide minor faults. Its also easier to colour lineart that is at least 2-3 pixels thick. Uh, I can't think of anything else...

So! Lineart! As an arbitrary subject, I'm doing Hatsune Miku, since I wanted to draw her sometime, and I wanted a subject who lent themselves to fancy game CG-style shading. I was going to have her singing, but I dropped that and kept the pose simple since it's a tutorial...

I start off with a layout sketch for just about anything I do; it helps break habits, and also avoids problems later on with propertions. Only the silhouette is important, really; the eyes and some details are there but only to make sure they're positioned correctly but I'll be redrawing them when I'm 'inking' it.
If you're good at drawing on paper then you can scan the rough and skip to the inking. (If you're good at inking on paper then you should probably skip all of this...).

Since the hair is kind of complex and overlaps, I do the rough for it on a seperate layer. The previous rough gets set to 10% transparency so that I can still see the silhouette, but it doesn't interfere with the current work.

The clothes are next. They're also done on a new layer. Since they're based on the previous layout and I seem to be pulling it off ok, I skip the rough and just ink directly.
'Inking' is just a process of producing clean lines - I don't want to try to influence anyone too greatly since its an artistic choice, but at a technical level, this basically means doing each line as one stroke, or hiding the fact that it isn't if you have to break it unto two unnaturally. For me this means lots of undo-ing when I don't like a line, or using a temporary layer to clean up the line if I can't avoid overlapping other lineart (such as when two lines meet and I want a nice join). Beyond that, look at what your favourite artist does, or look at how people do particular areas - as example, a lot of people thicken lines on the chin or eyes in particular ways, or vary the thickness a lot on lines that are curved.
Here's a video of Gabe from Penny Arcade inking a picture, which demonstrates the 'single stroke' thing pretty well:

(Don't worry, it's running at 2x speed, he's only semi-superhuman.)

Skin parts and face. I did this on a new layer, then cleaned the overlapping parts and merged back into one layer since there are no overlapping parts. After this, I'm done with the body rough so I hide it.

Hair next. Since it overlaps the face it gets a new layer. I redrew a bunch of stuff from the rough - it's just a layout so I don't bother with details, but I also decided that the hair ornaments were a bit flimsy in the rough and beefed them up. This is a simple picture, but normally I do that a lot more.
Again, I turned the other lineart transparent while I was doing this so that it didn't distract me, then made it opaque again once I was done. The hair rough gets hidden now too.

Time for some greebles and fixes. After seeing it with the hairline, I didn't like the haughty expression, and since the face is a seperate layer I just fixed it without redoing her hair. I also noticed that I'd missed some details from the original design, and fixed her skinny arm - you can't meddle too easily once you start colouring, so it's now or never.
After this, hide all your roughs, and lock your lineart layer so you don't draw on it like a dumbass... You should also set the layer to 'multiply' if you have it on a white background, the white becomes transparent and the black remains.

Another thing you see a lot of is that, when people are posting lineart they intend to colour later, they touch it up a little. Just duplicate the lineart, do a light gaussian blur on one (2-5 say, depends on how thick your lines are), group them with a colour layer, and you're done.

Gundam MkII

2009-04-05T19:10:00.003-04:00

So, I started watching Zeta Gundam ages ago. "Awesome!", I thought, "this will inspire me to do some mecha fanart practice type stuff. I'll just draw the ones I like as they turn up in the series."

So, now that I've finished watching the entire series, here's one from the first episode!

The MkII is probably my favourite Gundam design. Even though it's the oldest after the original one, the detail still stands up now, and doesn't bother with weird gimmicks (ignoring the daft G-Defenser). Plus, I'm a sucker for underdog mecha, and the MkII is outclassed by everything other than grunt mecha from the moment it starts being used, yet still survives the series (and ZZ too!). And so on.

I think I've gotten the hang of layout out mecha parts now - previously I was having trouble turning bones into individual parts, but rendering each jointed part as boxes and then sketching in the details seems to work better (although it's somewhat time consuming).

