Like the title? Kurogane for Christmas. See? It’s alliteration.
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I’m FINALLY back! And this time, it’s a double feature: a wallpaper AND a fanart!!!!
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..........Ok, that’s not exactly fair. I drew the fanart, turned it into a wallpaper, and uploaded them separately. But it’s a damn good piece of fanart, and a damn good wallpaper to boot. Check ‘em out below:
Tools used: 0.5 lead pencil, printer paper, eraser, scanner, Photoshop 7.0
[Obligatory Rant]
These are my Christmas gifts for Ryuuko-senpai, AKA SakuraHanamoto. I know it’s late, but I was in Hawai'i for the past week. I was planning to upload it in the hotel, but apparently Internet access costs money there. And for some reason, that particular laptop was the only one that my father hadn’t installed Photoshop on. And all the anime I brought to watch wouldn’t play because the stupid Photoshop-less laptop didn’t have the right codec. Bored out of my mind, that’s what I was. It was cruel and unusual torture, I tell you! TORTURE!!!! GAH!
But I swear, if money can buy time and effort, this fanart/wallpaper gift would have cost a gazillion dollars. And I’d have become a gazillionnaire by now, with a spiffy new laptop with Photoshop, Internet, and codecs. Yeah, you heard me. Spiffy.
The drawing alone took me two afternoons. My GAWD, CLAMP is so stylized. I mean, just how long do legs have to be!?!? And so much tiny details to pay attention to…seriously, I compared a page in the manga to a screenshot from the anime, and even the animators had simplified it. After that, I gave up referencing from screenshots and just stuck to the manga. Unfortunately, the manga, being black and white, left out a lot of detail anyways. Headaches galore. In the end, I just gave up altogether and took some artistic liberty. In other words, I left out a lot of stuff.
Actually, despite what I said above, I had quite a fun time copying CLAMP’s style. It was different enough that I had a distinct goal to aim for, and not have to worry about accidentally falling back into my old style. At any rate, my style tends to change with whatever manga/anime I happen to be reading/watching, so it wasn’t too hard to copy CLAMP after staring at Tsubasa for a while. I just hope it turned out okay.
My favorite part of it all….has got to be drawing the hands. I love how CLAMP draws hands. Very angular, so there’s no need to worry about making it look too realistic. It’s my favorite style to draw hands in, actually. I tried incorporating it into my style before, but it didn’t work…too CLAMP-ish.
My least favorite part, that’s easy. The sword. I fail at drawing swords. I fail at straight lines in general, but swords are my bane. It’s just the blade part, though. The handle of Ginryuu was… interesting, if not altogether fun, to draw. But I think I know the real reason why CLAMP got rid of it within the first half of Volume 1 now.
Well, after I finished the lineart, I picked up an inking pen, looked at the lines, looked at the smudges, said, “To hell with this,” and scanned it into Photoshop without bothering with inking. The result: an hour spent just cleaning it up. I would have done the lineart on Photoshop, but…look at all those lines!
Making the wallpaper itself wasn't very hard, just time consuming. This was mostly because I didn't have a definitive design drawn up. Note to self: always have a design ready before you make the wallpaper. It saves you a couple hours worth of Photoshop.
[/Obligatory Rant]
*gasps for breath*
~Meli Kalikimaka!
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Quote of the Day - The only difference between a dead skunk lying in the road and a dead lawyer lying in the road is that there are skid marks around the skunk.
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