A Pachi Break: New Update Venue

Hey guys - no drawing for you today, but I wanted to give you a quick update on a couple things. In the near future, I am going to be moving out of my parents' home and into an apartment with a friend. The preparation is pretty lax right now, but when the time comes closing in, I'm going to be busy and will probably have even less than usual in way of updates. I do have about three drawings on the back burner that should get on the site within the next couple weeks, but after that it'll probably be high and dry for awhile until my move is settled. Hope you all understand. I have some big plans for my work and this blog in the coming year, so I hope you will all stay tuned! =)

In other news, I just recently started a Twitter account! You can find my most recent tweets on the sidebar to the right and a link to follow me. It won't be strictly just about the blog - I'll be talking about pretty much anything there. So in case you were thinking this is a strictly-business twitter, it's not! It's also my personal twitter, so I may use language; fair warning. If my blog ever gets to a point where it's kind of successful I may separate it so I have one Twitter for the blog and one for myself, but for now that doesn't seem that necessary. Anyway, I'll be making notifications about future updates there from now on, so feel free to follow me if you'd like to find out about my drawings that way. I also still have a follow-by-email link if you'd prefer to get your updates via email. Or just stop by every now and then to see if there's anything new. The choice is yours!

Dance Out Blue or Character Dictation

When someone tells you they "can't dance", what they probably mean is they don't "like" dancing. If we were to get technical about it, generic dancing doesn't have any strict style or form - if you simply move your body in some kind of rhythm, you can consider that dancing. Declaring that one can't do the waltz, or the twist, or ballet, is on the other hand justifiable, since a specific type of dance requires skill and practice. Me personally, I'm not a huge fan of dancing. I LIKE it - I think it's fun to dance. But I'm very self-conscious and I get nervous when dancing around a lot of people. But not Sei. I decided as a joke that one of Sei's favorite hobbies would be "dancing at raves". Because really, you look at him, and he doesn't seem to be the type to be into an outing involving mass social interaction. But he goes gun-ho about it; he takes it quite seriously. This is a situation where the technique of "author insertion" probably gets the most use - using our characters to do things we cannot do but wish we could. I am really nervous about dancing for long periods of time, but Sei can do it nightly and with no fear. It really is quite interesting to see how a character will appear and act in a situation you wouldn't expect them to be in.

And on that note, I'll segue into what I really wanted to talk about today - something I call "character dictation". I'm not talking about a character narrating a story, no no no. This is in regards to the art. For many comic artists, work doesn't finish when the chapter/issue is done. Quite commonly, characters have to be drawn for promotional art or greeting cards or holiday images or anything imaginable - miscellaneous works. A lot of my drawings are done in the style of miscellaneous works because I am usually not showing you scenes from my stories - I'm just showing my characters doing "things". I'll use my Summer 2011 pool drawing as an example. The Gogyouo characters are relaxing pool-side. But why? Do they ever take a break at a pool in the story? You don't know. There is no context for the image - it's just them doing "things" that they might do. And thinking about this made me wonder if artists ever have difficulty figuring out WHAT their characters will do. I don't really mean difficulty in picking the theme/setting of the drawing, but difficulty in deciding what character is going to do what in that setting. Group drawings especially are affected by these decisions. For me, character interaction is an extremely important part of Gogyouo, and I make no exception for character interactions in my drawings.

I have one rule/tip alone that I follow in making these decisions, and I hope you may consider trying it out if you're having trouble making them as well. What I call "character dictation" basically means to let the characters themselves decide what they want to be doing. I know full well you can't ask them, but you can consider the character and their personality. Think about their past experiences, their disposition, how they normally react to certain things. To go back to the pool drawing; Sei has fallen into the water and gotten soaking wet. Why is Sei the one to fall in the water? Why not Masashi, or Mikioi? The answer is simple - because Sei would be the one most annoyed by that action. Being the one who created Sei, I know that he doesn't like swimming, because it ruins his hair. So out of all the characters in that drawing, I took these factors into account and picked him because he would be the most irritated AND he would have the most childish reaction because he would be upset about his hair. Basically I decided that Sei falling into the water would provide the funniest reaction. Likewise, why is Mikioi the one relaxing in the shade? Why not Suunuku? Well, because Mikioi is vain - he would much rather sit back and relax when on vacation. Suunuku is the one who would be jumpy and energetic and want to goof off - that's why she's running up with the beach ball.