So far this took:
2 hours for the layout (could have been faster, I got caught up in the details as usual, plus i couldn't settle on a pose)
3-4 hours for the rough sketch (which looks much like the lineart here, but with piles of corrections and random line widths)
4-5 hours for the lineart (2x resolution of the rough, otherwise it would have been faster).

I'm not actually sure about the times, since I kept doing it while tired and was getting distracted, but it was way too long... still, at least it looks like a good chunk of time went into it.

STILL NOT DEAD

2009-03-16T20:16:00.003-04:00

Angry Reimu and her "gohei", following a vigorous session of removing negative energies.

It's a different style for me. I thought of the gohei-bat a while ago, and last week the image of her expression came to me, so I wound up with this. Its pretty close to what I had in mind from the start - its not often that I manage to express things as I imagined them, so whether that's a sign that I'm improving or its just a fluke, I'm fairly happy with it.

I also used a bunch of colouring techniques I read somewhere - I don't think they came out awesomely here, but they're much faster than what I was using for the same thing before, so it's all good.

TsuChan parody

2009-03-05T20:18:00.004-05:00

From this comic on Tsunami Channel. As the comment says, the first panel originally said "Takumi love me...", which made me think she was doing some spontaneous acting / mind control... which has happened before.

tl;dr I have too much free time.

I like how a lot of the lines came out. The hand is passable, but I still need to study them properly sometime. Not sure about the style of the eyes, they look ok but its kind of a generic style. I think they would look better coloured, but I realised at the end that I don't know what colour the characters are supposed to be...

Geometric Shmup characters

2009-02-04T19:22:00.004-05:00

Three characters for a scrolling shooter style game.

Their designs are simply based on circle, triangle, and square. Even their personalities are based on those shapes. Blue is pretty bubbley and happy, and not particularly sharp. Red is very forceful and pierces everything with both her words and her attacks. And Pink is pretty nice, but is straight edge and a perfectionist.

The three characters are to be controlled simultaneously by the player. Depending on which one is "active", the other two will fly in different formations behind her. Not much else is decided yet.

Winter Cold... touche

2009-01-29T11:30:00.005-05:00

Ugh.

Winter Cold

2009-01-28T12:10:00.003-05:00

It's suddenly become much more winter-like around here, and some people are getting sick.

Get well soon, you guys!

Not Touhou

2009-01-25T10:32:00.000-05:00

It's not Touhou related! So what is it?

How should I know? I only drew it...

Yuyuko!!!!!!

2009-01-24T11:11:00.000-05:00

Since yesterday's one was a bit too cute, I needed to do one like this to balance it out. The pose is somewhat influenced by the Card Crusher.

Yuyuko!!!!!

2009-01-23T11:37:00.003-05:00

Yes that's 5 exclamation marks!

The thumbnail is a close-up of the Youmu that turned out exceptionally cute, but there is actually a Yuyuko in the full-size image!

And also Ran and Chen. They've been featured in an earlier post.

Yuyuko!!!!

2009-01-22T12:52:00.001-05:00

Yuyuko is a ghost, but she hasn't passed on to the afterlife. Probably has something to do with the fact that her body was used to seal away a monster life-force sucking tree.

The blue haired character is supposedly the creator and lord of Makai (aka Hell).

Yuyuko doesn't want to go.

The Sword That Cuts Anything

2009-01-21T08:51:00.001-05:00

Another Touhou/MH crossover.

In Monster Hunter, parts of monster can be broken or cut off. But annoyingly, only a few predetermined parts can be damaged, in the interest of maintaining gameplay.

In Touhou, Youmu's blade can apparently cut anything.

No doubt there will be trouble if the two are brought together.

Phantom Backround

2009-01-20T11:42:00.000-05:00

Updated with a lazy background! Actually I guess it doesn't look THAAAAT bad...

Supply and Demand

2009-01-20T10:00:00.001-05:00

Some items that are rare in Monster Hunter, don't seem to be as rare in Touhou.

