Golden Hour | Drawing with the Note 10+

Your girl is in her anime fan girl mode today. Since yesterday, I had been binge watching Bleach on Netflix. Today, I think I managed around a dozen episodes in between doing work.

While I really do enjoy shounen anime more than any other genre, I indulge myself to some funny and or romantic shoujo and slice of life. When talking about anime and manga, we can't simply miss talking about anime girls in sailor uniforms. That seems to be quite popular, apparently (cough - Sailor Moon - cough), even in real life.

A few months back, I found this photo in Pinterest and was literally reminded of shoujo anime. I was meaning to draw it back then, but I wasn't confident. There were a lot of things about it that were stopping me from drawing it. The most profound was that I wasn't confident of my skills yet.

Today, I finally drew her. I was under the impression that I had been slowly improving, and I wanted to really see it for myself by drawing a reference that I was so scared trying a few months ago.

Drawing Golden Hour

To get to the mood of drawing this, I was listening to summertime in loop. It has an upbeat, anime-ish feels to it, so I was really energetic working on this.

The reference was of a girl with shoulder-length hair in dark sailor uniform, basked in the setting sun. It was I think a really nice photograph, except that I really had the nagging feeling that it was difficult to draw and paint.

Unlike in my previous works lately, where I would fill in all flat colors before adding further details, I did everything here one at a time. I wanted to focus drawing the hair most especially.

Drawing the hair had always been this way for me:

• flat colors
• watercolor brush for highlights and stray hair
• pencil tool for strands

But I would do it haphazardly, not specifically minding accuracy. This time, I wanted to at least try. I took a lot more time drawing the hair than the rest of the drawing. I think it paid off in the end! I liked it.

What I wasn't proud of was the badge on her left chest side. That was made of illegible scribbles, I can't bear to even look at it. It was a good thing I had to blur it with Gaussian blur at the end.

The background was painted with the watercolor brush. It isn't exactly nice, but I'd take it (it was blurred down, too, anyway).

Details

• Device: Samsung Galaxy Note 10+
• Apps:
  • MediBang Paint for Android
• Brushes: watercolor (at varying opacity settings); pencil (100% opacity); blur

Notes

And that's it for today! I thought she was really pretty, but I always thought that the reference would be difficult to draw. In a way, it was! I think it was the sunlight glaring right on her face that made it difficult for me. What do you think though? My favorite here is her hair!

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