#toru nakayama

[sonokirin]

Collection of Megaman Zero art by Toru Nakayama

[himitsusentaiblog]

Hachi-Augment and Kumo-Augment (Wasp-Aug and Spider-Aug) from Shin Kamen Rider art by Toru Nakayama.

[kon-kon-kon-kon]

20121014081218.jpg

[skulpin]

Idle pose test/prep for the next boss overhaul.

Making a spinosaurus in Nakayamas style was a bit of a challenge. I did make some unconventional design choices like making his tail be connected to his back compartment instead of his ass. In the lore I made up for him he was like a walking electricity generator in the past so his tail is technically an extension cord that connects to stuff to power everything up

[kamenwriter]

Halloween illustrations by Toru Nakayama

[crowvillex]

Various artist face style studies 😀✍️ Mostly other artists ik and some iconic ones too but these were real fun to do and see how everyone stylized the same facial features & proportions along with linework, idt I studied anyone again apart from one in the future though... 👀

[reachartwork]

Rose Lalonde in the style of Toru Nakayama (Megaman Zero)

[sun-citadel]

MMZ ╱ Puss in Boots DTIYS | original + close up below!

[dblsoul]

zero art style challenge thing ?! MMZ ⇄ X4

(the official art i referenced ↓)

[ofhouses]

1165. Toru Murakami /// House in Nakayama /// Higashi Ward, Hiroshima, Japan /// 1987-89

OfHouses presents: Japanese Fields OfHouses, part X. (Photos: © Shinkenchiku-sha. Source: ‘Jutakutokushu’ 04/1989.) — This project will be published in our upcoming book: ’Japanese Fields | OfHouses.’

[saturniidae-sainte]

"Hee hee hee... thank you for coming to my show. But, I'm afraid that... this is the real "retirement" of your friend..."

i wanted to draw a more anatomically correct elpizo in celebration of 100%ing megaman zero 2. sue me. also, toru nakayama's proportions are really hard to translate into realism well.

[kamenwriter]

Toru Nakayama on Twitter

[bloodsadx]

thanks to everyone who has sent me asks and such saying i understand how to draw for being nice and stuff. i'm going to ramble about some influence/process stuff below if you want to read abt it

this might read as some kind of artistic statement or defense or something but i like to talk about this kind of thing just in case anybody can ever get anything meaningful out of my own thoughts and practices. i got to where i am after a lot of careful consideration and spending time thinking about what i like in other people's art, just like anybody else that makes art to any serious degree.

my "style" is very much a deliberate series of decisions that i have honed into being very fast for my own pleasure and enjoyment because i am very inspired by people like king terry/garo magazine/the heta-uma style, keiichi arawi, inio asano, hiroyuki imaishi, toru nakayama, phil elverum (as a cartoonist), gary panter (who was a friend of matt groening and wrote an essay about selling out that is worth reading and did a lot of stuff with RAW magazine which is one of my favorite things to think about), DIY/skatewear brand t shirt cartoons, early MSPA hussie stuff, etc. a lot of my favorite artists walk a line between constant high effort and low time investment art; often contrasting elaborately planned perspective grids or high resolution rendering with simple cartooning. asano and arawi i think are very clear and famous examples of artists that use 3d rendering and photography for backgrounds while drawing very deliberate and expressive characters on top of them. toru nakayama is really inspiring to me because he, like toriyama, has a very deep understanding of form AND cartooning and has a way of making extremely densely crafted cartoons which feel visceral and almost like plastic toys you can pick up and play with on the page. also just one of my favorite colorists. and i think hussie and arawi and imaishi are all fantastic character designers with very strong understandings of designing art styles that convey information very quickly and deliberately; i think bryan lee omalley and jamie hewlett were also big early influences on me for the same thing- they all have art styles with very clear line/negative space proportions, strong shape language, etc, and for a long time in my life i have sought to grasp a similar understanding of these things. and then i think phil elverum's fancy people adventures cartoons and just like skate brands and "shitty" DIY drawings and stuff (the album art for nana grizol's love it love it is like burned into my brain forever; seeing basquiat paintings and poems in a museum when i was 15 made me feel whatever and crazy and etc) are just something that serve as a constant reminder to me that some of the most effective art is art that is simply fun to look at, especially when it comes to making comic and cartoon art. simplicity and joie de vivre are very important to me as artistic concepts.