In Monster Hunter there's a somewhat rare high-level item called "Phantom Butterfly" that you need at the end of the game for crafting equipment. I'm pretty high-level I've actually never even seen one yet.

But in Touhou, a character will shoot out hundreds of them during one of her attacks!

Yuyuko!!!

2009-01-19T12:40:00.001-05:00

Well it's Tou hour again.

And it's Yuyuko again.

This time Youmu is here too. She's Yuyuko's body guard, but unlike Yuyuko, she's only half-dead. I don't know how that works.

I linked this earlier already, but she shows up in this video with Yuyuko:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BZf_ccGqfI

Monster Hunter

2009-01-18T11:26:00.002-05:00

Lazy 4koma...

I was ~~coereced into~~ introduced to Monster Hunter Freedom 2 by Isaque. Its a good game, especially the feeling that you're in a real "world", hunting monsters which live there, rather than just existing as enemies. I'm not so fond of the initial experience though... you're dropped into your village, and told to go do the tutorials before you start for real. It has several hours of tutorials, introducing everything in the game. I got bored halfway through and decided to go play some real missions, so I went to the village chief, who told me there were single-player missions in the guild hall.

It was true. There were missions marked "single player" in the guild hall. All of which were impossible.

Turns out that the guild's single player levels are just the multiplayer levels without a lobby. The old lady has the real singleplayer levels. Bitch.

Yuyuko!!

2009-01-18T10:00:00.000-05:00

Yuyuko is my favorite Touhou character, so it's only fair that I draw more of her!

Maybe a little suggestive... maybe!

TEWI

2009-01-17T10:00:00.001-05:00

Another Touhou.

This time it's Tei, or as it's spelled in Japanese "Tewi" I actually don't know much about her, but I like to think she's a rather mischeivous and maybe a bit mean or something.

Actually she's supposed to have black/dark brown hair.... but it's too late for that now!

Once again, reference is Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7wUNYsM-bI

Yakumochen

2009-01-16T10:00:00.002-05:00

Ran! Chen! More Touhou!

These two are pretty cute. Chen especially because of how she is always trying so hard.

Once again, a Youtube is worth a thousand words... so here's two. They're actually two version of the same thing.

Better art: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHyjNQorwYk
Subtitles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jip6DJC7qZA

Chiyuri

2009-01-15T10:00:00.000-05:00

Another Touhou character.

Apparently this is a really classic one... Her name is Chiyuri, but I don't really know anything else about her though. I based it off another piece of fan art, so it's probably suffering from telephone syndrome and is actually nothing like the original character at all!

Yuyuko!

2009-01-14T12:14:00.003-05:00

I'm trying out the software called Paint Tool Sai. Junk usually uses it for his lineart, so it would only be appropriate to take it for a test drive by drawing some Touhou fanart!

I've never actually played any of the games before though... but the music is nice!

This character is "Yuyuko". She's a ghost, but she doesn't let that stop her from being very cute! How exactly is she cute?

I think this will explain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BZf_ccGqfI

Happy New Year

2009-01-12T19:23:00.004-05:00

Meh. I've been lazy recently...

Happy New Year, with Alice, along with a winter costume redesign.

I should stop drawing so much Touhou stuff, but its so much easier than learning things I can't do already~ Also its utterly freezing here, and I felt like drawing someone who was warm, and in warm colours.

I dunno if I like this or not... I like the composition, and the colour choices generally, but her face is funky somehow and as usual I don't like the contrast between the light and dark hair, there's too much of a dividing line there. Also it took way too long, but then thats what comes from being lazy so long.

The BG is a cop-out, but it still works fine somehow?

Monster Hunter New Year

2009-01-07T17:02:00.003-05:00

Something was just missing without a Monster Hunter themed New Years image for here.

The monster isn't exactly an Ox, but it's as close as I could get... well they do have these little goat things, but that wouldn't have been as epic.

And yes, they do have green cats in Monster Hunter :)

Happy New Year!

