Sakura Who?

Hello all,

so yeah I've put the previous 'Evil Sakura' piece on hold for now to focus on new subject matter. Why? Well it's just one of those artistic situations where I'll look at a piece long enough and spot one or two problem areas that I wanted to tackle. And over time those one or two small areas wound up giving birth to a problem with the whole piece. I may just wind up scraping it and doing another rendering of the character, that's how off put I am about it.

Painting is one area that I just don't excel in. In high school I dreaded having to do paintings with oils, acrylics, water color, etc. With the mixing/consistency of the colors to the different blending techniques, canvases and don't forget the plethora of brushes you can choose from...bah humbug!

As for digital painting, however, all those headaches are a distant memory. With my buddy Photoshop, I have an infinite amount materials at my disposal. I've dabbled with Photoshop painting in the past but was put off by the lame results I was getting. Fast forward to recently where I've acquired a neat set of brushes thanks to a fellow colleague of mine. Having them along with a lot of patience things started to come together.

Naruto (above) started out as a real quick sketch I did to get myself into the character. At first it was supposed to remain, just that, a 'quickie' for me to throw some color on and post, but after two days it wound up being more than that as you can see.

In the end I'm semi satisfied with the results. Considering most of my line art quality from the original sketch was stodgy at best. It was a great learning experience and I look forward to future paintings.