I did this illustration as a surprise for my son. While I’ve been reading manga and watching anime for as long as I can remember, for some reason One Piece never called out to me. However, my son fell in love with it and binged the entire series. Finishing just in time for 5th gear to to make it to air. As a parent of teenagers, it’s often hard to find things you can enjoy together as they get older. We’ve been really lucky in that regard, we share a lot of the same tastes with our kids. Seeing his interest in the series and dedication to finishing it, got me to give it another try. I have to say that I’m glad I did. It’s become something we both look forward to one the weekends, and now there’s a pretty awesome netflix adaptation that’s got the whole family watching together.
Most of the art for this piece was done digitally in clip studio paint, using my wacom cintiq. I only brought it into photoshop for some of the effects, and to fine tune the color. I’ve mentioned elsewhere (multiple times), but I’ve been really impressed with the line quality and pressure sensitivity that comes out of Clip Studio. It’s far more responsive and natural feeling than most programs I’ve used. On the line work for this one I played with the settings for edge quality, making it feel a bit rougher. I then used the separate layers of the greyscale version as fill colors, instead of my more recent style of using them as separate opacity and layer settings over a base color. The more I use it clip studio, the more I find myself adapting my techniques to it.