2009-01-01T18:29:00.007-05:00

It's 2009! I thought Wall-E was a fitting subject to represent the changing of the year. I wanted to do another MH themed one as well, but it's not ready yet :(

It was a bit tough since there aren't really any cows in MH anyways...

Also, Jump-Cancel is now exactly 1 years old!

Why hello there.

2008-12-25T05:26:00.003-05:00

It's been a while.

I have no excuse.

Please forgive me with this clean-up of an old sketch.

The balance between detailing is really lopsided, but that makes it kinda interesting I think.

Seasons Greetings!

Dorothy's on a roll

2008-10-03T02:52:00.006-04:00

What is this place :O

It's been a while. This time it's fanart for a DS RPG called RIZ-ZOAWD. Based on The Wizard of Oz, the game's main gimmick is a virtual trackball used for character movement which I found to be quite charming. So here is the main character, "Doroshi", on said trackball.

This is the game's site: http://www.d3p.co.jp/riz/

It's in Japanese, but the headings are in English so it's easy to navigate. You can find a trailer featuring gameplay under the "Special" heading.

Random mecha - Gaiking

2008-10-01T20:21:00.002-04:00

Daikuu Maryuu Gaiking. I loved this, back in the day (it was the only actual mecha show I saw as a kid)... the remake is pretty awesome too, keeping the original designs and adding a lot of stuff.

I liked this picture as I was doing it, but as usual, after I finished I realised that the perspective kind of petered out suddenly. I sketched it properly, but the head was just a doodle and I went off on a tangent when I drew it... if I just sized it down and angled it back a bit it might pass, but its not worthwhile. Still, really gotta break that bad habit...

Random mecha - Gespenst

2008-09-29T20:07:00.003-04:00

CALL GESPENST!

About time I did something from SRW. I like the head, but I made my usual mistake of a) drawing everything without sketching it and b) doing so while zoomed in too much, so... fat Gespenst. The arm is a bit lame too. I could have repaired it easily enough, but really, its not worth rescuing.

I like the design of it, but it seriously sucks ingame... it gets given to your crappy pilots, it's stats are bad anyway, it has rubbish movement, can't fly, and since it's a deathtrap you're not going to give it any good weapons. Even the specialised versions are lame compared to pretty much anything else you have... which is a pity because mass-produced units make a nice change from "everything is the ultimate robot" designs.

Random mecha - The Hatter

2008-09-25T19:35:00.006-04:00

YES!

LET'S BURNING JUSTICE!

ROLLING STAAAAAAAAAAAAART!

FINISH!

THAAAANK YOOOOOOOOU! VERY MUCH.

Random mecha - Aestivalis

2008-09-24T19:09:00.004-04:00

An Aestivalis. Wasn't coming out as I wanted it to, so I just did a quick + dirty colour job and left it. I'm kinda rubbish at mecha heads - much like drawing a human head, if you mess up the positioning or spacing of elements, it ends up with a kind of "inbred" feeling to it. The body's ok, perspective is kinda ok, but neither are what I was originally going for.

Heh, just as I'm typing this, "The Aestivalis March" started playing on my playlist.

I hardly draw any mecha stuff because it takes me so long, so I'm going to spend a while doing some doodle-quality stuff (but more of it).

Touhou - Her Sake Not Even Drop

2008-09-20T17:11:00.003-04:00

Always wanted to do a "inexplicably flying anime girl" style pic, so... now I have. Yuugi Hoshiguma, sake balancer extraordinaire. I was concentrating mostly on the pose, so I didn't bother fixing the face and gave up on the hands... I'm fairly happy with the colouring and colour choices though. Just wish I'd remembered to do it bigger, since it loses the subtlety at this size (this is pretty close to the original's resolution).

I keep meaning to do more mecha stuff and other series, but Touhou is so much quicker and convenient to draw since you can just fudge the details...

