Tsukimusha

“Tale of Zelda - Champions’ Blessing”. Hey all! I finally found some time to sit down and finish this piece up! I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to doing a Breath of the Wild fanart but I’m happy with the result. My techniques have evolved a lot since I started my Tale of Zelda series nearly 3 years ago, especially how I color my linework and push depth, so this one is quite different from the other 5 pieces. Pretty different palette too! I tend towards darker colors so this was very experimental for me.

“The White Wolf”, 2018. It’s only been a few months since I finished and posted this, but I felt it fitting to post my most recent finished illustration as the end to my sort of 5 year artistic flashback. You can go back and read my original post about it or ask me anything if you have process questions.

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I hope you all enjoyed seeing the work I’ve posted over the past few weeks. It was a lot of fun for me to select which works to post, remember what I was thinking and feeling at the time, what worked, what didn’t; etc. I think my biggest take away from this whole series is that I just really need to keep up with studies on a regular basis! During the times I was so busy with conventions or other things popping up in life, whenever I kept up with studies I always felt like I was able to maintain motivation. I was able to keep those brain cogs moving that are crucial to artistic problem solving, all the while continuing to improve my technique, and my following paintings always looked better for it. I’ve started my studies back up again with my morning coffee, and I’m posting them to my stories as I go!

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You’ll notice that my posts will be slowing down to a healthy schedule as I develop new artwork. Lots of personal goals to pursue, and new techniques, themes, and aesthetics I want to explore in my work.

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I wanna give a big thank you to all the wonderful comments I’ve received on these posts. I can’t express how much your support and encouragement has moved me. As many fellow artists know, it’s so easy to grow despondent with your work when you only see your clients a few weekends of the year, and spend the whole rest of your time busting your butt at it in solitude. It gives me tremendous comfort and resolve knowing that my work has affected you in some positive way. There’s no greater outcome than that. Thank you.

“Rock Witch”, 2016. This is an original character I created as an inktober entry the year before; you can see the sketch I first did of her in the second image. She doesn’t have some fun backstory or anything, I was just out and about when I got the idea of a witch riding a rock/metal guitar as opposed to a broomstick and thought it would be fun to draw. By comparison to the last piece I posted in which the final painting was purely traditional, this piece is completely digital start to finish.

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So half a year later I revisited the idea to make a finished illustration. I’m a big fan of the work of Matteo de Longis and adore his “Vox” art book, so inspired, I wanted to try something similar. This was before I got my Cintiq, so creating the precise linework was pretty laborious on the Intuos.

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After a lot of mirroring the image back and forth while drawing to make sure I got the anatomy and linework right, I detailed out some tattoos. I went partly with the witch theme, metal, and some representing my personal disdain for the death of rock music in the US. The kanji on her leg translates to “witchcraft”.

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I tried a few different color schemes, not really quite sure what to go with. I liked her silhouette so much and didn’t want it to get lost, so I changed the moon to be full, and have it radiating rings to suggest it was a speaker emanating sound. The final step was to give the linework a very slight glow effect to give the piece a bit of life.

“Tiger & Wolf”, 2016. Not the most creative title, I admit. This was one of the most open ended commissions I ever received. The client didn’t have a preference in medium either, so I jumped at the chance to work in acrylics which I hadn’t done in some time (and haven’t done since! le sigh). They simply specified that they wanted a tiger and wolf composed together in a sort of yin yang composition.

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I looked at a few artists for inspiration, especially James Jean since he did amazing renders on both wolves and tigers as part of the Fables covers series. This was pretty straight forward - rough sketch in Photoshop, quick color study to establish an interesting feel, and then moving to final (on a heavy weight paper).

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One thing that was a little unusual that I did was work with acrylics that had higher liquid content, and using a really wet medium to smooth them down further, so they would paint really smoothly using Japanese brushes. It was a little difficult because it expedited the already fast drying process acrylics are known for, but it allowed me to try working in a nihonga-esque style (Japanese painting) without the hassle of turning the raw pigments into paint.

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The painting took about a week to complete, mostly because I spent a lot of time experimenting and had to relearn acrylics in some ways. I’d like to give it another shot sometime though!

“Odawara Castle”, 2018. This is the first in a series of paintings based on and inspired by photos from my trip to Japan in 2016. It’s the only one I have completed as of yet, but there’s two more in progress that I’m just waiting to pick back up on once my schedule clears. When I posted this I had also been going through a difficult time. I’m not quite out of it yet, but things drastically improved since then, and I want to thank everyone who supported me with words of encouragement and kind comments, it really made a big difference, and I try to remember that whenever I’m feeling down.

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Odawara Castle was owned by the Hojo Clan (many of you Zelda fans know they have the triforce emblem as their symbol), so naturally I was drawn to it. I wanna give a big thanks to my friend @artsbyfrankie, who was my host in Tokyo and suggested we go! It’s located in Kanagawa if anyone wants to go sometime. It’s not a super big castle but still fun to see and impressive. In addition to the process photos I included some photos from that day, so feel free to swipe and take a look!

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I decided I wanted to delve even deeper into the print movement that seems to ever permeate my work, shin-hanga. I tweaked my original photo, lightening it to see the detail properly in things like the masonry, and moving it toward the color direction I was picturing. Once the linework was finished in Procreate, it was ready to be printed and traced in inks as usual.

