San | A Princess Mononoke Fan Art

My initial and main reason for getting into drawing was because I wanted to do fan arts. I like imagining different scenarios of books, movies, and most importantly, anime. Then I want to turn these imaginations to something more visual.

The last time I drew an anime fan art was June, in celebration of the completion of the manga, Demon Slayer. The fan art was of Shinobu Kocho. I realized that I really do love drawing anime and wanted to create more fan arts. At the time, I was watching Princess Mononoke for the very first time.

I said before that I finally had a "formula" when drawing with MediBang Paint for Android, but for this work, I deviated.

And it was uncomfortable.

Drawing San

San, also known as the titular Princess Mononoke, was a wolf girl. She acts like one for she was raised by and lived with wolves.

At first, I wanted to do a draw this in your style (DTIYS). I ended up with a sketch based on a certain scene from the movie, then I completely forgot about it until a few weeks later, when I really wanted to draw an anime fan art.

The second time around, I went with something that is true to anime style. And something that didn't have reference. But it looked weird, because I'm not really one to draw something dynamic. I was about to fix it though, but while looking through Pinterest for references, I found a fan art that looked so similar to what I had sketched. So I canned the second attempt.

The third and last time (which was literally last night), I decided I wanted something simple, like the first one. This had no reference except for, well, the Princess Mononoke character, and I'm not even sure it resembled one like her. But I liked it in the end!

Lines

I had recently come across the artist Marc Brunet on Youtube, and I loved his tutorials! Perhaps it had to do with how he has such a good talking voice. I bumped into his video How to color your drawings (in any software), and I was intrigued!

I wondered if his tutorial would work on mobile apps, and I had to try. This Princess Mononoke fan art was the perfect opportunity to try, I thought.

Brunet listed down 6 steps:

lines
flat colors
shading
tint/reflections
lights
polish

He made it a point to say that the lines should look a little clean, and my initial sketches definitely weren't. So I drew again for something cleaner.

Flat colors and shading

In another layer below the lineart, I started laying down the flat colors. It was easy, because San had very uniform colors (if that makes sense).

Still following through Brunet's tutorial, I duplicated the flat colors layer and turned the whole layer white. I did this in MediBang by adjusting the brightness all the way to the maximum, and the saturation to the minimum. Then I changed the blending to multiply.

Then the challenging thing came: the shading. He was so good at it! He said that there was nothing wrong in using black for shading, so that's what I did. Kinda.

It was difficult, and I had to cheat my way by changing opacity. I'll make it a point to visit Brunet's shading tutorial one of these days.

Tint/reflections, lights, and polish

At this point, I was so confused. I felt like the video sped up way too much and I couldn't follow through. So yup, the tint/reflections and lights part?

Winged it. Till I somewhat make it.

On the other hand, I tried to put a lot of effort into the polish part. I was dying to scrap the whole thing halfway through (during the shading part), but I really felt bad about the effort. I was actually recording the whole thing but had to scrap the video because there were way too many bloopers, editing will be such a drag.

Finally, I edited the colors using Snapseed again.

Details

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

Notes

Aaand that's it. I think I'd enjoy doing the steps Marc Brunet laid down if were working on desktop versions of drawing apps, like Photoshop. But that's just a maybe, because I now know I really suck at shading.

For someone who loves watching Studio Ghibli films, I sure miss out on a lot. If you do watch Studio Ghibli films, what's your favorite?

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