TFA mosaic comics

2008-09-19T00:53:00.004-04:00

Here is something I did for Transformers Mosaic. Created in the IDW forums. Its a fan made comic in TF fandom. One of the things I like about doing these 1 page comics is that it helps get your name out there. Eventually people will recognize your name, if you do enough of these. I know you guys are super talented, so if any of you guys have time, I have some scripts. Send me an msg!

PacYuyuko

2008-09-08T20:01:00.003-04:00

Lol procrastination!

Just a random doodle I felt like doing, to get back in the swing of things (yeah right). This kind of lazy shading / lighting isn't bad for the time it takes... I don't like Yuyuko being all blue, since it looks like her hat is just a tight skirt on her head or something, but skin-coloured and hair-coloured both looked weirder. Should have thought about it before I did the lineart...

Technically Yuyuko is a ghost too, but eh, details.

Touhou - Flandre is Love

2008-07-13T20:29:00.002-04:00

Just a quickie for WTFR's Flandre Friday. I thought I'd get some perspective practice... its not terrible, but I rushed through it so much that i didn't learn anything from doing it. The skin contrast is a bit off too. I still kinda like it though, but it needs some finishing that I can't be bothered with.

Touhou - Patchouli Moon Attack

2008-07-12T13:26:00.004-04:00

Zambot 3 reference. I wanted to do this for a while... it doesn't look that much like it, but hopefully people who know Zambot at all will get it.

Lazy cel colouring... I only had 2 hours to do the whole thing, so it's just a colour layer and a colour dodge layer. I kinda like the high-contrast effect, but I don't think I'd normally do it like this on purpose. The lightning is decent, considering it took about 3 minutes (some squiggles and a cloned blurred layer placed into a group set to "screen" (which for some reason looks totally different to a layer set to "screen")),

Touhou 4koma - Touhou UFO Spotter's Guide

2008-07-11T20:18:00.002-04:00

Geez, you go away for a month and the place dies.

The motivation for this came from "8" being marked as "drunkard" in "Uwabami Breakers" (leading on from "9" being "idiot" in "PoFV"), so I thought I'd see if I could invent a series of them. I tried not to list the usual jokes and references, but I'm not sure how well I did that way... Drawing silhouettes is kinda fun though.

Touhou - CIRNO IS STRONGEST

2008-06-19T19:11:00.003-04:00

In widescreen-o-vision™.

Typical "joke gone too far" picture (comparing Cirno's ice crystals to Flandre's... uh, back decorations). This was something like 5 hours work, start to finish. I got to cheat a bit with the crystals, but the rest was just flat-out drawing 2 characters in the same pose, which seems unnaturally fast for my speed. You can kind of see that in the quality, of course...

Touhou 4koma - "You Reap What You Sow"

2008-06-08T09:34:00.004-04:00

Just realised I can use the comic title as my post title to save thinking one up each time!...

Someone spotted a nikoniko video with some of my art in it (at 3:33).

Translating some of the comments:
"Haven't we gotten to the [named artists] yet?"
"SO TALL"
"Nice China"
"More guns than a Zoid lol" (?)
"ear transplant lol"
Along with a bunch of "WTF"s and "awesome"s.

Anonymous Japanese internet people are so civilised!... Although, I guess Youtube comments are much the same, so maybe it's just message boards that have all the manners of a chimpanzee tea party.

Touhou 4koma - Cirno

2008-06-03T19:26:00.005-04:00

The beloved tomboyish girl. I guess people coming here won't recognise it, but this is taken from Cirno's profile story about her being eaten by a giant frog and then freezing it from the inside to escape. Not sure the joke works in 4koma format...

Did this with a timer running to make myself go quickly, ended up pretty much as I said yesterday. 1 hour for sketching, 90 min for lineart (panel 3 was the only complex thing anyway) and under 1 hour for tones. The big difference was that there was only 30 minutes of timewasting in there. This is the first comic I finished in one night~

Touhou 4koma - PCB #1

2008-06-02T19:28:00.002-04:00

Something (probably Photoshop) came very close to deleting this just as soon as I'd finished... I wound up spending all evening undeleting a 99% done version. Doggedness triumphs over poor technology once again~

Tried laying out the text before the art, but it doesn't seem to work too well. Quite like the joke though. Took too long, again... I was hoping to produce one of these a day, but 6 in 3 weeks is a joke.

