I needed a break from Pitivi, Blender and Natron so, after falling down the YouTube rabbit hole, I decided to have a go at some Anime inspired art.  MIKEYMEGAMEGA has some great tutorials on YouTube and, as a Patron, I have access to his Tutorial Workpack. Excellent :-)

Now, as you'll know from an earlier post, I'm not very good at freehand drawing. I'm also working on my laptop - no mouse, no tablet and stylus - just a plain laptop touchpad for input. 

While on my travels around the wonderland that is YouTube, I'd followed the rabbit to a video of an artist producing some excellent art using Inkscape. I'm a big fan of open source and with a few clicks I had Inkscape installed on my Sabayon Linux laptop.

So what first?

Eyes.

I've never had much success with drawing eyes but, after reminding myself how to use Inkscape, I was able to quickly knock up the following pretty quickly.

Its ok. It has some of the basic Anime(ish) components to it.

One eye is ok but people tend to have two and that is where I really fall over - I just cannot get the aspect ratio right. But wait, I have a handy tutorial workpack courtesy of mikeymegamega. Now we're into the realm of using reference material and the workpack has a wonderful sheet with heads in different poses. I dragged one into an Inkscape layer and resized it. Now I can start to create a layer with some guidelines and eye positions.

That enabled me to create a set of eyes.

A touch of colour and I'm starting to approach something respectable. 

Even better, the eyes don't look half bad.

I grabbed a few images of the internet and used them as a reference for the body.

As a first stab at using Inkscape for producing art, I don't think I did too badly. Perhaps it is just beginners luck or, at 2am in the morning, I've just lost perspective :-)

I have started to work on another image, this time working from several references and putting far more work into guidelines, guide blocks, shading hints. Its far too early to tell if I'll produce anything of note. At this stage its all about practise, practise, practise.

What do you think? Want to see more? Want to see the process in more detail?