Dreams come true Illustration - Progress

 I always start with a scribble, nothing special just to catch the idea:

 

Next step: a proper sketch, sometimes I'll sketch over again and again, when I'm struggling with anatomy and proportions. Sometimes I'm planning with colors the highlights, like here for the soap bubbles I'm adding later.

after that the boring part, (for me) lining.
I really don't like making outlines. I would love to skip that part. 😂

Next step: Basic colors

After that: shading and highlights

The last step: background and even more highlights!
Sometimes I make a few color corrections with Photoshop and then it's done!

My first Shikishi Artwork

Hello and welcome back!👋
My blog has returned and I REALLY missed this so much.

Blogging used to be one of my favourite hobbies. But for the last few years I've used mainly Twitter for microblogging, sharing new art, work in progress, etc.

But now, that it's going to hell right know and any other social media platform became a pain in the butt for artists, I'd like to share my art on my little safe space again. where I just can write about it again without limits, doing little experiments, showing the process, you get it. 😆

So for today I wanna share my first shikishi artwork! A few years ago I bought these Shikishis from a store (I forgot wich one it was. 💦)

I do have to work on a comission very soon on these shikishi, I wanted to do a little test run. Just to see what works the best on the paper.

And this came out of it! I used the blue Pilot Color Eno for the first sketch (love these pencils!) and my new Pentel Orenz mechanical pencil. At first, I did not want to color it. buuuuuuuut.......

I've changed my mind and started coloring it with my copic markers. It's also been.... at least 2 years since I've used them. I'm still in a renovating process at home, so most of my traditional drawing stuff is just chilling in their shelves.

And here's a photo of the final result! I'm not 100% happy with the colors, but it's okay for the test object. 😂 while coloring it, I discovered how much I miss working on traditional artworks. It's so much fun! I'm also a little rusty coloring with the markers, but guess I'll have to practise now more often~ 🤷😆

See ya next post!

About my Web-Manga "Frog Out"

Those who have been following me for a while know that I have been working on my manga "Soulmate" for many years and have tried out ideas for realisation every now and then and of course discarded everything again. :D

It's a very big and looooong story, so it's going to take me some time to get all the pieces of the puzzle together and really start working on it. Until then, I'd still like to learn to work on a web manga and get back into paneling and storytelling. For that I need a much shorter story than Soulmate.

My original plan was to revive my old Doujinshi called Cursed Angel (which I'll probably rename), but I wasn't quite so happy with that because I have lots of revising to do there too.

I had to wait a bit longer for the train after work last summer (again....) but luckily I had my Pocket-Moli (short for Moleksine Sketchbook Pocket) with me, so my Sketchbook To-Go, and I scribbled the following into it:

A frog magical girl! I don't know, somehow she was suddenly in my head. Just for fun I made some sketches of her and I liked her more and more. Suddenly it went very fast, she got a "normal form" and a name: Ranae (Latin for Frog) Katō (Japanese for tadpole).

And as it happens, my brain just won't shut up and quickly spun a story around Ranae and Frog Girl. Frog Girl is her name in her Magical Girl form. Really creative name, right? xD Actually, it was supposed to be a placeholder until I come up with something better, but I've gotten used to the name by now, so I'm keeping it.

Back to the topic: I quickly had a story with an opponent, a task, secondary characters and a setting. What also came quite spontaneously: The title!
Because Ranae is a Frog Magical-Gril, I wanted something with Frog in the title. Partly the story gets a bit weird, so in the back of my mind I always had "Freak-Out", which I then changed to "Frog Out". I first thought "wow, that's so genius" and when I googled it: was taken already. For a game. XD
Maybe I can use it anyways???

I had originally wanted to keep the story short with 1-2 chapters, but now I have 5.
Which is still okay and relatively "short". As I said, my brain won't shut up.

But I'm really looking forward to drawing the story! I've grown so fond of Ranae and the other characters (which I'll show in a later post). At the moment I'm designing the environment. Where Ranae lives, her school, other places they hang out... that is NOT one of my strong points. Backgrounds are my nemesis, so it's going to take me a while, but I'm planning to start sketching the first chapter very soon.

Test pages, drafts and intermediate steps I will of course post here ^___^~