If I add up the time, its something like:
1 hour sketching
2+ hours for lineart (expanded to 4 or 5 due to MSN and web browsing)
1 hour for tone

Not impossible in an evening.

SD Vader vs Obi

2008-06-01T02:10:00.003-04:00

Probably one of the more famous scenes from the first movie...

SD Trash Compactor

2008-05-31T01:57:00.004-04:00

Phew, this one took a while.

But I think it was worth it... maybe?

Oh yeah, I saw Speed Racer a few days ago, and it was totally awesome. I cried a few times because it was so awesome.

It was a true RACING movie. I think they tried to have a plot or something, but mostly it was about racing, and in that regard it was beautiful.

Also, when trying to guess who the movie was targetted at through the pre-movie adverts, they showed a YTV spot (kids TV channel) followed by a lingere spot. I thought it was pretty odd, but my friend figured it out: the ads were aimed at kids who came for the movie, and the moms who brought them.

Touhou 4koma - Marisa+Nitori

2008-05-28T15:30:00.004-04:00

So, the Touhou 11, "Subterranean Animism" demo is out. It has Marisa + Nitori, giving Marisa the power of SUPER SCIENCE. This is awesome.

The other 5 partnership options in the game are pretty much the standard obvious fandom ones, which kind of leaves me wondering if ZUN had thought of them originally or wound up adopting them as fanservice? I don't really care about that (beyond Nitori), but what is good is that the mechanics they have attached to them are fun (as opposed to balanced - it kind of feels like 6 different gameplay modes, it changes so much. Personally I prefer it this way). I should play 10 sometime, which I skipped over out of apathy...

Er, comic-wise - I actually like this for once. Probably because it has robots. I like robots. It took a bit longer than normal, but considering that its fairly detailed, and I just made up the designs and poses on the spot, it was pretty quick.

Star Wars Scout trooper

2008-05-27T23:53:00.002-04:00

In keeping up with SW theme. Here's a scout trooper! He looks kind of weird the more I look at him, but really fun to draw and good for practice.

Touhou 4koma - China #4

2008-05-27T20:00:00.002-04:00

Whoops, finished this one a while back and kept leaving it too late at night to be able to post it.

More China antics... pretty simple joke. Grabbing a prop from the BG is kinda cheap (especially when I've stopped drawing BGs). I think I'm getting the hang of the art, although I realised when I was toning it that I positioned it badly for a lot of the main colour areas (like Sakuya's blue frock).

2 more to go, although I still don't know what to do for the next one...

SD Obi espionage

2008-05-25T23:47:00.004-04:00

More SD Star Wars.

Mostly focusing on background practice, so I'm choosing memorable scenes with a lot of perspective. Luckily there seems to be many of those :)

...I guess I still need a lot of practice with backgrounds.

SD Vader invades

2008-05-23T20:52:00.006-04:00

Interesting... well lets go with the Star Wars theme for a while.

On a related note, I saw the new Indy movie and it was silly and epic, just as it should be.

05/27 - Oh god the background is so wrong... that's what I get for trying to do it from memory.

Star Wars Stormtroopers

2008-05-21T09:05:00.003-04:00

Love those old school Stormtroopers but I find it hard colouring characters in white. Anyways not sure if this works but I'll post anyways.

Touhou 4koma - China #3

2008-05-18T20:15:00.003-04:00

Continued~

This was technically done yesterday, but today's isn't finished (thanks to a jerk powercut reminding me that I should save more often), so it's not a double post, boo.

Touhou 4koma - China #2

2008-05-17T16:49:00.003-04:00

Another one~

I'm dropping the backgrounds... they're more work, and they look worse than not having one at all. Also, sepia-colour~

Also, much thanks to Icey for making me rewrite it into something that makes sense without mindreading.

