Mistakes of Youth: The Blog (Powered by EXCELLENCE!)

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My word! I’ve yet to do any Gunslinger Girl fanart! This is an outrage, to be sure.

I still have a ways to go, but this lineart doesn’t look totally horrible. I just looks kind of horrible. I think my main weakness is that I lack the ability to project a 3D image onto the page with my mind, then draw lines around said image accordingly. To be able to draw with such confidence requires, a) confidence, of course and b) experience. I took a few drawing classes back in Freshman year, but in retrospect they weren’t nearly enough. I need more experience in life drawing–learning about how certain things should look in certain situations. So, what’s the best way? I suppose more classes would be the most prudent course of action, but say I don’t have that option available to me at the moment? Should I just start drawing from images of Asian U-15 swimsuit models until I get good? Men in suits? Both?

One thing that really hurts me is when it comes time to clean up my rough linework. I tend to be fairly happy with what I have sketched out, but when the sketch makes the transition to clean lineart by way of the lightbox, it always looks worse. Part of this is because I don’t have a steady hand, so when I trace over with my 0.3mm pencil, my lines are somewhat squiggly. It could also be because I lack a proper drawing table, so I can’t get the kind of support I need to keep a steady hand. Confidence once again plays into this–I find when I trace with more confidence, my strokes look better.

Another couple of things that really screw me up are fabric folds and shadows. It seems every single artist out there but me is good at fabric folds, so the fact that I’m really terrible at them kills a good amount of the soldiers in my Self Esteem army, but I suppose it’s just one of those things that takes practice. And more life drawing. Shadows are probably the easiest thing to be bad yet, yet they’ll still look decent if you have an okay handle over them. Once again, mastering the shadow, and where it falls simply requires more practice.

All this said, I’m a little bit happy between where I used to be and where I am now. This is a generous estimate, but in the next year or two I suspect I’ll get to the level I want to be at if I keep working.

Original Post

I felt I needed to bleed the previous comic’s punchline a bit more, so I did. As far as artwork goes, I’m playing around with styles. By that I mean, I’m messing around with how I draw girls. And by that I mean, I’m changing how I draw Tina a bit, since she’s the only girl who consistently shows up in this comic. She comes out looking kind of like a Haruhi character, and I like it. I take this a bit further in the next comic, which is already done. I like this style, but I’m also partial to the style in this comic. I’m not sure what I’ll stick with, but don’t be surprised if drawings are more inconsistent than usual. Eventually I’ll find a style and stick to it, don’t worry.

In further art-related nonsense, the more astute of you may notice that panel layout in recent comics has become tighter. This is because instead of drawing each panel out on separate sheets of paper, I’m laying out the panels on one big piece of paper, and drawing the characters in those already laid-out panels. I know this newer method sounds like how one should make comics, but I’m not partial to drawing in small spaces. I do however like how the newer comics are looking, so I’m going to stick with this method.

We still don’t have enough requests in to the print the doujinshi. If we don’t reach our goal in the next week or so, we’ll probably just distribute digital copies to those who want one at a lower price point. To be honest, this whole thing was an experiment by my friend and I, and we weren’t expecting to make anything that’d sell like hotcakes. But buy one anyways!

Moving right along, for those who may not know, I’m studying abroad in Japan this summer. I just found out about where I am to be living, and as you can expect this has made me rather excited. I’m leaving in about two months, and in case you were wondering–yes, the comic is coming with me. I will be comic-ing in Japan, and I will most likely bring the characters over there as well. Oh god, then it’ll really turn into Megatokyo! Anyway, expect a lot of interesting in-the-field podcasts, stupid Japan-related blog posts and perhaps an account of my first Comiket experience.

And with that, I’ll wrap up this rant. Sorry for the lack of anime commentary, but nothing has captured my interest beyond stuff I’ve already written about in this space already. That and I’m just tired of writing for today! Time to watch Casshern Sins!

Twilight of the Dark Master is a silly cartoon based off of a silly comic with a silly title. What makes it notable, however, is the man behind it all–the dude, Akiyuki Shinbo. After proving himself as an animator, Shinbo then went on to direct a number of OVAs and a few TV series in the mid-to-late ’90s. While some of these earlier works are of questionable quality, they all tend to have something interesting to bring to the table, and are enlightening to those who follow the man’s work, such myself.

Twilight of the Dark Master is pretty typical of any OVA you’d find lurking on the shelves of Blockbuster in the late 90s–there’s a wealth of gore, naked women, and naked women being slaughtered horribly. It’s action, martial arts, sci-fi, comedy, straight from Japan AND NOT KIDS STUFF!!! Even though the piece’s narrative is about neck-deep in Japanese cartoon clichés, what makes it worth watching are the bold touches of Shinbo magic here and there.

