Author: Robin

For this week’s Industrious Illustrating, I want to share a painting I did as concept art for a fantasy visual novel idea I had. The painting itself isn’t done yet, but it’s in a finished enough state that I can show it to others . This is the Palace of Spades, which is a magical fusion of a Huaxia palace and an Albion castle. It floats above a deep pit in the middle of the capital city of Longjing/Sigillum — the two names given to the city by different populations of inhabitants.

The regions of Huaxia and Albion are loosely inspired by Ancient China and by medieval England, though the story takes place when the world is on the cusp of technological and societal change. After all, it’s almost been a thousand years since the Kingdom of Spades was founded by four heroes from Huaxia and Albion uniting their people to seal away the Great Leviathan, and the magical seal on the Great Leviathan is about to break. It’s now up to the current generation of Spades Royals to defeat Spades’s greatest threat once again…

To create this painting, I heavily referenced real-life pavilions, castles, and buildings for the architecture of the Palace of Spades. I’m still making more concept art and illustrations for this storyline, so I may end up sharing more of it when they’re finished!

Honestly, I’m not the proudest of this comic. I didn’t have the time to properly render or correct some of my drawings, so I would like to redo some of the pages if I ever posted these on my social media or printed them into a mini book. But for those who have been following along with my column, this comic is the result of the AEIOU (Activities Environments Interactions Objects Users) sketches I made a few weeks ago for Drawing Visualization. Yes, there’s a lot more to Toshiaki’s story than what I told in these six pages; I intend to eventually draw more comics that will tell his full story.

—

Also, thank you to everyone who stopped by my Artist Alley booth at Con Ja Nai in the MLB last Saturday! I managed to sell a decent amount of my prints and also had a lot of good conversations with the people who stopped by my booth. I look forward to attending more conventions and art fairs in the future!

Hello, and welcome back to another week of Industrious Illustrating! This week, I’m sharing some background paintings I made for the UMich anime club’s visual novel (interactive choose-your-own adventure video game made up entirely of cutscenes) project about three girls piloting big robots in space and falling in love with each other along the way. But the focus of these three backgrounds is less on the girls and more on setting a scene for the drama and action unfolding in the storyline.

For this background, I wanted to make an asteroid field that looks like a somber, quiet place where two people can have a conversation in the vacuum of space. The blue-grey color palette and lonesome star illuminating the dust clouds were selected for this purpose.

For this background, I wanted to make a desolate, empty desert where the dark sky, winding sand dunes, and distant mountains create a landscape where you can have a heart-to-heart with someone you didn’t actually know very well.

And this is just a regular starry background for any conversations, fights, etc. that happen while crossing the open expanse of space.

That’s all the background art I have to share this week, but that’s not the end of this post!

As a reminder, I’m selling artwork at Con Ja Nai tomorrow, which is UMich’s one-day anime convention in the Modern Languages Building, from noon to 6 PM! There will be a bunch of other artists and vendors also selling in the building, alongside a maid cafe, panels, anime showings, and more. My booth (Table A2) will look something like this.

I hope to see you guys there! If not, I hope you’ll stick around for more Industrious Illustrating as the semester draws to a close!

For the past few weeks, I’ve spent several late nights in the Digital Print Lab at Stamps watching the inkjet printers spit out pretty pieces of paper at an agonizingly slow pace. Why is that? Well, I’m planning on selling prints of my artwork at Con Ja Nai, which is the one-day anime convention held at UMich in the Modern Languages Building on April 9th this year. There’s many freelance illustrators who make a living off of selling their artwork at craft fairs or conventions, but for now I’m just selling my art as a fun side gig.

Anyway, I printed my favorite pieces onto 8.5 x 11″ and 11 x 17″ pieces of Epson Enhanced Matte Paper or Epson Luster Photo Paper so that they’ll look great hanging on someone’s wall someday.

However, the prints came out of the printer with white borders around them, so I had to trim the white borders off with a paper cutter. Some of my designs were also more suitable to smaller print sizes, so I printed multiple on a single sheet of paper and then cut them down to size by hand.

After being cut down to size, I’m currently storing them in a plastic bin that doubles as a display rack.

I package every print in a resealable clear plastic bag that also has one of my business cards in it. This protects the print from dust and damage while also letting the customer and passerby look at the art they just purchased. Also, I’ve had a few bad experiences with purchasing art at conventions and not receiving it in a plastic sleeve, so the nice art gets dented and damaged before I can put it on my wall, so I want to avoid doing that to anyone else. 🙁

I’m looking forward to meeting other artists and nerds at Con Ja Nai next month! Perhaps one of my future posts will go into how I design and order factory-produced merchandise that rounds out the rest of my sales stock, or perhaps I will go back to posting about my artistic process… Stay tuned!