Tsunade and Jiraiya: Step-by-Step

This picture was done for a request. It took me about three days of sketching and painting off-and-on. All of the painting was done in Painter 7.0, while the preliminary work of tinting lines and scanning the sketches was done in Photoshop 6.0. All images can be clicked on to see a larger version.

The final painting can be found online at Deviantart.com, at http://www.deviantart.com/view/7065127/.

I have two tutorials that complement this one, Basic Digital Painting and Simple Metal.

Legal Stuff: All images in this tutorial are by and copyright to Telophase. Permission is granted to download and save a copy for your own personal reference. You are not allowed to upload, post, or publish this tutorial or images in print or electronic form without the express written permission of Telophase, and you are most certainly not allowed to claim any of the images as your own work. The characters and character designs are from the manga and anime Naruto, were created by Kishimoto Masashi, and are copyright © to Shueisha and TV Tokyo.

Telophase's portfolio is at www.telophase.net/portfolio and her DeviantArt user page is at telophase.deviantart.com. She may be reached through either of those webpages.

Step 1:

The request was simply "Jiraiya and Tsunade from Naruto," with no specifics as to pose or mood. Characters always spring to life much better if you can incorporate aspects of their personalities into the picture, in their expressions and in their surroundings. The two characters are adult ninjas in the world of Naruto. They're old friends, and trained together as kids. Jiraiya's pretty much a lech, always ogling pretty women, but he can be serious when the situation calls for it. Tsunade is competent in just about everything but gambling. It's established in canon that they haven't dated and don't date, but I figure Jiraiya's not above trying to get into Tsunade's pants from time to time.

I originally wanted to emphasize the old-friends side, and I'd thought about a long thin stylized painting, much like a scroll, with Jiraiya pouring Tsunade some sake, but the characters eventually had other ideas. I sketched a lot of potential ideas, but nothing looked good. The sketch to the right here is the first one that looked halfway decent. You can see it's still portrait-oriented, with the longer axis vertical.

Step 2:

One of the ways I refine sketches is to first scribble it out, then scan it into Photoshop and change it to Duotone, tinted red, then print it out. I can then sketch some more on the red, following the good lines and ignoring the bad lines. When I re-scan, I scan in RGB. I then go to Color Balance and increase the Lightness of the reds and the magentas to 100, which completely drops all the reds from the picture and leaves me with only my new lines. I could tint it blue, which is the traditional non-photo-repro color, but red is easier for me to see.

This one is where the orientation changed to landscape, because I realized the composition worked better if Jiraiya sat down behind Tsunade instead of standing, and if they were offset to the left a little bit, with the table and sake bottles taking up the empty space there. Yes, I love negative space and I think that the empty space in a picture is as important as the full space.

Jiraiya's turned farther towards Tsunade in this one, and Tsunade's not especially drunk yet and is looking uncharacteristically demure. I haven't bothered to pull up the manga and look for reference on their clothing yet, because I want to get the poses right first without worrying about the details.

Step 3:

Jiraiya turned to face the viewer in this one, but his eyes are still on Tsunade. He hasn't developed the final expression yet, but he's starting to get there. Tsunade's head is less tilted, but when I was trying to get her eyes right, I succeeded only in making her look pissed off. Her arm with the sake cup looks stiff, and Jiriaya's haivng trouble holding that bottle well. I've started to look up the clothing - note that Tsunade wears culotte-length pants, her tunic isn't tucked in, and her jacket is hanging loose behind her.

There were too many lines on top of Jiraiya for me to erase them and refine his clothing, so I decided to scan it in, tint it, and print it out for yet another round of refinement.

Step 4:

This is the version where Jiraiya's wide lecherous grin and his eyes not quite ogling Tsunade's boobs showed up. It changed the original concept of the painting from two old friends having (a lot of) sake together to Jiraiya attempting to get Tsunade drunk enough to do him, but that really fits the character much better than my original concept, so I cheerfully jettisoned it and ran with this idea.

Jiraiya's clothing is done with reference here. I forgot to trace over the back of Tsunade's jacket in this one, but that's OK because there's still one more round of sketch-refinement to go because I still wasn't happy with Tsunade's expression.

Step 5:

Here's the final, refined sketch. I never got Tsunade's eyes right, so I went with the eyes-closed-in-drunkenness look and made a mental note to give her a red nose and cheeks to go with the idea that she's quite schnozzled. Jiraiya's expression is at its most lecherous, and I've added more sketchy boards on the wall in the background and a bunch of dents and dings to the table and stool. This was where I discovered that Tsunade's stiff hand looked better if I drew her with her pinky extended. Jiraiya's right hand still looks bad on the sake bottle, but I had way too much trouble trying to get it right, so I decided to call it good enough and left it.

