Originally I didn’t plan to make a post out of it, just some analysis for me to learn, but here we go again, digging into an artist style and technique. First I don’t own any piece of art by Kishida Mel, I know him through scans. Some may have seen the video where he draws on his Cintiq; I’m providing a slowed down version so that you can appreciate more his hand movements and his techniques. Artist are skilled, some more than other. Kishida Mel has impressive skills.

Roughly ( since I can’t translate Japanese ), Kishida Mel started by randomly drawing, then went to college design, dropped out, and put his work online and got spotted. So he does illustration for magazine, light novel, anime character design, and certainly most known recently for his work on the Atelier serie.

Kishida Mel, judging by his drawing video, did a lot of work on paper before moving to a digital environment. He started digital art on image board, so no pressure control, and with a mouse. He switched to a tablet, the Intuos 2 and with Painter 7, he could  finally enjoy the pressure control of his pen. He upgraded to the Intuos 3, Intuos 4, and finally the new Cintiq21 UX pen-screen which is simply the best at the moment. Also, he switched from Painter to SAI, and using Photoshop for some final editing.

His computer is overkill, with a Core I7@2.66ghz, 12GB of RAM, and a secondary 23″ screen. I’m not sure of what he can do with 12GB since he use SAI. As it’s only a 32bit software, it can only use up to 2GB of RAM.
Now the technique. As I said, here is a slowed down video. Initially, at 3 times the real speed, I had to put the speed at around 40% of this speedy video. It’s a little bit faster than reality, but the movement will look more fluid than if I tried to put it at the real speed.

His style is quite soft, with little hard shadow. The color he uses are desaturated, he doesn’t use vivid one. Well, let’s see how he does.

Sketch and inking

Kishida Mel use SAI’s pen tool, with the second hardness tip. His movement is mostly hand/wrist because he dezoomed quite a lot the canvas. In fact, you won’t see him zoom nor rotate/mirror much at all which shows the precision of his movement. Sketch is a bit see-through for anatomy, but that’s all.
Inking is done with 2 different type of movement. For most line, he will use a single fast stroke, and if it’s not good, CTRL+Z. Then, for adjusting the thickness of his line, he makes several stroke where he wants them to be thicker. Some hard shadow are done during the lineart instead of the coloring.
Finally, while the lineart is black, he adds a layer to color it in brown.

Coloring

For coloring the character, he only use 1 layer. He doesn’t really bother with layer management which makes me think that he has colored previously on paper. White color is provided by the canvas.

His SAI has no color set in the color swatch, they are all picked from the color wheel. He use a brush to color, and mix the color directly on the canvas, then pick them up directly on the canvas. While coloring, the color and the size of his brush changes quite often. I would say that it’s a technique similar to the one used in painting, but I don’t have much knowledge in traditional media.
He only use the brush tool to color; I can’t see the settings, but it seems to be set rather low as he can put a light blue color on black without it turning quickly grey. Also, I wonder what is his pressure control setting. It doesn’t seems like it controls size, which would explain the regular change of brush size. At the end, he cast some light by using the softest tip.

End

For reference, I used:

• The video
• Atelier Rorona & Totori artbook scans
• Interview

It’s not always that I can get enough material to see an artist technique, but I hope I will get more for someone else.

Finally something a little bit more interesting in the learning curve. Creating original art is the only way to know how much you have improved. It’s also the moment you can be happy because you are not copying anyone. Here is a first batch of original illustration I did.

Usually, I keep all my bad drawing for inking… When I ink a sketch, it looks worse than the pencil sketch, so here is one inking. At day 2, I just got the head kinda right.I also tried some chibi drawing, but it’s a failure as well. I’m disappointed in some of these original, but after a few days, there are also some for which I’m satisfied. One thing I started to use to get the ratio right is my left thumb, which acts like a ruler.

The top drawing is really the first one I liked. I decided to try to color it in Photoshop to start. Inking was done using the pen tool, to help me making curve, otherwise there is no line smoothing unlike SAI. I also made some adjustment to some line, like the fingers which are now longer, to make her hand less puffy. I also used the drawing from my hand training to help me.

I didn’t follow any tutorial for most things, I just tried to copy what I saw in other colored artwork. However, there is 2 colorings methods used there for the skin. All the upper part of the body were colored, my own interpretation of shading. Doesn’t look so good contrary to the part below her t-shirt which simply looks more like traditional coloring. The difference is that there is a lot less shading than what I first thought. The arms have a lot of gradient, but the waist only use 2 colors!
The hair, are very hard. I think I will just mix vector in the future to make them.

