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.