‘Ashitaka’ in ink painting style 以水墨風重畫宮崎駿作品

Ink Painting Style 水墨風

Last year, we had a chance to see the original layout designs  of Studio Ghibli.  The one layout that I liked the most is the one shown on the right, with Ashitaka riding  Yakkul  in an arrow shooting  post.  This is from the 1997 anime Princess Mononoke, Studio  Ghibi's first movie to use computers.  Eighteen years has passed, but the story is still very relevant today and even the animation itself doesn't feel out-dated.

'Ashitaka' redrawn in Expresii

水墨風で描きたくなったので模写してみました。
We decided to redraw this layout in ink painting style with Expresii.   Admittedly, it's hard to draw with a real Chinese brush. The good thing about digital ink painting with Expresii is that you can always go back and redo the strokes until you get them the way you like.  Using the digital brush in eraser mode  also helps to create shapes that are not easy to get using a brush in real life.
毛筆水墨是難控制的。如果搬到電腦裡，側可以重複筆劃而不傷宣紙畫面，且可以用把筆換到 ‘橡皮’ 模式，以畫出用真筆難以做出的造型呢。
The process was recorded with Nvidia's Shadow Play on a GT750Ti graphics card:  

Escalator decorated with Ghibli's layout design

In Ghibli's animation, fur and hair are  depicted with the usual 'outline-and-fill' (單線平塗) method.  In Expresii, we of course would like to use brush painting's language  to depict the objects where appropriate. We use 'scratchiness'  (飛白) to depict the hairy nature of Yakkul's fur.  We use organic flow  patterns to fill that area.  Scratchiness is also useful for rendering the straw cape.

Visual Language 表現手法

What holds for the Future?

It's good to hear news about  the new painting app Mischief, which is praised for its infinite canvas and infinite zoom.  Expresii doesn't have infinite zoom, but is capable of exporting to a very large bitmap (16k pixels max in  dimension, depending on available memory).  This addresses the low-res issue commonly found in today's "nature media" painting apps. In fact, when we show zoomed-in views of our Expresii artwork to users of existing digital graphics tools, they often asked "wow, is it vector graphics?".  Below are more closeups for you to check out. If you would like to see a large output (8k x 10k) in one piece, you can download it from here. 

We value true innovations in digital painting technology.  As long as there's something left to be desired, we will work our butts off to bridge the gap! Your feedback is important to us, so please let us know what you think!

And, finally, watch in these videos how such an animation was produced with attention to great details   at Studio Ghibli : 

Left: Straw depicted in cel animation. Right: In digital Chinese brush & ink.

Left: Fur depicted in cel animation. Right: in digital Chinese brush & ink.