Ginga custom pt. 13

I wish I could say I planned this out, but it was just a coincidence that my Ginga custom part 13 also happens to be the 13th post of this year. Woo, pointless numbers!

This time I chose to paint Benizakura! One of my favorite characters of the series. I don't know where exactly I'd place him on my list of favorite characters, I just know he belongs there somewhere.

I had this dog figure, on the belly side, it say's American bulldog. Yeah, I know it's far from a Tosa Inu Benizakura is supposed to be. The figure's snout isn't too squashed in so I thought it could work out.

The first order of business, I cut the figure's ears off. And then I used "the green stuff" to build some new ear stubs. This was the first time I used green stuff, it was pretty interesting. I was surprised how fast it hardened, so I had to sculpt those chewed off ears in a hurry.

After that little sculpting, while I was base painting the figure white, I accidentally dropped it on the floor. Of course the dog's left ear broke off. Luckily it didn't shatter or anything, so I was able to just glue it back in place. While I was at it, I mixed up some more green stuff and tweaked the shape of the ear a little.

I was using a new set of acrylic paints, and I wasn't really liking the way the paint was behaving. The biggest issue was that it wasn't opaque enough. I was a pain in the butt to have  to mix all those colors over and over again.

Painting those scars was really hard too. I used the smallest brush I had and still  those scars are too wide and blotchy. The dog has a lot of wrinkles in its face so it was a struggle to even get a straight line. I had reached the end of my patience with mixing those brown colors so once I got scars I was semi happy with, I just decided to let it be. 

Same goes for the eyes. I was struggling to get the other eye to look straight. I got it wrong so many times, I was about ready to throw the whole thing out the window. That's when I decided it was for the better to put the figure down and continue working on it the next day.

The collar is again made of folded masking tape and then painted. I'm not sure why my Benizakura turned up so glossy. I used the same matte varnish I've used on all my other dogs. Maybe it's the new paint I used?

Before & after

Benizakura is supposed to be this big and powerful dog, that illusion is broken when I place him next to my other customs.

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For the heck of it, while working on the figure I became inspired to do some fan art as well. I don't draw Ginga dogs that often so I used a reference picture for this. The red background is supposed to mimic those eyecatchers from the GDW anime. And the other just because I like a simple background.

Forgotten Fanart

All right, I'm just going to make this post a picture dump of some of my recent and not so recent drawings and whatnot. The oldest is from 2015 or maybe earlier and the most recent ones are from this year obviously. I didn't put them in any age order so they are very randomly listed below.

A bunny, a sketch for a present I was making for a friend. I used a figurine as a reference.

My Little Pony G4 styled pony persona? IDK.

Fan made Pokemon. In the Christmas calender event at Living in the Moving Forest  blog -"Invent your own Pokemon" prompt.

The Hama bead portrait of our horse I made for my mother as a birthday gift. Didn't turn out too great. I would have liked to use a brighter photo as the base, but I didn't have a better headshot of him. It didn't help that I ran out of 4 colors of beads while making it. I prefer the picture in the silver frame because of the bright colors. I made that one as well, like 7-8 years ago.

Dragonball Z. Unfinished drawings of Freeza and an OC Majin character.

My entry for Daria Cohen's Vampair Design Contest on Instagram. The characters are named Missi and Duke. I colored this in a hurry so there are mistakes in here that are bothering me now. Like that cane I didn't retouch at all, so you can see my only brown felt pen was drying and dying. Also, that uncolored dress part on Missi's shoulder is driving me nuts. Check her channel out!

Drew this Jason Voorhees as a Christmas (duh!) card for a friend.

From the Ring movies. I found that one WIP picture I had almost forgotten about in the depths of my tablet. For the colored picture I wanted to mimic that old school TV static you don't see anymore. I also made that plain, basic and dull background just in case I find the other one be too distracting.

At one point, when I got interested in Monster High dolls, I purchased the Monster High PS3 game "New Ghoul in School" when it was on sale. In the game you are allowed to create your own character from different monster classes. It is a kid's game so it's not really that in-depth or hard in any way. I was fun for a short while. Anyway, I made my character a ghost and named her Saya. And after browsing some other fan created MH character sheets, I made her a "skull logo" design and gave her a pet for a good measure, because that apparently it's a must thing for a Monster High character to have.

:::Moomin Art Contest:::

So here above are my entries to the Moomin art contest arranged by Yle.fi in 2019. No, I didn't win, but I'm happy I participated. I don't think I've done any Moomin drawings since my childhood, so it was a lot of fun. I drew five pictures and then colored them on the computer. Usually, when I'm coloring a picture it takes about 1-2 days for me to get it finished. This time, the deadline for entering was drawing near and I hadn't even started coloring any of the pictures. So I did the impossible, and colored all five pictures in one evening. Which seems really crazy now when I think about it. I admit I did cut every possible corner I could to be able to get them finished. I didn't clean the line arts thoroughly and I did color them as fast as possible. The only one I kind of like as it is, is the Snufkin & Little My one. Honestly, I should just re-color all of them, now when I don't have a deadline to keep.

The best part of this is that they highlighted one of my drawings on their website in their post about the contest results! Yay!

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I can't even remember drawing this Snufkin. Which isn't that surprising, I think I must have traced it from a children's book or something in order to be able to color it the way I like.

I'm pretty sure I used a reference picture of a regular Koga dog  when I drew this Kurojaki. I'm not comfortable drawing dogs at all or dogs in Yoshihiro Takahashi's style for that matter, because I'm terrible at it. For practise reasons, I used a ballpoint pen for the  line art instead of the marker pen I usually use. I also tried to follow a tutorial while I was coloring this, but I ended up improvising it anyway. 

Connor, from the game  Detroit: Become Human. This is my most recent drawing, hence a lot of WIP pictures. I liked my pencil drawing that much I didn't want to ink over it, so I improvised a light table to make a second drawing. The actual quote from the game goes "You can't kill me, I'm not alive." But since my drawing is a reference to this meme I had to change it up.

That's all for now!