Tuesday, November 15th 2011 - 01:45AM :

Evil Ryu and Akuma. Plus thoughts about myself as an artist

This is an old collaboration from 2001. Pencils (Ryu)= Tong. Pencils (Akuma) & Inks= WebYoSan.

After checking out WebYoSan's Street Fighter fanart with cool design and well inked lines, I decided to do my bit and add some rendering. I was originally going to go for the normal Ryu, but decided his evil persona should be shown instead- he looks and plays better than the original anyway It was the first time I'd tried making use of the 'Multiply' and 'Screen' airbrush blend options. They can slightly increase the speed of CGing as it saves keep picking lighter/darker colour tones separately, but it can look more messy. I tried to overcome this messiness by later adding regular airbrush on top to smooth things over. In the end, the CG still took hours, but worth it! When approaching a CGing task (or any task in general!) it's often daunting and difficult to get started because I never know if it'll turn out well, but after I get stuck in and take my time, I usually manage to get decent enough results. However, there has been times in the past where I've started a CG or artwork and I just cant do it! I wonder if it's because what I'm doing is too hard for me, or if I'm just not in the right frame of mind. Luckily with colouring, if the line art is good, it inspires me to produce something on par.

10 years later and I did open up the original file to do a few colour corrections to bring it up a notch

Coloured using Photoshop 5.5
So why am I posting this now? And why not within the Art Gallery pages?

It's just I've spent all day looking through some of my older work. It's been nostalgic and fun to re-visit some of my earlier drawings and artworks

A third of my works are still here and viewable on OM. This Street fighter pic was pretty cool and lots of fun to collaborate on at the time but perhaps just not quite good enough (in my opinion) to showcase my colour abilities so I've kept it out the gallery. It looks cool now that I added more purplish colouring to it though. I've also been making a few corrections to my other works now that my skills have improved and I'm able to do so, or able to see flaws I couldn't when I first started.

Although I wonder by how much have my skills improved over the last 10 years (the time in which I've mainly been concentrating on my artwork, digital colouring skills and calling myself an artist- although at times a very amateurish one!)?

I've gotten better, for sure. My observational skills, anatomy, shading, colour knowledge, proportioning, perspective, technical skills etc. have all improved

Although I'm aware that despite having finished, perhaps 500 drawings, illustrations or CGs over the last decade it would be fair to say I'm still yet to reach a level of competency I feel is worthy of my efforts! It's not something I cry into my pillow at night over, but an interesting observation and leads me to suspect that if one's artwork isn't already at a decent enough standard by the time they're entering late teens and 20s, then it's not likely going to improve a drastic amount thereafter.

I wonder what other people's thoughts are on this?

An increase in ability is generally something that slows down as people get older- just look at really young kids that can learn to play musical instruments like pros after a year, while it would take an average 40 or 50 year old a year just to learn to play 'three blind mice'! Okay, not quite, but you get the idea

I wonder how this slowing down will effect my ability to produce artwork? I'm unlikely to get worse at least, which is good. My ambition to draw some amazing scene with characters all interacting from different, obscure angles AND all from memory and without reference AND within a short space of time may never be realized.

Perhaps thinking like this will prevent me from pushing myself by aspiring to achieve well beyond my current limits? Or perhaps this takes
the pressure off by allowing me to just focus on producing artwork within my own means; so know and accept that I will take huge amounts of time just to complete a single character drawing and knowing and accepting that I will likely need to use extensive photo reference material to get poses, backgrounds or accessories looking spot on etc.

Takashi writes:	Date Posted: 27:11:2011 Time Posted: 05:53AM
Good to see that you update this site again And I want to thank you so much that you linked my website ^^ It means so much for me.

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