


Cheated on the third one and used a micron for some of the details...
I was trying out tweaking with the different brushes in PS7. Unforunately I don't remember how I got the brush I did this image with. I like keeping things loose. It's hard to get dynamic images. I need to keep looking to my favourite artists for inspiration. Maybe this problem would be resolved if I went to life drawing more often...











Awwwwww. Isn't she CUTE!!!??? In a sort of creepy, bug eyed, "I'm not human" kind of way??? I don't really consider myself an anime artist. I grew up watching Ranma 1/2 , Dragonball Z, Pokemon, etc. etc. And I use to draw it all the time but I was never really good at it and the more I grew, the more I realized it just isn't for me. It's definately had a huge influence in my style, and therefore I respect it... Most of it... As for the picture, I wanted to try anime again. Always good to try something different ;) Ever since I played Disgaea, my style changed A LOT. So whenever I do something anime-esque, I think Harada. Which I'm cool with, I love the guy.
These are some preliminary character designs for a short flash animation my friend and I want to do over the summer. Once again, I'm trying to back away from my typical stuff and do something new. I don't really care if it looks amazing or not, I'm just trying to push myself in different directions... The characters aren't very structured but I can always make them structured later. Also the quality of the pic is kind of bad but that's my laziness. It's not a masterpiece anyway :P
I started out by doing a quick sketch of the Angel on the tree in Photoshop. I do this because I find that by doing the rough stuff first I can get the pose right along with the composition and whatnot easier than by going straight into the image with colour. If I start out doing a piece with colour I tend to make things look stiff. That's just my inexperience with the medium though. Plenty of people create beautiful pieces by getting right into the colour at the beginning.
I then save the image and load up Open Canvas. I like Open Canvas for digital painitng better than photoshop because of the watercolour tool. The watercolour tool in Open Canvas really has a nice feel to it that I've grown comfortable with over the years... But anyway I set the image to multiply layer and colour the lines I have. At this stage the colouring is rough. This is because I am trying to figure what looks nice and what doesn't colourwise.
After I have everything coloured the way I want it I flatten the image so no more layers. Everything is on one layer now. I go over all the black lines with the water colour tool to give it a more painterly look. This part is tedious but rewarding :D
Now technically the piece could have been finished but I decided to add a dragon in there to make things more interesting.
After getting all that done I put it in a nice little frame and adjusted the colour balance because I felt the colours could have been stronger.