I realize that to a lot of people, this may seem like a backwards way of thinking. Most artists probably come up with a thing for each character to do last rather than picking a "thing" and then assigning a character to it. Actually, that's how I do it to. But before I start drawing them, I go back and really think about the decisions I've made. Would the character really do this? If not, is there a justifiable reason that is causing the character to do this? One thing I hate to do is to "force" a character to appear in a certain way or doing a certain thing that unrealistically goes against that character - I like to connect everything by reason. Even my most abstract works have reasons behind them - take The Woven Girl for example. It may seem completely random that she is leaning herself against the grip of a giant axe, but it's not; her character has a strong affinity to "weapons", and Suunu's favorite weapon just happens to be the axe. To be fair, you don't know this. Indeed, this whole process is one that usually will go unnoticed by the viewer - all they will see is the final product created from your decisions. But it can make getting their a whole lot easier if you let the character make those decisions for you. You created them, so let them decide what you're going to do with them!

I seem to be doing a lot of drawings with more and more steps taking place in Photoshop lately. To be honest, I think I'm going to go back to strictly traditional for awhile after this one, but it's been fun experimenting with new techniques. For this one, I had originally planned to go full-on traditional. But in order to capture the feel of a night club, there needs to be a lot of darkness. Darkness on paper requires a lot of graphite and/or ink piling up in one place and ruining paper quality. So for this drawing I wanted to try only half-completing the drawing and doing the rest on my computer. The only thing I drew and inked all the way was Sei himself - the crowd I kept in pencil and went to work on it in PS. The eventual result is what you see. At first I was just using varying shades of grey to try and emulate what I could have done on paper on a computer. But then I decided it would be fun to give the image a light hint of color, to better give the impression that Sei was on a dance floor under colored lights; so I went with a kind of greyish-blue. The only thing I'm really not happy about with the image is the way the bottom of the crowd silhouettes blend with the floor - it's not very clean. But overall this was a fun experiment. Please don't ask why Sei has a large ring around his wrist. Glowsticks I get, but large rings? I'll never understand his rave-accessory sense.

Pachi Particulars 02: Color and Blocks

Hey guys, hope I haven't been leaving you too high and dry since the end of Manga Madness! To be honest, for the last week I was unable to come up with any new ideas; not to mention I had a very busy work week so I really couldn't take the time to think about the blog. But I've got some new works on the way, so look forward to those. For now, here's two miscellaneous drawings I worked on recently. One is new, and the other is a twist on an old...

This drawing is featured in the blog gallery, but I never included it in a post. It's also the image that inspired my first From the Action Pages sketch. Anyway, I felt a desire to mess around with a color image again, and though one day I'm going to seriously start an image from scratch with the intent of coloring it proper, I decided to use this old drawing and try to make it look more exciting. Adding in these effects in Photoshop has been mostly self-taught with the help of some tutorial videos on Youtube, but I'm starting to feel like I'm developing my own way of doing it that works. Some day when I make a serious post about coloring images using Photoshop, I'll lay out the steps I take, but I don't really feel qualified now since I'm still a beginner at this kind of coloring. I can say this - even if it's hard, it's a lot of fun. It's very rewarding to see color appear on your characters - it's as if they're coming to life.

As a side note, his boxers are supposed to be a dirty yellow, but all of the shading made them look olive green. Sei would NEVER wear olive green boxers. >_<' It's obviously why he's so angry, right? Right?

I did come up with ONE new idea last week - a drawing showcasing the fact that I had no ideas. So I thought, what would be an ideal way to conceptualize my artist's block? Well, with a block of course. I felt like I was being oppressed by this block, so naturally it needed to be crushing me. The block itself ended up as an amalgamation of random stone shapes with one stone on each side representing how I felt in my current state. It wasn't pre-meditated - it just turned out that way. That's what happens when I draw with zero ideas - randomness. But even so, I still tried to make it look good, but that didn't go over so well. I wish I had left shadows out of the equation in this way, because I came out with an incredibly uneven shade all around. On the bright side, if any of my sketches had to suffer from poorer quality control, I'd rather it be one I wasn't doing seriously.

Now then, I'll answer the question on all your minds: what's with the anthropomorphic teeth? Well, they have arms and legs and mouths because that's funny. My teeth are oppressing me, with actual spite! Hilarious! Oh, no, you mean, why are they teeth to begin with? Let's just say I had a trip to a new dentist last week and the visit was......how do you say.....enlightening. New worries in regards to my hygiene arose that made it doubly difficult for me to focus on the blog, thus the double oppression on my poor anime-self. Speaking of, if anything came out well in this drawing, I'd think that my rendition of myself did. I went for a more cartoony style using fewer lines of detail and less attention to realistic shapes, and I think in that regard it looks alright.