One of my favourite artists of all time (which you can probably glean from the fact I'm going back to Dorohedoro) is Q. Hayashida... So I thought I'd share some of the work I did a few years ago when I did artist studies of her! I did art at both GCSE and A-Level, and I actually did studies of her work for both. This post will be a bit of a chronological walkthrough of the studies I did.
At GCSE, my focus was on her linework, especially since it was just before lockdown. I didn't end up doing any painting for the final GCSE project, and did it almost entirely digitally with some pencil elements. (My three main artist studies were Hayashida, Yusuke Kozaki and Tatsuki Fujimoto, and I brought in some smaller studies of Soeda Ippei, Tawaraya Sotatsu, Ken Sugimori, David Vandervoort, Sesshu Toyo and Jamie Hewlett, among others. I was very prolific!) I was fortunate that it was 2020 and I had the freedom to practice art that lockdown gave me, in many ways. I received a 9 as my teacher-assessed grade -- for anyone unfamiliar with the GCSE grading system, that's equivalent to an A++. We didn't sit a final exam, so it was entirely portfolio/coursework-based.
First, this (I believe shamelessly traced!) Aikawa that I drew in Krita as a pastiche piece. I wish I'd put a bit more effort into the painting, or just left it in block colours. Obviously this was digital, so it was a bit of a cheat, but I still like it.
The drawings I passed off as style studies were mostly doodles I cropped out of sketchbooks and loose paper I'd been drawing on in lessons and at home. Technically, I suppose they were style studies... A lot of focus in the practised art GCSE syllabus was on the intentionality of pastiche->developed idea->refined idea, but there wasn't much space for "figuring out". I was a really annoying student, though, so I did a lot of figuring out.
In 2020 one of my friends and I got super into using a multiplayer GPT-2 text adventure procedural generator that really just spurred you on to make your own stories. I only bring any of this up because I ended up using the actions that we wrote for our characters as the basis for a lot more development sketches based on Hayashida's style. I wouldn't encourage anyone to use AI as part of their artwork, though, and it certainly isn't something I'd do today.
I still like this art a lot, and I'm glad that I did it all in pencil. I think it carries a really nice undertone of still holding something very tactile and human above the digital basis of it.
During lockdown, I also drew a lot on Drawception. Here's a selection of the Dorohedoro fanart I did on there.
The way Q Hayashida proportions her characters faces and bodies is something that's really stuck with me for a long time, and this piece of one of my longstanding OCs was a bit of a study on that. I still like this one too, and I did a redraw a few days ago that I think is a bit of an improvement. Obviously I spent a lot less time on it.
The final piece I drew for my Hayashida study at GCSE is really still something I'd be proud to draw today. This was done in Krita as well, and I remember getting super into it. I think working based on her super messy but neat lines was perfect for the kind of grungy feel I was going for. I also still draw metal highlights like this to this day.
At A-Level a couple of years later, I studied her work again! This time, I was coming off the back of being incredibly into oil painting, so I studied her painting style. The biggest thing I was looking at was her incredible texture work. I'll probably make a post sometime about my A-Level paintings in depth, but I was very into oil as a 3D space at the time, which you can hopefully see in these pieces, though these were more inspired by the exceptional limited palette work of Andrew Cadima, and the "peaked whites" technique Norman Rockwell used a lot of the time to create his highest highlights. The skull one was a challenge in pulling out a high variety of tones from two low contrast cadmium colours.
When looking at Hayashida's painting work, one of the most incredible things to me is this disgusting, viscous effect she layers up onto pages now and again. This is one of her panels, obviously. I think it works extremely well to establish the kind of miasma En and his mushrooms create!
I don't remember where I read it now, but there was an interview with Hayashida at some point where she said the way she painted was on layers and layers of tracing paper, so I did too. You could probably also do this on baking paper, because it's oil-resistant.
The way to force the paint to create these great shapes was to be very liberal with application of paint, white spirit (or another thinner) and a thickening, drying oil. Art departments tend to use linseed oil, but sunflower oil also works. I think I pushed around the liquid with a hairdryer and then let it set.
I painted my character (photo referenced from my brother) on a seperate piece of tracing paper.
Finally, I composited it both physically, by layering the two sheets, and digitally,by scanning them in and overlaying them.
This photoshoot was generally quite Dorohedoro inspired, so I ended up doing a few paintings. This one was on a piece of MDF from the B&Q bargain bin. For some reason in the middle of painting, I muddied it up a lot, so I've also included the better, brighter colours it had halfway through.
The tracing paper technique was great, and I used it again for a 2 layer painting of a pair of Schleich toys that I did later on.
This one had to be scanned and digitally layered, because it didn't let any light through on the bottom layer without a strong lightbox.
The last things I'm going to show off here are some more pieces of weird texture work I did that were trying to create that multilayered gross feeling as well. This was spray paint suspended on a water bath, on which I laid pieces of black and white paper.
Just because it's cool... I did that stuff inspired by a guitar my dad and I built and hydrodipped in 2020 after watching a lot of Youtube tutorials.
If you've read all this, thanks for your time. I hope you've enjoyed seeing some of my archival work!
