Here is an experimental article; as I might do more artist focus in the future. I don’t expect their content to be always the same. Il will certainly depends of the material I have at hand and my knowledge. I have acquired Let’s Make Character CG 2 month ago, but as you could expect from the title, this is no artbook. So how will I review this book which certainly doesn’t fall in the artbook category? In term of illustration, there is only 3 new one in this book, certainly for the explanation. So instead of reviewing the book itself, I will dig inside Shimeko‘s artstyle as I flip through the pages of this book as she has a truly unique artstyle which I appreciate very much. I have limited skills when it comes to drawing and coloring, but I hope this will also help people who are learning, as I’m filling this article under the “Learning to draw” tag. The new illustrations are processed and saved in PNG, the rest is raw resized JPG. [PNG: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4]

Shimeko start first with a sketch, drawn on paper, then she ( because it’s always better when the artist is female even though I don’t know! ), ink in Photoshop. I won’t comment much this part, but the sketch doesn’t have a lot of details, so most of them are drawn during inking.

The coloring is really what makes Shimeko’s style unique. She first start by giving a general look of the skin color. Also it seems like she already gives some substance to the eyes by using a gradient. As a noob in coloring, I know also that a lot of people make this mistake: they start to color in detail one part of the body, leaving the rest blank. This is also true for sketch and lineart; but having seen some step by step explanation from some artist. I think they all give a general feeling of the illustration color scheme. This is certainly an important step as it determines the contrast type, the color coherency and of course, the general feeling of the image.

The book also have some technique, apart from the step by step explanation. Here we have Shimeko’s coloring stroke. The first one is an hard brush with varying size, like ink; the second is like an airbrush, and the last one is more like watercolor, with varying opacity. While I have an idea how to do ink and watercolor with the pen pressure setting, I’m not sure for the airbrush as it looks more diffusing than the default soft brush in Photoshop with dynamic size.

Of course, the lineart doesn’t remain plain black with most artists, as the surrounding color has an effect on the visual perception and in fact, the black will no longer look black. Shimeko used brown here for eyes lashes, and all other the stroke.

Then, Shimeko do a basic shading of her illustration. At this stage it looks already quite like a digital drawing, without much details left to add; but she doesn’t have this digital style and in fact, her coloring as people know s rather soft and painting like. The first step in this magic is certainly her light casting. Objects reflect light and give certain shade to other element. It’s the case here for leaves and strawberries.

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To finish her artwork, Shimeko makes a copy of her artwork, then apply a gausian blur and modify the fusion mode and opacity. The difference isn’t so visible in the book as the images are a bit small. Then she adds the frills to the dress. As it’s simple frills, she draw them by hand and lastly, she modify the curves. Once again, I can’t tell the visual difference, but here is the finish artwork.

The book has 2 more illustrations with their step by step coloring. The process is bit different for these 2 but I won’t get in details. At the end of the book, there is also 2 other illustrations, but they are already on the Internet, either in digital form or as a scan. Ultimately, this book is really nice if you want to learn Shimeko’s style, and if you do understand Japanese as it’s not easy to get anything from the images. I also hope that I will be able to do more of these focus in the future.