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Description

Inspired by "Love Theme " by Shigeru Umebayashi (from "The Grandmaster" soundtrack). Title "stolen" from Mr. Sunshine.

The original idea that I started, was slightly different - the characters were not so prominent, more hidden and embraced by the bamboo grove, standing on a small hill by the stream. But as I worked on the characters, I started to love the details on them and it felt like a loss to hide all of these nice nuances into the background.

I am actually torn if I should write my story/thoughts about this piece or leave it for everyone to come up with their own version as this one image could be part of many different stories. It good be secret meeting between lovers in snowy bamboo grove. It could be wife greeting her husband back from the battle. It could be woman asking the man to do something really bad for her but because she knows he deeply cares about her, he would do it.

Let's just say.. the emotions and thoughts were around portraying sad departure, yearning, being powerless in front of the fate and grand schemes of live.

The biggest challenge for me with this artwork was building "the frankenmosters"... both the female and male model is combination of many different images as keeping propositions and "fabric logic" intact was hard. I definitely did not fix everything (I did loved the red kimono sleeve so I left it like it was). The golden obi gave me nightmares as I wanted it to be visually striking but also "be logical" (slightly). With the male, I am still not 100% convinced on the hand even though I played around with modelling mannequin and it looks like it is ok but.. it looks.. slightly off. And the swords. There is no way to make Midjourney do proper Japanese swords.. therefore I went trough my personal photos trying to find any samurai nicely from the side with two swords (to get the angles&lengths right). I did visit few samurai festivals in Japan and took many pictures but majority of time everyone is posing from the front. In the end, there were few lucky shots when my husband had a samurai photoshoot where I took photos of him from the side that needed some work but were nicely usable for this composition I had in my mind.

On the positive side, I loved working with the bamboo and snow. Also, finally slowly recovering/recreating my drawing brushes and having more and more variety to get different effects and textures.

Resources: personal stock, AI generated and a a lot of drawing, tear brush by Frozenstock

(also, check my Twitter for gif showing different stages of this artwork

Description

Inspired by "Love Theme " by Shigeru Umebayashi (from "The Grandmaster" soundtrack). Title "stolen" from Mr. Sunshine.

The original idea that I started, was slightly different - the characters were not so prominent, more hidden and embraced by the bamboo grove, standing on a small hill by the stream. But as I worked on the characters, I started to love the details on them and it felt like a loss to hide all of these nice nuances into the background.

I am actually torn if I should write my story/thoughts about this piece or leave it for everyone to come up with their own version as this one image could be part of many different stories. It good be secret meeting between lovers in snowy bamboo grove. It could be wife greeting her husband back from the battle. It could be woman asking the man to do something really bad for her but because she knows he deeply cares about her, he would do it.

Let's just say.. the emotions and thoughts were around portraying sad departure, yearning, being powerless in front of the fate and grand schemes of live.

The biggest challenge for me with this artwork was building "the frankenmosters"... both the female and male model is combination of many different images as keeping propositions and "fabric logic" intact was hard. I definitely did not fix everything (I did loved the red kimono sleeve so I left it like it was). The golden obi gave me nightmares as I wanted it to be visually striking but also "be logical" (slightly). With the male, I am still not 100% convinced on the hand even though I played around with modelling mannequin and it looks like it is ok but.. it looks.. slightly off. And the swords. There is no way to make Midjourney do proper Japanese swords.. therefore I went trough my personal photos trying to find any samurai nicely from the side with two swords (to get the angles&lengths right). I did visit few samurai festivals in Japan and took many pictures but majority of time everyone is posing from the front. In the end, there were few lucky shots when my husband had a samurai photoshoot where I took photos of him from the side that needed some work but were nicely usable for this composition I had in my mind.

On the positive side, I loved working with the bamboo and snow. Also, finally slowly recovering/recreating my drawing brushes and having more and more variety to get different effects and textures.

Resources: personal stock, AI generated and a a lot of drawing, tear brush by Frozenstock

(also, check my Twitter for gif showing different stages of this artwork