Enji Night | adamphan

Enji Night Digital Painting

For this project I decided to create a painting based on a photograph of a very popular cosplayer named Enji Night, dressed as a Yoko Littner a character from the anime Gurren Lagann.

I wanted to take my digital painting skills further by studying from a real life photograph and creating a modern/manga style version of the image as a digital painting through my line art and detailed colour refinement process.

I created this painting during my Christmas holidays and the result of the final image has impressed me as the detail I put into the face and skin tones appear realistic and blend well with the fusion of the manga style hair and clothing colours as I took reference from art of Yoko Littner.

Enji Night is a cosplayer from Hungary, with over 279K fans, and has added my painting to her favorites and "FanArt" collection on her Deviantart profile.

The original photograph of Enji Night cosplaying as Yoko Littner can be found here.

Stage 1 - Line art

Since I am studying from a real life photograph for this project I wanted to ensure I had clean line art that I could work on that will mark out the body and features of Enji Night. With the photograph not having any black lines I had to lower the opacity of the photo and create a new layer above in which I would draw and trace out the figure and draw in small details that are not visible due to photo quality such as the zip on the neck cloth.

With the painting being a manga/realistic fusion of the photograph, I had to minimize the amount of solid black lines and detail on the line art.

I experimented with the contrast and exposure levels to create a black and white image of the photograph that reveals that darkest areas and lines on the photo so that the process for drawing the refined line art would be easier and consistent, rather than making up random lines and creases in cloth material.

Stage 2 - Colour and Refinement

Once I had the final line art drawn out, I applied the base colours based on references of the art of Yoko Littner as this would allow me to achieve suitable and default colours for the character instead of colour picking the colours from the photograph.

The first areas I added detail to were the simple features such as the bracers, bra and head accessories. I mainly used the default hard paintbrush and airbrush to complete this painting as using a large airbrush allows me to blend a dark or light colour into the base colour since the spread of the airbrush will blur the colours.

For each area of Enji Night I coloured, the layer that would take priority above would be the dark layer, so that layers underneath I could paint over with ease such as the pants, I could easily paint the lighter tones without creating any disruption with the black tones above.

Stage 3 - Details and Refinement

The most detailed part of this painting was the face of Enji Night as I constantly checked the original photo to compare where the light and dark tones would be, using an orange skin colour to mark the shadow areas near the nose and under the hair followed by lighter patches of the skin colour on the inner areas of the face such as the cheek and forehead.

Using a very dark skin tone for the outer areas of the head allowed the colours to all blend and focus together when zoomed out, as the dark fades into lighter shades. I balanced the light shades on the skin with the rest of the body by using a 30% opacity airbrush and white skin colour, slowly painting above the face so that the orange skin colour I used would gently fade into the peach skin tone.

For the hair, I followed the line art and applied a dark red airbrush along the lines with pink shades on the opposite side as this relates to the manga version of Yoko Littner, with the light pink pattern across the front part of her hair.

Once I had repeated the colouring details of airbrushing and layering of Enji Night, I compressed all the layers together and added an outer glow effect to Enji Night so that the glow would outline her figure with the pink/cream coloured background I created using the gradient tool, with white glimmer effects from a custom paintbrush to add towards an attractive and relaxing mood with the painting.