Touhou 4koma - China #1

2008-05-13T19:45:00.004-04:00

I finally did a 4koma~

It took much longer than I thought~

That's even ignoring the rejected ones that didn't make sense... hopefully this one manages that at least (assuming you know China). I've been writing down a load of 4koma ideas for a while now, but somehow it was easier to get rolling with a multipart one than a single one - there should be 6 or so in the series. I'm hoping to get over a dozen done for the end of the month (Reitaisai) as an arbitrary goal... wish me luck lol.

Also, blog post 100 woo~ I'll start on my speech.

Unfinished GM

2008-05-09T19:54:00.003-04:00

Tired

Hot

Sick

:(

Tried doing some painty stuff in Sai, but couldn't see how to get it to do what I wanted it to without spending a month on it. Do people really paint over the whole layer a million times, even when shading block areas? Seems like too much of a pain in the ass to me... or I just don't have the patience for it. Might try it again in Photoshop though.

Another Seeker

2008-05-07T16:17:00.004-04:00

Hey What happened? No more postings? Where are you guys? haha... anyways here's another seeker. He is Thundercracker, one of my favorites. My best friend had this toy.

Funky colours

2008-05-02T10:46:00.002-04:00

Something interesting happened here. I colored it in CMYK and then saved it as a JPEG all of a sudden I get these funky colours. Perhaps he is a new seeker. Any suggestions on a code name for this character?

Big feet

2008-04-27T21:30:00.005-04:00

Its been a while since I posted, with exams and all... its insane, Now that its almost over, I'm going to start posting again.

I went to Isaque's house last night. Cool collection of figures. So here's my latest drawing. As I was drawing, something weird happened and I messed up his feet. It's big feet Starscream.

Show me your moves!

2008-04-25T18:40:00.006-04:00

Mrr... It's been like three months since I last posted... (Morrigan's sword way back then was based on Alastor from Devil May Cry, by the way. Yeah, it was a bit off...)

Last weekend, a few days before a friend's birthday, I told her I hadn't drawn anything recently and asked her what I should draw. She said "Captain Falcon FALCON PAUNCHing Peach!" which was soon more specified to him punching her while she's doing her la la la thing (one of her taunts in Super Smash Bros. Brawl).

A bit after I asked for background ideas. "Mcdonalds or a KK Rider concert!"
I don't know if either suggestion was supposed to be serious, given she was surprised when I actually did go with McDonald's... =p

Marisa ze~

2008-04-22T20:06:00.002-04:00

Just an ordinary magician. I wanted to settle some details of her outfit in my head.

I spent seriously way too much longer on this than it deserved...

Monster Hunter art contest 9

2008-04-21T00:03:00.003-04:00

This is what I submitted :(

Still incomplete... I discovered that midnight of the 20th in Japan is about 14 hours earlier than it is here.

Going to finish it up and see if they will accept an update.

Monster Hunter art contest 8

2008-04-19T19:59:00.003-04:00

One more character sheet.

This guy is a gunner, but he doesn't have his weapon with him in the image. This is impossible. So I guess I need to decide on a gun.... probably will go with a light bowgun of some sort.

Monster Hunter art contest 7

2008-04-19T16:57:00.001-04:00

I forgot to choose armour for one of the characters... and it was unexpectedly hard to choose waist and leg pieces that matched the upper body pieces.

I think it worked out okay in the end though?

Monster Hunter art contest 6

2008-04-19T02:47:00.004-04:00

Extra post to celebrate my scanner working properly again!

Apparently using the right driver helps...

Also, cats!

Monster Hunter art contest 5

2008-04-19T00:55:00.003-04:00

Oops missed my post for the 18th...

This time it's a look at how I was developed the scene and background elements. Actually this just looks more like generic middle-ages fantasy rather than Monster Hunter in particular, but oh well.

I didn't use any of these, but you'll get to see what I ended up doing soon enough :)

Monster Hunter art contest 4

2008-04-17T19:47:00.002-04:00

More cats :)

... I think my scanner is dying.

