Tag: digital

Art Gallery – Kuromi & My Melody

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Full confession, I am team Kuromi all the way. With her resurgence in popularity lately, I am over the moon with the amount of merch and cute art floating around, even if it does occasionally have her best frenemy involved. I started this piece intending to just make cute papercraft-style art of Kuromi in kimono by herself, but have to admit she felt a bit lonely so I did the two of them. They’re so darned cute together I don’t regret a moment of it. Also, the pom-poms on Kuromi’s collar are actually cute little official My Melody bells. I couldn’t help myself, even if nobody else would have noticed!

 

Art Gallery – Washi Papercraft Maiko

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Washi Papercraft Maiko This week has been a long and frustrating one. Bad weather, work stress, and my grandmother is having some medical issues. So yesterday, when I found myself with some free time, I decided to self-soothe by working on a digital washi papercraft maiko collage. Typically, I make these based on characters from pop culture – movies, cartoons, etc – and prints of those are available here. However, I realised that the bold and graphic shape of them would be very well-suited to traditional woodblock printing as well. Armed with my large collection of washi and chiyogami paper stock textures and scans, I set out to work.

I stuck to a primarily dusty, desaturated palette to keep things feeling soft and vintage, and applied textures to her outfit to bring it all to life. I added the origami flowers as kanzashi and the bamboo pole on her parasol to bring a bit more depth to it and make it look even more like a “real” mixed-media piece instead of an entirely digital one.

Overall, I’m very happy with how she turned out. It always feels good to create something pretty and share it with the world. I suspect I’ll be making more of these sometime in the future.

 

Art Gallery – Moonflowers

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I recently bought myself a Microsoft Surface to be able to work on the go, and one of the greatest appeals for me was the fact that I could draw directly on the screen. What I didn’t take into account is the significant learning curve. Painting with a graphics tablet like a Wacom is markedly different from painting on a canvas, and painting directly on your work surface is different from both. The Surface has the benefit of allowing me to put my input tool directly on top of the artwork, more like a traditional painting, but the screen itself is so smooth, there’s no tooth at all like there would be with “real” paper or canvas.

I found a photo of a lovely painting of a moonflower in a book recently and it called out to me.  As you may know, moonflowers are kind of my “thing”, hence the moonblossom.net domain, my moon and flower custom kamon, etc etc. So when I found this, I thought I would use it as inspiration to start to get the hang of painting directly on the Surface! I’ve definitely got a ways to go, but I’m happy with my progress.

I suspect I will be doing digital painting much more often now that I have this thing, so be prepared for an influx of kimono and woodblock-inspired doodles!

Art Gallery – Sherlock Fan Artwork

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This is a bit of a departure from my usual content in this section. Typically, the Art Gallery posts are reserved for traditional art or art I’ve received of myself in kimono and you’ve probably noticed this is neither 😉

One thing you may not know about me is that I am a huge fan of Sherlock, the BBC’s modern Sherlock Holmes remake. A while ago, a fan group I’m in arranged a challenge to re-imagine the main characters in a different time or cultural setting, so I did both. I had fun trying to keep the general feel and colour scheme of their clothing without making it feel overly anachronistic. And of course John Watson’s Sig Sauer P226R has been replaced with a set of swords.

And yes, that is my tumblr URL along the side. Feel free to follow me, but it’s a very incoherent blend of personal posts, fandom things, cute animals, and food posts. Nothing remotely like this blog.

Art Gallery – Beautiful traditional-style digital artwork

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I paid more for this (in Gaia Online game currency) than I generally would for a commission, but Lutherum‘s style and skill level were absolutely perfect for what I had in mind. He did an incredible job of replicating all the details of the outfit, especially considering how ornate and fussy this particular kimono is. He was also already familiar with proper kimono and kitsuke, so I didn’t have to explain details or anything, which was nice. I also really love how the artist merged his own personal style with a more traditional sumi-e painting style, and sort of desaturated the colours to give the piece a more cohesive feel.