and i mean, i do fuck with crazy painter dudes and shit too; i was huge into goya when i was 14 and had a print of the witches sabbath taped to my wall until i was like 22, i fw waterhouse & bruegel the elder insanely. i am like a sponge for most kinds of art and i do a lot of art research all the time. most of my first book was heavily influenced by compositional techniques from pre-raphaelite painters and the iconography of egyptian & greek wall art and especially especially extremely crowded gothic art and the concept of horror vacui.

but anyway, im not really insecure about my art, i know how much effort and time and practice and research i've put in, i definitely know my strengths regarding cartooning and stuff, and i'm even more aware of where my work needs "improvement" in order to be "commercially viable." i've been in multiple positions in the past several years of taking art seriously where other people have been dismissive of my art and i've seen other people fail to capture the energy & simplicity that i am able to get in my own art, etc.

for people interested in my Process and the things that i work on to draw the way that i do, the way i have gotten whatever skills i have has been mostly through drawing the same things over and over and over (toenail, cavity, pimple, gunk, making different expressions and doing different poses); i draw in pen MOST of the time, and i have for a very long time, and i make few edits, and i focus on keeping energy and confidence in my lines; i do perspective studies, i've spent a lot of time doing gesture drawings and environmental studies inside and outside. i draw a lot of movie frames and do color studies of youtube videos and stuff like that. i remember reading some kind of criticism of post-KAWS/street art infiltration of commercial art that artists now are most rewarded for drawing literally the same thing over and over and over like their hands are printers and that the main thing artists are then allowed to do within that context is express themselves through minor variations within that key theme; i don't think im THAT rote but it has definitely informed my perpsective on what i do and what i am interested in doing. on some level i have designed my art to be easily reproducible by myself because i want to make comics and sometimes even to animate my characters and that requires me to be able to draw a lot of drawings relatively quickly. this is another reason why character designers and video game key artists are such massive influences on me, takehito harada and akiman and toshiyuki kusakihara being some huge ones i've spent a lot of time doing studies of i didn't mention previously.

and because the main way i make money at this point in my life is through screen printing & reproducing my drawings as items for sale, i spend a lot of time making my art Distinct, Eye Catching, and Iconic, to the degree of instant recognizability even on a t shirt or a sticker from far away, and i try to make my drawings strictly legible and generally focus on communicating ideas and emotions through big thematic and emotional gestures and strong colors that can be easily separated. this is one of the main reasons i havent developed as strong of a rendering/coloring habit; that kind of stuff is difficult to color separate for the purpose of solo DIY screen printing. but i've spent a pretty decent amount of time doing that stuff, and i spend time studying forms regardless, with the lines that i do use. a lot of my sketchbooks are me drawing literally the same thing over and over slightly differently until i have something that i feel is a strong enough cartoon to make into a shirt or patch or sticker design that satisfies a litany of criteria i have for what i consider strong cartooning.

anyway that was a very rambling post but i hope at least people get something out of it even if its just slight entertainment from me blowing hot air out of my mouth for 20 minutes.

[aqueousablution]

(April 2023) Coquelette (AKA sorXa as a Resistance member)

Original post body under the cut:

It seems only fitting that I should draw sorXa in the style of MMZ, seeing as a nontrivial portion of her design and the ideas for the setting around her were inspired by the Zero series.

The style imitation here isn't perfect, though it really doesn't help that one of the two pages I drew this on had a rougher texture because I drew on the wrong side (the smoother texture of the upper part works better for the MMZ artstyle, I think). That being said, if you showed this to 14-year-old me and said "you'll be able to draw like this someday," I'd have lost my fucking mind, seeing as there was a period of some months in mid-to-late 2011 where I was trying to emulate Toru Nakayama's artstyle (after which it started morphing into my own style, though that didn't give way to what would become my current style until... late 2012, I think? Or maybe early 2013?)

Also, I mentioned this when I posted the WIP, but I went with "Coquelette" for her name to keep with the Resistance's "French bird name" naming scheme, and "coquelette" is a feminine version of "coquelet", i.e. cockerel, i.e. a young rooster, as in Rooster, my old FFTA Thief who I also had a Lego minifig of (like some earlier incarnations of sorXa).

[tenkeydesu]

while twitter's alive im probably posting mostly wips here first. i havent gotten around to finishing the shading on this but i was makin' a megaman zx/toru-nakayama type design for chainsaw man, even made a pochita biometal

yeah that's about it for my first tumblr art post

[lucina-trs]

Here's my first attempt at an art style study!

I've absolutely adored the Mega Man Zero series, and Toru Nakayama is one of my favorite artists; so I tasked myself with trying to learn how to draw like his old style which he used across the four Mega Man Zero games. For a first go at it, I think it turned out pretty decently!