In my eyes, Shinbo’s work is characterized by alternative colour schemes, abstraction and unique camera work. His style is fairly prevalent across the film’s forty-five minutes, but it doesn’t really save the piece from its cliché ridden plot. A lot of Shinbo techniques we see in later works make their appearances here, and do their work well enough. There’s a smattering of dutch angles, lots of faraway shots, a number of shots with silhouettes of random objects in the foreground, and a bunch of eccentrically designed interior locations. A 4:3 aspect ratio hurts all of this, as these techniques aren’t given the true cinematic presentation they require. Right at the end Shinbo decides enough is enough and everything goes widescreen for one pivotal moment.

While this is easier to recommend than the Hurricane Polymar OVA, it’s still a very flawed work, and probably not worth watching more than once. I’d only seriously recommend it to Shinbo fans, since that’s the best thing it has going for it.

…in Japan! A most delightful little email came in just a few hours ago, and in it lied the details of where I will be living between April and August of this year… IN JAPAN. It’s a chill little apartment house just north of Tokyo. The rooms are fully furnished and come with a bed, a desk, shelves, a mini-fridge, a TV and free internet access. I did rank a dorm highly in my housing choices, but in retrospect I’m a lot happier with this arrangement. Why? I get a TV! Now I can fulfill my dream of watching shitty Japanese variety shows, and I’ll be able to catch the premier of Hayate no Gotoku season 2 on Japanese TV, in Japan.

Man, it’s gonna get pretty Wapanese up in this blog in a few months, so watch out.

Instead of doing three at a time, I’m just going to blaze through all of these at once.

Akikan

Oh Akikan! What could have been! You had such a wonderfully dumb concept! If handled correctly, you could have been immensely entertaining! It was, however, not meant to be. If episode two is any indication, the staff doesn’t even care about this show. I haven’t seen something this ugly since that time I watched ten episodes of Soul Link, which is quite hilarious, since Suzuhira Hiro did the designs for that show as well. To make matters even worse, this show is by Brains Base. I thought better of you guys! I mean, Natsume Yuujinchou was boring as shit, but at least it looked good. This is just an abomination. Do not watch it.

Maria†Holic

The dastardly combination of Akiyuki Shinbo and Studio SHAFT (AKA: SHAFTXSHINBO) are at it again, this time with the amazingly sassy and abusive Maria†Holic. Though, quite frankly, I’m a little disappointed. The show carries itself on its witty writing more than anything else, and when that happens in a Shinbo show you know something is wrong. Him and his cohorts have boiled the signature SHAFTXSHINBO style down to a science, while at the same time bringing nothing new to the table. The show is playing it pretty straight, and is more on the Negima!? side than the Tsukuyomi ~Moon Phase~ side as far as directorial eccentricity goes. I like it, but I expect a lot more. The opening sequence does more or less make up for all of the show’s shortcomings, though. And the writing really is great–Maria is such a dickhead.

Minami-ke ~Okaeri~

Well, that feels a lot better. After stumbling around a bit with the slightly deformed baby that was Minami-ke Okawari, our good friends at asread have done their homework, and figured out just what makes Minami-ke good. Okaeri is a step back into the snappy direction and quirky writing that made the very first Minami-ke a joy to watch. Instead of trying to force their own stylings onto the production, asread is keeping to the spirit of the first series as much as possible, and are doing a fairly good job. The colour scheme is set back to the warm tones that brought the first series to life, and the character designs are a fair compromise between asread’s style and the style used in Doumo’s series. While not as horrible as bloggers make it out to be, the artwork in the series ranges from having moments of greatness, to simply being okay. It’s rough, but it’s still pretty good.

Rideback

This one fooled me. I came in expecting mecha warfare, but instead I got some seinen college story with strangely girly character designs. I don’t really know if this’ll hold my interest, but episode one didn’t totally suck. The story of a girl losing her talent for ballet then finding herself again on some random robot motorcycle is dumb, but it didn’t weigh things down too much.

Sora wo Kakeru Shoujo (Sora Kake Girl)

I was unable to tell if this first episode was a mess of cliché on purpose or not, but once you’re half-way into episode two it’s pretty clear that this is Sunrise parodying themselves. This is another one where I’m not sure if it’ll be able to hold my interest, but it has nice character designs on its side, and pretty solid Sunrise production values. It’s probably better than Code Geass, but lacks the entertainment value.

Sora wo Miageru Shoujo no Hitomi ni Utsuru Sekai (Munto TV)

Munto is kind of like Kyoto Animation’s Daicon IV opening animation, except much longer. It’s a pretty generic fantasy story, but you can tell the staff’s heart is in it. This first episode is just the original 2003 OVA with some slight touch-up work, so naturally it looks pretty dated. While not as shiny and bright as modern day Kyoto Animation titles, everything moves well, and some shots look like really good pictures you’d see on pixiv, just animated. The female character designs are all great, with a couple of especially cute lolis in the cast.

