Hand Drawing & Digital Coloring: Uta Hime Niko

New image, titled: Uta Hime Niko. Not sure what the name means, but it sounds cool and manga-like. Roughly it could mean Song Princess Erhu. Maybe...

I did this recently in my crazy phase after watching magical princess anime marathon on youtube. I remembered watching Sailor Moon when I was a little girl. Another reason why I did the picture was the competition posted on The Book Depository. Whoever won would get a set of manga books. Who wouldn't want that? The competition called for a drawing of your original manga or anime style superhero (or superheroine, whichever you like).

Seriously, I'm not sure what possessed me to make this design. It just happened. The costume looks a bit like latex. I was actually going for stretchy blue jeans and pink satin, but it kind of failed to look it. The boots weren't supposed to be brown (at first), but this earthy color was milder and more benign for a heroine. If the character was a villainess, I'd make the boots black with metal spikes. The style was a mix between western square dance fiddler and eastern court musician. Do you think it works?

Like most of the pictures in this blog, the first sketch was hand drawn and then it was colored using computer software such as Adobe Photoshop. So, here it is.

Digital Art: Spirit of Rose

I am completely enchanted by the world of ballet. It started when I was a little kid, just beginning to know about Japanese manga. I came across this manga about ballet with the main character named Mari Saotome. I got hooked almost instantly. Now, I didn't jump ahead into the pond because I knew I would sink. But, I started to like drawing ballerinas dancing, or just standing in costumes.

So this, like any other of mine, was traditionally sketched with a pencil and inked with a pen. Then it was scanned and colored with Adobe Photoshop. The color scheme is red according to the most vibrant of rose colors. Red dresses are so pretty. The shoes are pink, as is the color of most ballet slippers. Unless you're dancing Red Shoes. Sometimes Odile's pointe shoes are black too.

Okay, ballet aside, this is not tampered with layer styles. Only pure traditional brushes and ... alright, I used blur filter too.

Fan Art: Sora Naegino (Kaleido Star)

This is a fan art of Sora Naegino, the main character from the anime Kaleido Star. There's the manga too, but the style of my image is purely anime.

I sketched the outline based on a few screen shots of Sora and scanned it. Inked (traced) the outline using Corel Draw so I got crispy clean lines. Then painted the colors using Adobe Photoshop which was so much fun. The costume wasn't from the anime, it's purely mine. Notice the shabby design which was a little dull, not the extravagant getup that appeared in the anime.

Notice the background. I didn't get to write Kaleido Star because it's a bit long. Believe me, I tried. Looked weird. So I opted for the word Star. It's short, meaningful and appropriate to describe Sora.

Hand Drawing: Victorian Girls

I like drawing long dresses. I can't design a beautiful dress, though. So here's just two girls wearing generic long dresses. With different colors, of course. The lack of background is not deliberate. It's just that I suck at drawing background, so it's left empty and barren. I'm not sure about the parchment and quill. Victorians no longer use parchments, methinks. Oh well, at least it's not a slab of stone and a chisel.

The image is fairly simple, just generic manga style girls with generic manga style hair. At first, it was just rough pencil sketch, then I added ink using black ballpoint pen. Other pens are not as cheap and easy to use. I erased the rough lines and added some colors using colored pencils. As I was too lazy to fill the background, I only colored the grass.

Not much to be said. That's the problem about hand drawing. Nothing to brag about.