Ouran High School Host Club - Group Painting

My very favorite anime is one called Ouran High School Host Club - no other anime I've seen can compare to the perfect balance of silliness and storytelling that leaves you with a smile on your face.

I love ALL the characters on the show (part of what makes the show so great is how each character is explored and developed) and have wanted to do a group drawing of everyone for a while now. ESPECIALLY because official OHSHC artwork is usually bright pink and filled with roses or over-the top silly. . . not really to my taste.

For this blog post, I decided I should start with the finished piece and then jump to the progression photos - so here's the finished piece I created! It is a watercolor and ink painting that has been digitally retouched with a digital background added (original size 11x15:):

Now, let's go back and watch it come together.

After my recent success working with watercolor postcards, I decided to splurge and buy myself some large, high-quality watercolor paper. I've been out of watercolor paper for a while and the stuff I used to use was low quality and would curl (the watercolor postcards have been so nice because they're the high quality paper and I'd never previously used watercolor on paper that nice, it really makes a difference!!). I bought the pad with the specific idea of this piece in mind - I knew I wanted to start on it right away.

The first stage was penciling out the outlines I would later be inking over. I worked from several different reference screenshots from the anime, so I focused on different faces at different times.

faces start as lose circles or shapes to block out the space, then I go back and develop the face further with actual features

developing the faces and beginning to develop the shape of the bodies now as well

Because there are more characters in this piece than I've ever had in a single piece I've done before, I was surprised at how long the pencil work took me (I worked almost nightly for at least an hour, took about a week). I had to be pretty patient as it came together, so I was very relaxed about my drawing schedule and would watch random shows on Netflix as I worked.

almost done with my outlines!

After I finished my pencil work, I picked up my graphic pen (which I hadn't used on a piece before) and started tracing over my pencil lines.

I decided I wanted to add an inviting hand to the character in the foreground and ended up not finishing the pencil work on the last two characters on the far left until after I had done some inking

finished inking, including going back and thickening lines to create a sense of depth

Spent a couple evenings laying in watercolor paint - and some highlights in gouache:

The traditional art finished, I took a photo and in Photoshop made some corrections -for example, some of the heads in the drawing were actually disproportionate to the bodies, so I fixed that (probably the most obvious fix). Then digitally added a background and all finished!:

. . . in case you forgot, here it is all finished!

I went with a cooler color scheme as opposed to my usually warm palette, so this piece stands out color-wise from other work I've done (which is kinda fun).

All in all, I'm really happy with how it turned out :-)

~m.d.