Realized my one year dream of drawing Sakuma in the stage costume of AKB48's tragic love song between two men, Zankoku na Ame (Cruel Rain). I checked the performance video because of the premise, and it stays in my heart for the good song and the costume.
Un-fun fact about this song: this song is sang by AKB48 and its sister groups: NGT48 (Niigata) aka the first version of the song, CGM48 (Chiang Mai, Thailand), and JKT48 (Jakarta, Indonesia); and Indonesia's version is the only one to change the relationship between the singer characters to a het one... which as an Indonesian, is disappointing but not surprising
For this drawing I tried to render more loosely and sketch using lasso fill tool, and instead of eyeballing the color I used greyscale + gradient map + blending modes. The result is that I drew much faster! Back then this scale of drawing would take 12 hours the fastest but I managed to only take 9 hours with this method. I did a lot of tweaking particularly with the values of the color to keep the composition balanced. And it's a pro tip: if the colors feel off, it's likely either 1. the values are off or 2. the color composition isn't at 60:30:10.
I always admire arts with painterly style, particularly the ones where you can see mess and blobs when zoom in it, so I tried to draw this work that way here. Overall while I'm not necessarily proud of the end result, I am proud of my more refined workflow. For next art, I plan to adapt another Jpop queer love song, Good Times and Tan Lines by SUPER DRAGON which is a group I've been really liking lately (I'm experiencing idol renaissance rn). I want to make a simple MV with Kisaku.. it has been a while since my last Kisaku art
