Process Video – Misaki Nakahara Fan Art

Ok, first of all I admit that I had a lot of mistakes in this artwork, mainly in the face part. That’s why the first half is like dedicated to just the face!

Cute girls will always be harder to draw compared to macho men IMO!

Take note also that I was not able to include the first part which was sketching the pose. I included the pose reference in the file and I did NOT TRACE over it.

Also here are a few pointers I learned from doing this:

• Translating from anime style to semi-realistic is NOT as simple as shading the 2D anime line work. What I learned is that it was easier to try to look for references of real people who look like the anime character instead of just imagining transforming it into a real person.

• Having separate layers for the character and the background helps a lot especially if your background needs lots of strokes.

• Textures! Even a slight overlay of texture(artificial or not), or the slightest noise, helps in making an image appear less digital!

• Oh, and just don’t forget flipping the image over from time to time as well as setting a grayscale adjustment layer on top to check for values. If it looks good when flipped or when grayscaled, then you are going the right direction.

Well, that’s it! Thanks for watching!

Total time it took to finish this was around 15 hours within 3 days compressed in 14 minutes.

Final artwork can be found at my “works” page.

Music is by the awesome Alexander Blu! (creative commons)
http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/alex…