Lolita artwork, EGL Bible art.

Here is a sorta old picture that I like.
I've posted it on other sites, but now I am posting it here.

It is also here on my deviantart page. http://murasaki-no-ryuu.deviantart.com/art/Lolita-posing-439567495

-MNR

Happy New Year - Time to look for a job

Happy New Year all.

I've graduated from college. Now I have to look for work as either a video game artist, or a movies/media artist. I particularly want to be a character artist or a concept artist. It is a slow going search. I probably will have to take a regular job in the meantime. ]=

Anyway, I'm working on sprucing up my portfolio. I have a bunch of work to redo and spice up for my portfolio.
 I also have a bit of work to do on my flash drive, in regards to separating older artwork, older, useable artwork, works in progress, and recent artwork.

I am working on some concept art character sheets.
These are just some random strange priestess characters that I had eventually wanted to use in a story. Eh... they need a rework. I think these are from 2008 or 2009

-MNR

Painter X

Painter X is the program I use to paint digitally. When you want to simulate traditional materials, or do some really smooth blending for art that needs not to be scaled, go to Painter. It  takes .psds. I use it for my soft shading because it does the painting effects I want in far less time than photoshop.

At times, it is harder to figure out because it has slightly different shortcuts. The eyedropper tool is D, but I changed it to I like in photoshop. It has so many built in brushes to get the proper effects you want. SO many brushes. Its overwhelming at times. But you just have to explore them. I have barely touched oil brushes because right now it's not right for my arts.

Sometimes it crashes. Kinda annoying. It crashed a few months ago. But then again, photoshop, firefox, ALL adobe products, and internet explorer all crash. So that's not new. It has autosave.

The main point of this post is to say that layers are dealt with differently in Painter X. You 'collapse' layers instead of 'dropping' or 'merging' layers like in other image programs. To drop a layer means to merge the layer with the background layer. Be careful in that regard!

To collapse a layer in Painter: Press Ctrl + Shift + X, and the program will merge the current layer with the layer just below it.


-MNR

Game done

I did a lot of artwork for this game. The gameplay wasn't what i had wanted it to be. It was a great struggle for me.

... Just goes to show that again, I'm not a coder. So 1.5 months to make a whole game by myself isn't going to produce an award winning game.

I'm a little sore about that, because we have to exhibit it for two days and I'm DONE with that thing. I have plenty of projects I want to work on. I need to totally make a list of all the projects I want to complete. However,I have around 3-4 essays to write and I'm trying to pass my classes. Also, I"m trying to find summer housing so I can work at Deadmans over the summer. It has so far been extremely difficult to do this.

List of projects:
Finish that 3d face I was sculpting in Blender
update my website's content and layout
Draw some of my brainstormed lolita clothing prints
Learn animation in blender (I already know animation in Maya)
Create a lolita dress up game
Learn pygame
make a prototype of the game "Tessa's story"
Finish that dark green lolita dress
finish sewing that black lolita pinafore
finish knitting my cream colored lolita socks
pick a fabric and dress style for my lolita summer dress

That's all off the top of my head.

I will post a link to my game. Maybe eventually. But here is the poster.

I'm really proud of the guitar design. that was fun. I had drawn both the lead singer and the guitar in my sketchbook last year and decided it would be fun to use them.

Contrast in Past artwork

I looked at my artwork in the past, on deviantart. I don't believe in just throwing away my old artwork. I don't think anyone should. How will you know if you've gotten better?

Jan 2005

Feb 2010

These two are the same character, Geneva. I mean, this isn't the best example of how I've gotten better, but there's a definite contrast in how I started to draw her. I feel her character design is more solidified in the second image. That is not what she wears on a daily basis though! It's more like the first image.

late 2010, lolita from GLBs.

Late 2010 early 2011, commission from Gaia.

I was soooo interested in anime and manga. Anime and Manga everything! Now, even though I like it, I'm pretty passive about it. I rarely read or watch anime and manga now. I stick to watching my few favorite animes and episodes more and more. I love shows that aren't anime.

I've really changed as a person-artist in the last 5-6 years, not to mention looking over the course of 18-ish years of drawing. I can see which pictures  show a unique change in my drawing style, where I learned something crucial. I still have most of my sketchbooks, each spanning 1.5 years of my drawing career. I never noticed really that I get a new sketchbook every year.

