Behind the scenes + process: Akyuu

This post documents the process of an experimental piece done this year.

Inspiration

I am a fan of the video game series called Touhou Project. When I was in junior high school, I had the thought of making an illustration of Akyuu. At that time, the idea I had was for Akyuu to hold a book while listening to music from a gramophone; complete with a scene of Gensokyo in the background.

However, I felt that such a complex layout was too challenging for my skill set back then—not to mention the characters and phonograph in the foreground. Gensokyo in the background alone was already giving me no way to start. Therefore, this illustration was only stored in my mind as an idea.

After high school, I came across an illustration by Rockwell. It depicted a teenager in the foreground reading a book, and in the background, a knight embraced by the princess brings out the face of the teenager. I was impressed by the vague and realistic treatment of both the front and back scenes and the circular composition of the background.

I suddenly remembered the idea I had back in junior high when I was playing Touhou’s latest game (unconnected marketeers) at a friend’s apartment. Quite unintentionally, I discovered that I had improved enough to bring this ambitious idea to life. Hence, I embarked on the journey of illustrating this piece before the new school term began.

Sketch composition

The sketch is basically a continuation of my earlier concept, with Akyuu listening to music from the gramophone in the foreground and a Gensokyo background placed inside the circle in the distance. The circle composition is a reference to Rockwell's above illustration.

Reference Aids

I strained my hand a few months back and the hand injury still greatly affects the way my sketches turned out. Since I wasn’t able to work with my hands for a relatively long period of time, the brushwork was pretty rusty and i could hardly draw a nice shape with smooth lines. This painting involved several elements such as characters, props and scenes. I collected a large number of reference drawings after the draft was drawn to further aid me.

Similar to the painting process of Koto last month, I still took the lead to set up a rough model for light and shape reference.

The model's folds were still quite stiff, so I searched for the character's cosplay clothes again to understand the form of the folds in real photos.

Then came the prop’s photo reference. The gramophone is taken from a picture on the Internet, and the books are pictures I took myself with some on the shelf.

The background is decided to be presented in Ukiyo-e style with natural elements such as mountains, clouds, cherry blossoms and villages.

Contouring and shaping

Shape the lines according to the references. I wished to express a strong feeling of nostalgia through the illustration, so I closed the character’s eyes and made her hold the book closer to her body.

Fill in the inherent colors of the character & props.

Subsequently, the shaded area is drawn with both manual and automatic selection tools with the brush.

I skipped the draft & lineart steps since the phonograph and books were done with reference to the previous model.

Adding the natural color, the following picture is obtained.

Background selection

Although I had decided to lean towards ukiyo-e for the background and collected enough references, the gap between this and my usual drawing style was still really big, and it was difficult to learn it over time. The process is in a quandary here...

Then I thought, what if I use my usual auto-selection tool on Ukiyo-e? I took one of the images and tried it out, and found that the shapes generated by the selection on the Ukiyo-e were unexpectedly rich and interesting.

I selected a few more flowering branches from different ukiyo-e drawings and selected the area to extract some shapes.

Ukiyo-e style has a clear color block with an outer outline stroke, so by setting the auto-selection to the outer outline area of the lines of the Ukiyo-e, it will extract the outer part of the block shape again.

Then came some miscellaneous attempts to select mountains, meadows, rivers and clouds from different ukiyo-e paintings, and combine the extracted shapes so that they gradually form a picture.

(Still quite unexpected, I just want to select areas to find inspiration, I did not expect to be able to put out the painting...)

Character Refinement

I then merged the entire previous figure layer for further refinement. I shortened the length of Akyuu's hair, added some warm colors to the face, and enriched the shape of the folds more based on reference photos.

The refinement was incidentally done on the computer's SAI this time, so the shaping was not quite the same as usual.

Considering that the left side of the picture is relatively empty and the arrangement of objects and figures is rather dull, I added a sagging scroll on the left side and added red lines around the figures to adjust the composition.

The dormitory’s display is slightly chromatic; when I guided it back to the iPad I discovered that the color is a little dark. So I adjusted another version of color, slightly brightened the picture and added some cool tones.

The background colour has been changed and refined accordingly; with increased brightness and a blue gradient added to the sky to make the mountains seem cooler. I also changed some parts of the line art to a warm shade of orange to contrast with the cool tones added earlier—also making the background elements look fuller.

However, the cool color at the top of the image after the sky turned blue was a bit too attention-grabbing, and the left side of the picture still felt somewhat empty. I tried to add a green border to stabilize the composition of the image, and the red line was adjusted somewhat with the surrounding books.

Final Refinement Adjustment

I added patterns and highlights to the existing gramophone based on the previous references of the gramophone.

Part of the red line was added to the edge of the cuffs to enrich the pattern detail of the garment.

Finally, there are some more minor adjustments. For example, I added more patterns to the frame, enriched the arrangement of the red strings again, and actually added a white circle in the middle of the background of the Ukiyo-e to make the character part more prominent, etc.

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The entire illustration was not completed without a hitch. In order to balance my hand’s recovery with school work, I had to cut back on the time spent drawing so much that every time I put pencil to the screen, my hands were extremely disobedient and the creative process stumbled. But even so, it was completed! Applauding myself for not giving up so easily.

That’s all! Still sending thanks to my friend Valerie for helping me with the English translations. You're welcome to comment if you have anything to talk about!

See you next time!