Not doing Shikabane Hime Kuro since I’m not done with Aka yet.

If you’re new to these parts, let me fill you in: I think Fuyou Kaede is the greatest, most perfect 2D girl to ever grace my walls, computer screen, television set and bed. She’s from this mostly rad show/game/multimedia extravaganza called Shuffle!, and I really should watch the rest of my DVDs. Anyway, I obsessively collect imagery of her, which isn’t all that difficult since fanart is sparse and the stream of official Shuffle! artwork has been expectedly reduced to a trickle over the past year due to Navel’s release of Oretachi ni Tsubasa wa Nai, and the TV series being over for about four years now. As such, I was pretty surprised when my associate Seiya brought some new Shuffle! artwork to my attention.

It would seem that the latest issue of Megami Creators features a bit by Nishimata Aoi (her artwork is on the cover as well) and in this bit lies an all new, all awesome and all Kaede masterwork of epic proportions. Seiya sent me a low-res image taken with his phone, but that wasn’t enough to satisfy my hunger. Thankfully, some kind soul has scanned this amazing image over the past couple of days, and I couldn’t be happier.

Let us examine this wonderful work of art. The pose itself is pretty simple, but extremely cute. I really appreciate how it proudly displays Kaede’s delicious body, and her usual winning smile is the icing on the cake. Something one should notice about this pose is that one of Kaede’s feet is quite prominently in view. Nishimata hardly ever does feet, and I’m going to assume it’s because they’re not her strong point, but this foot fetishist is quite pleased with the hot foot on display here. It’s nice and sexy, and comes with a gorgeous set of devilishly hot, long toes. I just want to lick each and every one of those toes, or shove my cock in between them. But I’m getting gross, so let’s move on.

One thing I particularly like about Nishimata’s work is how she comes up with pretty nonsensical, but really cute outfits. This outfit doesn’t make much sense, but it’s wonderfully girlish, adorable, and what I’ve come to expect out of Nishimata’s wacky fashion sense. I’d like to know how that side-tie bottom is being held up! Seriously.

The piece is rounded of with Nishimata’s signature clean linework and colouring. It’s all very polished and nice to look at… and to fap to!

Nishimata isn’t a perfect artist, but I like her work despite its flaws. I’ll go more into this in a potential future post, because it’s already 9:30 and I haven’t watched any japtoons today! I guess I’ll watch Sora Kake Girl or something. But anyways, thanks Internet! I owe you one!

Original Post

Oh god, here’s another comic. I really liked the sketches for this one, but as I continued I started to like it less and less. Looking at it now, I’m pretty indifferent towards it. It could stand to be better, but I don’t hate it. I tried some new things, like correctly sized heads and conventional panel layout, and they work pretty well. The backgrounds are the usual mess of bad mouse painting mixed with pictures I steal from Google images and Tokyo Kid’s official site (which seems to be down at the moment, hm.) I don’t think I’ve made this clear, but I do steal a lot of images when I make comics. I know this is fairly obvious, but I figure I should make it known that I’m not pretending all of Brad’s Hawaiian shirts are my own designs. They’re all stolen. But lots of artists appropriate imagery in similar ways, so I don’t feel too bad. Oh yeah, speaking of stolen images, I’m not going to provide an uncensored version of this comic just so you can see the horrible shota shit Tina is holding. If you really want to see it, hit up Mandarake’s shota section. It’s like the second book there. I didn’t want to hang around too long, that shit is gross.

Another podcast came into existence a day or so ago. It’s me, Omo and Link going on for about fifty minutes about that show everyone has been ripping their manga up over. I’m going to try and do a show with Señor Link again about that Touhou cartoon Maikaze released a while ago. That’ll be neat.

I mentioned last rant that I threw together a little doujinshi on a request from a friend. I got some requests to buy it from some people over the last week, but before we can print anything we need at the minimum thirty requests. We’re not quite there yet. It’s only three bucks, and it’s pretty funny even if you haven’t seen the series in question. So buy! Buy! Buy! We can also do digital copies, but if anything’s going to be printed, we need at least thirty people.

I did my first bit of fanart for 2009, and once again it’s a picture of Chiaki being touched in a bad way. I did this at the beginning of 2008, too. I have no idea why. I’m not even that wild about Chiaki. I mean, she’s cute, but not one of my top 5 lolis or anything. Oh well.

A bunch of cool anime has started, and the coolest is probably Maria+Holic. I don’t want to say too much, as I’m already planning on saying a bunch in a future season review post, but it’s pretty good. It’s not really as crazy as I want it to be, but what can you do? The opening is pretty rad.

Anyway, we’re at the end again. Later.