I'd say nowadays, I write ideas and sketches rather than finished and colored drawings in my sketchbook. My sketchbook is used more to write down ideas, rather than make complete sets of artwork on every page. I am less stringent in this. I think this is because I've slowly transitioned from being a physicist/mathematician to a video game concept artist. During the epoch in which I wanted to be a physicist/mathematician, I was very perfectionist, and worked painstakingly on my artwork. During this occupational epoch, the ideas and concepts are far more important than individual art pieces. All of the little sketches and lines of text I write serve to culminate in a larger, more expressive piece of artwork or series. I have definitely improved. Drawing finished pieces without ideas as to what it means is no way to draw.

While I was becoming a young adult, I had a conflict of being a young artist that absolutely loved anime and manga everything. However, my style wasn't 'cute' enough. I felt bad because my characters weren't adorably 'moe' or 'kawaii' or ''sexy' and I strove to copy more popular internet anime artists, because they were popular.

I kind of see now how hollow a pursuit that was. Where are these popular anime artists now? They are drawing the same artwork, the same expressions, the same situations, and characters that look almost identical to years ago. That's not what I want to be, just a one liner, just a gimmick.

I drew in class. 2007. This has elements similar to art styles I would only now learn about. Constructivist, for example?

I still draw anime artwork, but I've branched out, and discovered that I like traditional artwork styles. I really discovered that I loved surrealism, constructivism, and Dada. Taking Multimedia Century has helped me realize there are more important issues that need to be drawn, sculpted or painted, other than "this girl in the japanese schoolgirl clothes is blushing over something". I think that anime art should be explored as a legitimate art style in museums that gained popularity in artists around the 1980s and exploded as a style in the 1990s, for educational purposes, because there are lots of misconceptions about its roots and subject matter. However, it shouldn't be taken seriously as something like... that should be taught to children in schools, like impressionism and color theory, or what types of lines you can make with what types of materials. It is like how you don't really teach children how to draw American cartoons in school.

I tried to copy the other artists. Oekaki. I barely knew how the tools worked!

An image from back when I did anime art commissions on gaiaonline. I tried my best with CGing at the time.

I cannot despise anime. It taught me how to draw and kept me striving to learn why I wanted to draw what I drew, and what I should draw. It helped me discover character design, environmental design, fashion design, and of course, lolita. The thing is, I started with anime and then expanded my interests, and as I grew, my knowledge and mastery of stylus based art and ideas grew. Other artists I grew up with have done that as well. A lot of times, I vastly prefer their anime styled artwork much more than what they have recently turned to. For example, this woman was my idol, and she's still amazing artist. But I still loved her oekaki drawings much better, and looking at her progress in them over the years. Loish.net.

I just find it a shame when someone demands to be called a true artist, and they draw the same things over and over again.... with no concept behind the ideas.

I was just looking at these old drawings, and I wish to redraw them. It will be like an artist making a new take on an older piece of artwork. Because I am a new artist. A different artist.



      These are some of the images I want to redraw. I still love them, its just that I can remake the concept behind the image.


- MNR

Working on page 6 of my manga.

So... I have 3 more pages of my manga sketched out.
need to be fixed up before they're presentable.

I'll post pictures maybe later.

I decided to add some background story to it.

Through Toriko's narrative, how they met and canoodled. Hah. Canoodle.
They met in a warrior tournament. And she will tell that tale briefly.
And then her tale will blend into him meeting her priestesses.

Yey! This is going somewhere!

A lot of hard work. Due to misc. events, I have not been able to work on it as much. I should probably sketch some in my sketchbook instead of just doing story boarding in there. I would prob get a lot more done.

I can see how this shouldn't take ages to make, like some manga series do. Esp. if the work is spread equally. Just.... doing all this alone gets to be a lot of work. I'm not complaining, I'm doing this for fun.

BTW I stuck myself in the ass with a knitting needle. By accident. The bleeding stopped but that asscheek is still sore. Am a little upset about my stupidity in leaving it on the couch. But I'll survive. Unless that needle had salmonella or something. Then I'd need penicillin.
.... anywhoo....

Am gonna take a nap now.

2nd commission