Does anyone know Alphes Style Drawing?

[VirusChris]

Hey there, I have need of some help with learning how to draw in Alphes style as used for certain Touhou fighting game and seems to be a very popular art style. Something that even Dairi on Pixiv uses and I wish to learn it also but I have no idea what the basic steps are needed to do it.

Originally this site had the only know Alphes Tutorial, until recently all of the images linked there most likely expired and render part of the tutorial useless:
http://indeedengine.com/forums/index.php?topic=29.0

You can find some of the old images via Google Search by typing in "alphes tutorial" and switching to the Images tab, but the pictures are blurry when you click on them and you can barely make out what it says. I was hoping someone knows how to make Alphes Style around here create a character from scratch in this style... the ones are deviantart seem more on "pre-made" and not an actual tutorial and more on editing really. I would really appreciate it if someone can point me in the right direction and hopefully I can make a proper (basic) Alphes Tutorial video to view and help others make characters in that style too.

It's a shame no one seems to make a proper tutorial of this. Can you guys help me "salvage" this three year old tutorial somehow?


Hopefully I'm posting this in the right forum and not getting into trouble linking to other old sites. Please let me know if anything turns up. Thank you.

[Delfigamer]

this guy called "Formless God"

You might want to ask "this guy" himself.

[Romantique Tp]

Literally just draw and color your character in the most generic mid-2000s anime style possible, then apply random blobs of light shading everywhere, including at the top of your character's head/hat. Sometimes apply darker shading where light shading is normally used. You shouldn't need a guide for this.

[Mеа]

then apply random blobs of light shading everywhere

I assume it's like a single layer for shading with blending mode set to multiply or something. You can even make it easier for yourself if you fill in a blank color for the character and lock the opacity/alpha (or just use a mask). That's about all you need to play around with. Assuming you can already emulate his drawing style and you're only wondering about his coloring style.

Googling 'anime wallpapers' can return any number of generic anime art of the absolute worst kind. I wouldn't necessarily argue that Alphes has generic looking art.

[VirusChris]

I assume it's like a single layer for shading with blending mode set to multiply or something. You can even make it easier for yourself if you fill in a blank color for the character and lock the opacity/alpha (or just use a mask). That's about all you need to play around with. Assuming you can already emulate his drawing style and you're only wondering about his coloring style.

Googling 'anime wallpapers' can return any number of generic anime art of the absolute worst kind. I wouldn't necessarily argue that Alphes has generic looking art.

Well my style is a little rougher than that and what my drawings look like are this:


I was more curious about how the coloring was setup and seeing designs by Dairi on Pixiv like this:
http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=54967865

The way he/she colors the drawing is amazing and wanted to make my character in that style as well (the coloring) but I wasn't sure what needed to be done to get it just right. Was hoping to get someone to point me in the right direction to get started on making one and hopefully make my own video tutorial to help others as well.

[Mеа]

The point of value is to reveal the form of the shape, its volume and depth. You'll have lots of trouble trying to do that with that line art. The hair looks flat. An easy way to help yourself trying to color is to draw with considerations of the front, side, back, and top/bottom of something (hair and face in this case) in mind when doing the line work. Then revealing that with value is much easier and not superficial. Alphes colouring does have lots of that, colouring somewhere just to give texture and interest, but his lineart, the base, looks good and allows for those elaborations. And I think it looks great.
I'd imagine he coordinates his colors with filters/blend modes to unify the palette, but I don't know what they are. So in the mean time once you get the lineart cooperating, you could simply use the palette from some existing alphes style picture to see what the artist was doing. Then perhaps screw around with layers and blend modes to see if you can recreate a palette from just the base colors. Picking the colours themselves shouldn't be too hard, it's the colouring what where. That takes taste and practice, and isn't exactly something someone can easily point you towards, aside from the considerations of form, shape, and texture as mentioned above.