Alt Reisen

2008-04-16T15:54:00.002-04:00

lol regular posting

This arose from a terrible pun someone made about "Alt Eisen" from SRW and "Reisen" from Touhou. Wasn't terribly high-effort, and looks ok for it, although it took FOREVER anyway.

This is also the first lineart I've done in PaintTool SAI - usually I can't be bothered with picking up new software, but Photoshop's lineart was bugging me for a long time, and SAI is pretty awesome (and uses shortcuts which are almost identical to Photoshop).

Monster Hunter art contest 3

2008-04-16T01:55:00.004-04:00

Cats! Nevar forget!

Now this is one of the things I love about Monster Hunter... it's a game where this kind of situation wouldn't be unusual in the least.
There's just something awesome about a game with such a serious tone having this kind of humor in it too.

I definitely can't forget to represent this aspect of MH in my composition.

Monster Hunter art contest 2

2008-04-15T18:17:00.004-04:00

Another character sheet.

I chose mostly silver and grey coloured armour pieces to match the Silver Rook gunlance. Also since the Silver Rook is practically an end-game weapon, most of the armour pieces are pretty high-level as well.

Ah I just realized that forgot about the cats :O

Monster Hunter art contest 1

2008-04-15T00:28:00.006-04:00

Monster Hunter Portable 2G is out!

Well actually it's been out for a month now... but I only managed to get my copy recently :(

So now I'm working on an entry for the art contest they're holding to celebrate the release.
This is one of several characters I'm going to have in my image... it's too boring to just have full armour sets, so I'm mixing things up. I'm making character sheets like this one as references for the final image.

I'll post the sheets over the next few days so it looks like I'm not actually taking a billion years to finish the final image.

Lol Comic ver. Touhou

2008-04-07T19:39:00.003-04:00

I don't seem to be able to produce anything worth finishing recently...

So for a change, one more practice comic. I was trying to get black not-thick lines here, plus trying out "tone"-ish shading. Verdict: maybe a bit too thick, and the shading is actually decent (aside from BGs... need to look at other comics more closely I think). Need to do something about the speech bubbles too, doing them myself looks pretty terrible... and definitely need to be less slow, as ever.

No meaning to the contents again, if you want a generic Touhou situation then you can't go wrong with "Marisa + mushrooms"... also if you so much as recognise the first panel then you're spending way too much time on the internet.

A post for a new beginning

2008-03-27T20:39:00.003-04:00

Ok.

I think I have not posted for long enough.

Time to get back in gear!!
Or something like that...

Non-dead Patchy

2008-03-23T21:48:00.006-04:00

As opposed to "undead"...

In short, someone started a series of pictures of Touhou characters being killed by arrows, so I did a pic in response showing it was 'fake' (it wasn't like it was the most horrifying thing I'd ever seen, but I'm not exactly fond of depictions of human suffering either, so this was my 'counter' to it). Fake arrow, fake blood, and she can fly so the rope does nothing anyway lol.

I like the eyes, although her breasts seem to have migrated to her stomach......

Blood effect was stolen from Half-Life, using my eyes.

Voile, the Magic Library

2008-03-21T22:15:00.004-04:00

Actually Baroque, the Prague Library... with Patchouli Knowledge, the magically anemic youkai librarian. Can you spot my subtle doctoring in this image?

Thought I'd use this to try my hand at some image manipulation. In the end though, even though I fiddled with lots of things (extra shadowing, ambient blue tint, reduced saturation, noise) to try to make her look properly integrated, at a basic level she just didn't fit so I just gave up and made her look half-integrated, half-decent looking.

On the one hand, her outline is a bit too thick, and I didn't light her quite properly (should be less backlit and more ambient)... on the other hand, the original photo had a lot more noise in it than I realised (since the room was really dark), and was pretty grey too. I couldn't even do any filters like "watercolour" since that exaggerated the problems.

Not really sure what I could do to fix this... maybe do a sphere or cylinder as a test for how the lighting should go? Maybe it's plain easier to do with a better photo...