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It was a fairly lengthy inking session using menso brushed, but tons of fun. Then I scanned it into Photoshop and painted it up starting with flat colors as usual, and adding subtle shading and texture. The whole piece took a lot shorter time than the Bath House series for example, due to having my own set reference to work from. I really hope you all enjoy this piece, I have many more planned and I’m looking forward to improving my background art skills!

“Wei of the Dragon”, 2015. This is a fan art for Wei Shen, the protagonist of the game Sleeping Dogs, which I really loved but I think it missed a lot of peoples’ radar or they didn’t play it. I really loved the setting of an open world action game set in Hong Kong where you work to take down (or cooperate with) the triads. There’s so many open world games these days that it was nice to have one that felt very culturally different, even if the gameplay style was very GTA in a lot of ways. I really loved the hand to hand combat and environmental attacks too, and I thought Wei was an interesting character, more of a morally ambiguous anti-hero which is a lot of fun to explore. The free running aspect was actually more fun to me than in Assassin’s Creed. Sure the graphics were a bit aged for the time it came out in, but that didn’t bother me - the story was one of the best told I’ve seen in an open world game I think. Excellent soundtrack too! And fantastic DLC - the 70’s thwap sound effects and Chinese hopping vampire zombies man, good stuff.

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This was a very experimental piece in that I used both pencils and inks in the final illustration, which I hadn’t really done before. I really love old kung fu movie posters, especially Bruce Lee, so I wanted to go for that overall kind of vibe, framing Wei with a background silhouette of Hong Kong and surrounded by an inked dragon and eagle which are part of his tattoo.

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I went from a photoshop sketch to refining it in photoshop, printing and tracing it onto the final board, inking first, and then developing up the drawing. It was a fun experiment but I haven’t really worked that way since. I really wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do for the colors but ended up focusing on that sort of imperial red with a bit of explosive flair for funzies.

“Fire Emblem Awakening - Valor”, 2018. I’m starting to run low on finished art from the past 5 years to show you guys! This is much more recent, from earlier this year. While I love doing ukiyo-e work, I also really love drawing in a more western style, and the linework in this is much more representative of how I naturally draw. It was actually a commission; I had wanted to do an Awakening fan art for some time but never got around to it. More collage-y style compositions like this, similar to many movie poster compositions, have always been a real challenge for me to compose. I naturally lean more toward scene illustration, so composing this was a real challenge. But there wasn’t a particular scene I wanted to illustrate, and my client gave me a lot of freedom - they just wanted Chrom, Lucina, and Robin in it.

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I went through heaps of ideas, too many to show here. I don’t really like doing the “three quarter anime character pose”; I’m an illustrator and I like to try to tell a story with my artwork, so just drawing Lucina with her sword out or something like that would have felt too much like a cop-out and betraying my own modus-operandi as an artist. That kind of thing is fine for sketching, but I want my final illustrations to be more than that.

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What I learned through the grind of working on this and trying to tell a story is that it’s best to take the major elements and use the narrative directly as a means to compose the image. The way I saw it, in Lumina’s story, the outcome of her fate and the fate of the world hinged on her, and her bravery to confront it. The most obvious representation of bravery or valor is a sword. So the story I wanted to convey is that the fate of the world hinged on her sword. But not just the world’s fate, but her father Chrom’s as well; she needed to prevent him from being killed by a supernaturally controlled Robin, so it was that much more personal of a story for her. So showing both consequences of inaction was important, and by using the sword to bisect the composition, I could show that fate hinged on it, and her.

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For some reason I really struggled with this for reasons that I still don’t fully understand. My client was very patient with me while I returned to this painting numerous times in between other work. I’ve since decided to only take commissions for original content. I stopped taking commissions a while back for fan art of series’ that I’m not a fan of, because my heart just wasn’t in it. Even though I’m a fan of this series, creating fan art for me is a personal experience, so I prefer to wait and create that artwork when I feel I have something personal to say about what I enjoy.

“Tale of Zelda - Twilight”, 2016. I did this one around the same time as my Wind Waker fanart, and I was just hot off playing through the Wii U remaster (yes, the one with the awesome amiibo packed in). There was a lot that I really liked about the game, especially the character designs…and that moonwalking storeowner in Castle Town was hilarious. Even right down to the disturbing Ooccoo.

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It was tough to decide which elements to focus on specifically. I really wanted to get the Ancient Hero in there, but I couldn’t think of a good way to compose him with the other elements I wanted without making it more of a poster style composition. I also really kept wanting to go horizontal, but it wouldn’t have worked as part of my Tale of Zelda set which are all vertical. I ended up reverting the energy of Wolf Link running to using his trapping combo attack instead.

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One of the fun parts was redesigning the dead soldiers as ghostly ashigaru (samurai foot soldiers) and using only their outline to convey that. I also redesigned Midna’s helmet to be similar to Jomon pottery, and the hair to be more kabuki-like. Most of my color inspiration came from a shin-hanga piece called “Shinobazu Pond” by Tsuchiya Koitsu (https://ukiyo-e.org/image/artelino/35677g1).

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One drawback of this piece is that just like the Wind Waker piece, I had to rush the line work to get it done in time, and that definitely shows. It can be really hard to run a business by yourself; there’s that common saying that only 20% of your time as an artist is spent on the art itself, and that is a sad truth for me, so it’s very hard to juggle time vs. quality. This illustration is being phased out too - only 6 prints left in stock in my Etsy - so if you want a copy get one now! I won’t be reprinting them.