“煙々彼岸” by Genyaky

Hello everyone, hope you’re doing well. Apologies for the dry spell of content but we are back with yet another wonderful art piece for you all. Today’s piece is one of the recent greats from our artist Genyaky once again, and this piece dare I say is even more interesting than the last. As per usual links to both the art work and the artist can be found be clicking on the links in the caption.

The first thing that jumps out to me about this piece is the lighting and setting. As we can see this appears to take place during a sunset on a fall day, and this serves as an excellent opportunity to talk a bit about lighting in pieces. As we are probably all familiar, when you draw with a natural light source that involves both the position of the sun or moon and the more complex interactions between the light and various figures and objects in the scene. For instance, in this piece notice how light hits the top of the character’s heads and certain parts of the torsos or legs, and then we can plainly see the body get gradually less saturated as the area is hit less with light. This may seem simple or perhaps like a minor detail but it really is important to give the characters and their clothing volume.

Speaking of clothing, that is another thing I think Genyaky does quite well. Similarly to the yukata in the other review we did, the representation of folds and line impression in conjunction with the high-level shading gives the clothes the perfect amount of depth and realism. Genyaky likes to use simpler line work in certain areas of their characters as we’ve observed before, but Genyaky doesn’t allow their pictures to be shallow by any stretch of the imagination.

Another thing that ties directly into shading and turning the simple into the complex, is the smoky spirit we see in the right corner of the image. This is a great example of how shading done right and awareness of shape and volume is essential to make complicated figures look 3d. Depending on the observation of the appreciator, the character may appear very detailed at first glance, but as every great artist knows, we break down figures and objects into simple volumes and build out from there. In truth, we can break up the character into warped spheres, circles, triangles and rhomboids for the eyes. The attention to detail with areas that should be more or less saturated and therefore lighter or darker is what really turns those volumes into the interesting looking, adorable spirit you see before you.

Last but not least, one thing that makes this piece very special is something Genyaky is very good at; character poses and expressions. Genyaky has a very good intuitive sense of the action lines for their characters and what expression will invoke whatever mood they want for their pieces. This piece is no exception and the lines the characters follow is one of the first things I noticed. For the character more in the foreground you can sort of feel the forces going from her right arm into her hip down into her feet. For the character in the back we can feel the tension in the back and abdomen and the forces distributed to her butt (the technical term). We can even appreciate the apparent weightlessness of the spirit, that it of course would have given it’s smoky constitution. Things like posing and expression, and in particular the slight exaggeration of those things and showing off their essence can not be overstated. Often the difference between a drawing that’s interesting or not is the ability to realistically but dramatically represent a character’s mood and the way they are distributing the forces throughout their body. It gives a whole new level of dynamism to the piece and really makes it come alive, which is some Genyaky has absolutely achieved in this work.