Raika Mikata's Rift

Fish Concept Sketches - Color test

2009-09-29T15:27:00.000-07:00

Quick color test of two fishes for the Star Kissed painting. 'Nuff said.

Star Kissed WIP

2009-08-15T11:47:00.000-07:00

New wip! Using Lockstock's Windy Pack again. She has gorgeous work, do check her out!

To explain the process: I usually get a feel for the character in the sketch, but their personality always shines through when I begin painting. Who is she? Why is she holding out her skirts? For some reason as I was drawing her, the words "star kissed" crept into my working conscious, so I thought I'd apply that to this painting.

Challenges I've put for myself in painting:
- Multiple light sources! I still have to control which light source is most important and make sure they're not all attracting the eye at once.
- Different colored skin! I want to practice drawing skin with colors that are not normally found in the natural spectrum.
- Clouds again! But this time with the moon + glowing guardians and oh my Light source howamIgoingtofigureouthowthisworks
- Her skirts are of a lacy/see-through material (see reference) so this ought to be fun!

I'll probably make the canvas a little wider too to give the sky a little breathing room. The guardians/helpers/fish will have a redesign, just giving them the generic "koi" appearance for now for placement purposes.

I'm doing all of this in SAI... not photoshop! So I won't be using some tricks you digital PS artists are familiar with.

Requiem

2009-07-08T11:34:00.000-07:00

Character designed/compiled by Zaku with Soul Calibur 4 on the PS3.

Grecian Elf Process

2009-06-05T18:10:00.000-07:00

I love watching progression of pieces, so you'll find lots of such from me. Here's one I'm currently working on, from cleaned up sketch, to ink, to digital color. Sketch done on regular computer paper, inked with inking nibs, and painted in PaintTool SAI.

I'm gonna fix her sleeve more. I get ansty about fixing lineart because frankly it's not my strong suit, and frankly I can get lazy about things. There's tons of tiny mistakes with this, but hopefully it'll get better as I tweak it along.

Sketch dump

2009-06-05T02:12:00.000-07:00

So what have I been doing out of college? NOTHING. I've been taking my break from art I felt I had always needed, and it is helping tremendously.

Of course that means the drawings suffer a little too, but it just feels nice to be freer. I've decided to work on my traditional skills a little more, particularly with inking and lineart. I'm not great at either, so I figured I'd benefit from the practice.

Inked with inking nibs, save for the rather light one - that's ballpoint. MASSIVE "woops" on the pant leg there. I cried a little. FROM THE HEART, YO.

Digital ink. Oh, irony.

Sketches during jury duty. Some spiritual stuff + dancing stuff.

Andora, aka "Black Pearl". She's a courtesan. Created while listening to El Tango de Roxanne (Moulin Rouge version). It's a fantastic song. I hope to play with her costume a bit.

working ons

2009-03-09T02:24:00.000-07:00

a really bad WIP in photoshop, and 2 characters done in flash.

It's an undead monkey in a thong and.... I was going to have a smoking pigeon but our teacher recommended our characters looked blissful (a la Tex Avery) and I am having a hard time picturing any smoker looking blissful. I'm thinking about turning his hat into an afro and turning his clothes to a jump suit of sorts.

Current WIPS

2009-01-18T03:45:00.000-08:00

Some current WIPs. All of these were sketched with red pencil then taken to PaintTool SAI.

Dance-Off Practicum

2008-12-11T00:01:00.000-08:00

Scene 1 of "Dance Off" (title pending), a part animation, part animatic I did for Practicum. I'm planning on reworking some of this (timing fixes, coloring black and white parts, etc.) over winter break. Next semester is finishing the damn thing and being able to say, yes, I animated this!!! :)

Miss Clara V

2008-11-27T00:49:00.001-08:00

Sort of based on a friend. I wasn't sure about color choice so I borrowed the general color scheme from Heather (from Silent Hill 3); it seemed fitting since my friend is a big SH fan.

Otis Sketch Dump

2008-10-04T22:04:00.000-07:00

Some motion sketches.

The rest of these sketches were done for Drawing the Fantastic.

Halloween Window Painting

2008-10-04T21:06:00.000-07:00

Participated in Otis' Halloween Window Painting contest. I wasn't actually part of the original team but I wanted to volunteer, so I helped out Moni and Nicole (two of my classmates) with their design.

I think we did remarkably well despite the given factors:

1. It started to rain when the base colors were being applied. It was also really cold; not exactly the best of conditions.
2. We were right next to the airport. it's a miracle our ears didn't start bleeding from the engines flying directly above our heads.
3. Occasional gusts of wind from both the weather and airplanes blew our materials that weren't heavy enough across the sidewalk, most of which were empty water bottles and paint-mixing plates.
4. Our materials were not especially of desired quality (paint was either too thick or too watery, brushes were tough to work with, etc.) and one of my teammates lost the paintbrush she brought from home to specifically work on it.