Also, after time, you realize that there are plenty of defects. For self criticizing, I think it’s important to give ourselves some time, just to put aside all the excitement. And also, the image is cropped, because there are see through skirts and pantsu

Drawing hand is hard. In fact, during the first few day, I hided them so that I don’t have to draw them. But it’s needed, so I had some specific training for it. As reference, I used some art here and there, and my hand.

I think that the most important things to remember when drawing hands, is the fact that finger are so close that they hide a part of each other. In short don’t do like in my first drawing above. There is only one which I copied from Dengeki Hime, the cut finger one.

This second set is a little bit better. Fingers are a bit chubby and not long enough to make beautiful girl’s hand. They are all original. I also drew one of my favorite pose when I think, on the left. Under this angle, you can see that the palm also have some stroke. For these two pages, I mostly took model of my hand. While it’s not good for proportion, it’s really a great way to know where goes each stroke.

6 days later, another training sequence for the hand. This time it’s for the cute pose and female hand. It’s quite important also for the nails. Previously I drew them completely, but it shouldn’t.Aside of copying, there is also some pose without reference, the closed hand, for girls when they are angry. There is little to be changed for holding an object.

Time to start the series of article on my project to learn drawing. I’m currently stuck at the 15th days sadly. It’s time consuming, and I don’t have much time thanks to college. But I will write the articles on my progression. The article might not follow the chronological order or my drawing. I decided to split them into subject which are relevant to my training. I will also provide the experience I learned. It’s the point of view of someone who is slowly progressing. My advice aren’t one of a pro, and in fact, might not be the best solution, but at my level, it’s the best I can do.

I think that everyone started from that point. Every artist copied someone else before. In art college, people copy as well. Copying is the first step in learning drawing I think. The aim is not to perfectly draw, but understand the line and construction of the drawing. Moreover, it’s an easy way to improve since as an exercise, there is already the correction available. For this exercise, I started first by using a lightbox, but then, I just drew side by side.

So the first 3 days were copies of several drawing I had in stocks, mostly from my collection of Dengeki Hime. I encountered several problem while doing so. The first one is the fact that they were in color, and I’m begining with lineart, so it has been quite hard. Second things is proportion, which is not easy to retain.

On the other hand, I learned hair design, and I also learned the basic proportion for the face. Hair are usually drawn as bangs, and on the face, it covers at least half of the front, and can overlay the eyes. For long hair, there is 2 layers for the hair, one around the head, and another one for the long hair.

After the copy of the magazine, I decided to try to copy another lineart, and I tried one of Tinkle, Shuna from Magical Tail, a new drawing which was in the a small booklet bundled with Byakuya Chakai. By copying this one, I learned some new things by auto criticizing myself.

I failed the face, sadly. The shape is too long, and so is the eyes. Tinkle’s eyes are much rounder. On the other hand, I did adopt partly the ways they draw the eyes in black and white. It just needs to be rounder, and that’s what I did on the day 4. Also, I got some basics at shading. When you don’t have screentone, you can colorize like you would do with color pencil, but here I learned the hashing technique, which use interval between line to set the tone. I quite like this, and it’s possible to cross hashes, but it’s harder.

Day 0

This is a personal project which I started one week ago and in which I will try to learn drawing, and I fixed the goal in 3 weeks! Sometimes people wish they could draw like one artist or another, or just manage to draw something better than a stick figurine. So I will try to improve my poor drawing skill that you can see in those 3 weeks.

To accompany me on this quest for improvement, I will use these:

• Faber-Castell eraser, a very good eraser that doesn’t leave much dust nor pencil stroke
• Faber-Castell mechanical pencil, loaded with an HD 0,5mm. Particularity is the automatic mechanism for the nib; one push on the button is enough, the nib will move automatically.
• Sakura Pigma Micron set, for inking. It’s a set of marker, going from 0,05mm to 0,8mm.
• Wacom Intuos4 M. I decided to get this one. Aside of drawing, it does help me for a lot of task.
• Paint Tool SAI, drawing software used by most artists, for good reason ^^

And this is not enough to learn. Some people doesn’t want to get monochrome doujinshi, but I have finally found some use for them.Here is all the reference book. Mostly black and white doujin, or some color one featuring them. 2 of them are hentai for anatomy studying and there is a stack of Dengeki Hime, for more anatomy reference, and plenty of artstyle, pose. Also, some online tutorial were used during the first week.

Being already on the 9th day… I can say that I have quite improved so we will see this in later posts.