The original sketch doesn't look this nice -- after I pencilled it in on top of the previous red sketch, I went over the best lines with a fine-point Sharpie. After I scanned it and killed the reds, I adjusted the Levels sliders until all the lightest marks vanished. This left me a nice fairly clean copy to do my inks on. I used channels to pop the blacks off the background onto a layer all by themselves. That wasn't a necessary step, since I was going to ink it digitally, but it's habit with me. I don't use the Multiply option for three reasons -- one: you can't tint your linework a different color with Multiply, two: Multiply does some funky things with layer blending if you use multiple layers in your artwork, and three: I needed to use a different layer blending mode in Painter, the Gel option, so I couldn't use Multiply.

I also decided to do a *big* picture, so I scanned it in at 200% (300 ppi), then adjusted it down to be about 14 x 12". This step, and all previous steps, were done in Photoshop 6.0 (even though I took the screenshots in Painter), but after this I switched to Painter.

Step 6:

Digital inking. I finally found a tool and layer blending setting that gave me happy results. I used the Airbrush->Digital Airbrush at a really small size (about 4-5 pixels, I think), with the layer the inks were on set to Gel. I created a new layer on top of the previous linework layer and inked on that, after turning the Opacity of the pencil linework down enough that I could see the ink lines I was laying down.

Turned out much better than I expected it to. I uploaded a copy of the inks to Deviantart.com, and you can find them at http://www.deviantart.com/view/7065063/.

I use a 4x5 Wacom Graphire tablet to do my inking and coloring. I don't have a mouse, since I'm prone to repetitive-stress injuries in my wrist and a mouse makes that worse. I normally use a trackball, and it's impossible to ink and color with that.

The secret to making your lines clean and nice if you're freehanding them on a tablet is not to worry about it. If your image is large enough, when you shrink it down it removes a lot of the wibbliness, and also lines in nature are rarely straight. If you're doing a picture with lots of straight mechanical lines in it, you'll probably want to use Photoshop's pen tool or do it in Illustrator to keep your lines technical and smooth, but otherwise the wibbly lines tend to give it an organic look that's quite appealing. If you look at the DeviantArt version of the inks you'll note that none of the lines are straight. If I'd drawn the table, stool, and wall with straight lines they would have contrasted strangely with the more organic lines of the figures and clothing.

The second trick is your eraser tool. Draw a line several times, then erase away anything you don't want in it. Another tip for making your lines look nice is to make sure that the ends are tapered -- if you were inking with a crowquill, the end of the line would taper off slightly as you released pressure on the paper, and that's a nice look. So if your tablet isn't set quite sensitive enough to pressure, or if you're stuck with a mouse, then get the eraser in there and taper the ends of the lines.

Step 7:

I didn't want the lines to be harsh, so I tinted them dark brown. You also don't want to color on a pure white background most of the time, because that makes the colors look weirdly dark. My idea of the picture was for the edges to fade out and for the most intense color to be in the center, so I threw a slight gradient onto the background. Sometimes this shows through slightly if you use transparent glazes to do your work, and sometimes it's just a mental reminder of what you intend to do with the picture, but either way applying a gradient or lighting effect to the background as a preliminary step is sometimes a good idea. Just don't count on the effect itself being a good background, because it usually isn't.

Step 8:

This is where Telophase makes her biggest mistake: not doing the background first! This is bad for two reasons:

First, if you're painting directly on the bottommost layer like I am, then you have to be careful of the edges of the already-finished stuff when you're painting the background, and that's damn hard to do. You'll see what I ended up doing at the end.

Second, it's usually true that the last thing you do in a picture is the thing you lavish the most time on and is the thing that stands out the most. You really don't want a background to overshadow the characters. I had to work hard to consciously kill the background when I did it at the end.

Usually you want to try to work on all aspects of the picture at the same time because that integrates the whole thing together, but I went for a piecework approach in this, working from the items that were the farthest away from the viewer first.

For the coloring I followed the same basic idea for all of the pieces: fill in an area with a flat medium color first using the Brushes->Round Camelhair tool, then stroke a darker color on and blend the edges in with the Liquid->Just Add Water tool. I decided that the light was coming in from the upper left and based all my shadows on that. Most shadows have 2 to 3 different shades in them, and each darker shade gets a little bit cooler in tone. Cool shades recede visually and make the part you're painting look three-dimensional, and when you vary the tones a little bit, the colors look richer.