Our painting is close to the airport, so if you're driving from LAX you'll be able to see it.

Like Clockwork and The Spirit Animal

2008-09-23T22:19:00.000-07:00

A sort of self portrait without reference.

...100% sure that doesn't look anything like me.

This picture is dedicated to my deviousness that I have hidden for a majority of my life but am letting it show more often... mostly through the suggestions of running down pedestrians, kicking puppies, and coming up of ways to mess with people psychologically. Oh yeah~. 8D

I did a test run for color and imagined the background to be a sort of a mid-gray-brown with the gears a dark brown (because I'm stupidly thinking of steampunk stuff). I named it Like Clockwork in reference to the workings of my own mind.

I was reading a book with a section on guardian spirits and this image popped into my head. The colors aren't quite right (should be more saturated and orange/golden) but I'll redo 'em later.

What really struck me the most was that his face reminded me of the God of the Forest from Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke." The eyes were very wide and it seemed as if he was always smiling. Like the God, he doesn't really talk but says all that he needs to say in his motionless face. (Which, frankly kind of weirded me out, especially with the wide eyes.)

A very odd creature. I enjoyed drawing him. His face was difficult to do because although it struck me as a deer at first, I couldn't shake the fact he felt more like a lion than anything.

Houses for the Peacock

2008-09-20T01:38:00.000-07:00

I sketched various ways houses that might be constructed by the Peacock character in the Jay and Peacock story. Most of the time I didn't like the one I just drew and thus moved onto the next idea. I kept the flower/firefly lamp idea from the previous sketches and applied them here as well.

It finally dawned on me that the peacock might not actually want to live in a stump - so old and musty in there. So I started drawing his house on top of a tree stump rather than in it. Unfortunately it was at this point I was getting tired of drawing houses I didn't like and sort of putted out of gas.

Color erase sketches

2008-09-16T10:57:00.000-07:00

Yeah, that's right. A dolphin blade. And a shasmir/machete/long blade (which is ironically not long enough) thing. *rock signs* Will be using this for my Pixel ID on deviant art because I need a new ID D:/

Sketches for one of my classes. I was toying with the punk fashion of the 70's and combined it with other fashions. I think I'll end up doing a lineart of a punk steampunk western gang. It's gonna be extra oodles of fun. :D I'll post up the sketches to that when I'm done with 'em.

Some older sketches

2008-09-12T20:07:00.000-07:00

Some sketches I did over the summer. I like the lighting in the first one, so I'll probably reproduce it at some point in the future.

Jay and Peacock Sketches

2008-09-11T19:26:00.000-07:00

Some sketches I did for my Drawing the Fantastic class. We were asked to draw the two birds from the Aesop fable of the Jay and the Peacock.

For the birds, I toyed with stereotypes and tried to imagine what it would be like if the peacock was a pompous refined "gentleman" while the jay was a sort of middle-man wanna-be whom tried to copy the peacock, right down to the dress. I tried making the Jay a little fatter (with quite a bit of chin) and even included some bird "stubble" for effect.

For the 2nd drawing our teacher asked us to imagine what their homes would be like. I figured the jay would probably live in a very round, cute house made with materials that he might have found in the forest, and so for the first drawing I gave him a birch-bark porch and a roof made of twigs. I added some lamps that were actually flowers with fireflies in them.

The 2nd concept derived more from the birch bark idea, and so I made from a base bird's nest a lotus/flower shaped house made purely from bark. I figured he'd want something soft to sleep on and so added flower petals and downy feathers. On his front "door" he has two peacock feathers, the symbol of his false pride. I liked my lamp idea from before and tried to embellish it again in the 2nd drawing, this time adding acorns with water inside as pots.

The 3rd drawing didn't get very far, but the basic idea was that the Jay's entire house was made of peacock feathers that he found.

Once I finish the peacock house drawings I'll post 'em up.

Peacock Cloak

2008-09-07T19:52:00.000-07:00

I was researching some peacock pictures for class and found something I thought was really cool.

Rather neat, interesting and very inspiring! Original Post here.

Sketches and some dancing pandas

2008-08-30T10:40:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Raika Mikata's art blog. I've been doing some sketching and wanted to share some with the big bad world. I have some issues with self confidence so maybe by doing regular updates I'll be able to rid myself of some old fears.

Here are a couple of sketches I've done a while ago. I really enjoyed drawing the dancing pandas, so hopefully we'll see more of them.