The highlights were added on each piece last, following much the same idea as the shadows. I only used one level of highlight, since I didn't want to make it overwhelmingly highlighted.

Step 9:

In this step, I've finished Jiraiya's clothing and laid the basic lights and shades into his hair. I've finally discovered the secret to convincing fabric folds: bold highlights and lowlights without much blending between them. When you blend them together too much they look like soft, gentle, rolling bends instead of actual deep folds.

The arm, chest, and leg bits that are dark are colored in over the original skin color in this step. My idea, since they're made of netting, was to color the skin first then layer in some transparent glazes to tint it dark. This wasn't as succesful as I'd hoped, but I did the dark stuff on another layer, lowered the opacity a bit to make it slightly transparent, and the dropped it onto the canvas layer.

Step 10:

The round circle is the brush tool. I forgot to move it off the image before taking the screenshot.

I worked on the bench and table here, and a bit more on Jiraiya's hair. The wood took forever because I wasn't sure how to go about it and tried a lot of approaches. What I ended up doing was to dab a bunch of brushstrokes in different colors on it, blend the edges together, then go through with the Liquid->Coarse Distorto tool, and draw the wood grain on with that. Looked pretty good. It was a bit too distracting, so I made a new layer, colored over the wood with a dark color, then lowered the opacity to make it a gentle tint, and dropped that layer onto the canvas.

I was trying to make Jiraiya's hair more like hair, and was starting to overwork it and it looked awful. I decided to come back to it later. THIS IS A BAD IDEA. I came back to it after I did Tsunade's hair, which means I had to be *extremely* careful when painting the parts that were overlapped by her hair.

Step 11:

I did the sake bottles, the sake cup in Tsunade's hand, and her pants and hair here, then went and fixed Jiraiya's hair. Her hair was a bitch and a half because I wasn't sure how to do it. I couldn't really do a simple manga coloring because I went realistic with the clothing, but really realistic hair wasn't happening. So I combined them -- I went through and marked the basic highlights and shadows on her hair with several different colors, then blended them together. Then I went through with a 4-pixel brush, drew in strands of hair here and there, and blended them gently. That worked so well I went and did more-or-less the same thing to Jiraiya's hair. I realized that the simple linework on their hair wasn't going to work, so I turned off the linework layer and worked on blending to make strands of hair come out all around his head. I think his hair is still a little too light and needs stronger shadows, but I'd spent so much time on it I didn't want to screw it up and called this good enough.

Step 12:

I finished Tsunade's clothing, then worked on little touches here and there, mostly on the linework layer. I smudged and softened the lines where they seemed a little harsh, and emphasized Jiraiya's eyes a little bit.

Since light-colored fabrics reflect the colors they're near, I made Tsunade's tunic reflect green in the shadows near her green jacket, and made it reflect blue in the shadows near her blue pants. The sake bottles closest to her also have some green reflections, and Jiraiya's hair has some really subtle (maybe too subtle) colors in in near the greens and reds of his clothing.

Then I looked at the picture and thought "Oh, hell!" because I hadn't done the stupid background, and it was going to be tough to finish it without going over the already-finished parts.

Moral: DO YOUR BACKGROUNDS FIRST!

Step 13:

The finished piece. I ended up starting the background the same way as the stool and table: I dabbed a bunch of colors, then blended them together. The lines of the boards looked really sketchy and harsh, so I first used a dull neutral color to trace the lines on the canvas layer, then blended and softened them, then used an eraser on a low opacity on the linework layer to make it blend in. Then I realized that the wall was too warm, sicne I'd used a lot of yellow, and it was visually competeing with the warm colors in the middle. I solved that problem by making a new layer, spraying it with Airbrush->Coarse Airbrush set to a lavender color (purple is the opposite of yellow in the color wheel and it wll tone yellow down amazingly), then turned the opacity down low and dropped the layer onto the canvas. The Coarse Airbrush added some subtle texture to the wall.

You can see the results of having done Jiraiya and Tsunade first: there's a halo around them. The halo works in this case because I left the edges obviously unfinished, but if I hadn't done that and was trying for a realistic look, the halo would have been visually screaming "YOU THREW THE BACKGROUND ON LAST, DIDN'T YOU?!" A lucky break for me.