A little bit of improvement. =]

UGH! This has to be the most topsy-turvy week I've ever had all year long. Its one of those weeks where you have a lot of good things happening and a lot of bad things (>.<). I COULD NOT GOTO THE ANIME CONVENTION FOR FRIDAY AND SATURDAY~TUDHIUQE@IHOE# !@#@ !H#UO Y U*O#Y!I!!!!!111!!111 I had absolutely no one to cover me at work for the those days.. and the people I thought who could cover me apparently had other plans =(. *sigh* at least I can goto Anime Boston on Sunday...

Besides the papers due, exams done, and the financial office visits - putting those all aside, I've managed to do quite a few sketches in this one week. And I gotta say I'm pretty happy with what I've done. It's a small bit of improvement but it's a sign of progress, which means that hey- its not impossible for a regular guy like me to create a doujin or manga, or w/e terminology it was. This week I focused pretty heavily on working with the upper body. I played around with my characters a little bit, I had them scratch their heads, put an arm around another, make gestures, approach evil lightbulbs, etc. Briefly by the end of the week I began to do a little work on the lower body as well, which proved to be a very good challenge.

Here was the first sketch of the week. At this time I was pretty frustrated with awkward my characters would look when I tried to draw them in an actual panel. It was as if they were slightly off in proportion in some areas and perfectly fine in others. Last post I concluded that it was because of the size I was drawing at. Drawing in really small spaces can screw up your senses when you're trying to fit in those small details. So for the first sketch of the week I was like alright, I'll start off boldly with a full paged drawing of an entire figure. Surprisingly enough it didn't come out so badly. I took note of all the areas I had the most difficulty of, which would be the shoulder width and the legs. The shoulders were easy to deal with since all I had to do was shave 'em off little by little until they looked right, but the legs.... they were a pain. I don't know if its just the way I look at it but it seems to me that the legs are just a litttttle bit too short, and a bit thick around the calves. Although they may actually be completely fine in terms of thickness considering how little effort artists tend to put into the legs of a character they draw. Sometimes the legs are really slender but look completely fine with the whole picture. But it may be an issue with the leg length alone...

On the night I played poker I never mentioned what I was doing after I lost.. My friends persuaded me to draw some hentai as a treat to them =_= And so I did, and was very surprised at how well it came out and how much better I understood body proportions after that. Maybe I just need to look up more reference images of bodies to get a better understanding of them, afterall, they do have you draw naked models in art school for a good reason. But I never drew out the mid section in much detail, I just couldn't do it =_=, shit I really don't want to draw real hentai, but because of that that may be why I have difficulty filling in the gap between the torso and the legs, making the legs seem short. =P

Alright moving on..

After the first sketch I pretty much went on and on sketching randomly... it was decent practice, but I didn't "finish" any of the work at all. So basically I'm still lacking a lot of skill in my inking. The first picture in this set has some inking, but not much really. At least it looks better then what I had before, but it's not even in a panel. The second picture I was thinking about doing a short quick comic, but I digressed and it turned into a sham =P. By the time I got to the 3rd sketch in this set I figured that I haven't drawn a man in a while since I was in high school, I was afraid I would've been a little rusty, but hehe it came out fine. All I had to do was take off my shirt 'n flex lol.

These two sketches were freshly etched out this afternoon before I closed up my store at work. I was in the working mood so I went a little further with my sketches and tried to draw the environment around them. The picture on the top had a lot more going on than any of my other sketches. I drew a girl sitting down cross-legged with cards out to play, I drew out a dresser, a pillow to sit on, a rug, and a clock in the background, so it looked pretty nice and cozy. It would've come out better if I used a ruler for some of the lines. Right next to it is a shot in a neighborhood, typical suburban setting in Japan with Two-story buildings surrounding the streets and I made sure to have the telephone poles and its cables around to keep it realistic. On the bottom side of the sketch is a little fanart of Tainaka Ritsu from K-ON! hehe. Now for the bottom picture, it was purely a sketch done out of fun of boredem... I drew a guy all geared out and ready to pull out a lightbulb, and on his right is a girl about to yank on a 

big evil lookin bulb. 

This is the last one I sketched up for the day. This whole time I haven't put any effort at all into paying attention to the faces and hair of my characters. I was focused solely on improving their bodies so I quickly sketched through their faces on a whim. So I figured I needed to brush up a bit and properly draw their faces. And believe me, its a really satisfying experience to design a character properly. It's like, on one sheet of paper you may have some good figures drawn out but they seem have no impact, or to be exact no "soul". When I design a character its pretty much a process of thinking about their personality, and then disecting their face, their hair, and body bit by bit and then putting it together. I'm not sure other people do it but I'm most comfortable with this method. And when its done- It feels as if I actually created an anime character hehe. But of course in reality people draw their prototypes over and over until they come to a decision. 

I have a lot more sketches.. but they're just sketches not even any thumbnails if I wanted to do a few panels =_=.. I've done almost no inking at all this week~ /shame on me. SO next week I've gotta summon up all my courage get to work on that, no bitchin out this time, if I ruin a fine penciled in piece of work, who cares I'll jus draw another one, ~I gotta work on inking, drawing environments, and lower body proportions.

Yup. Me 2 Kuroi-sensei. Feels good when its done.

Art update #2!

Lol.... the most fun thing I can find to do now is just trying to improve on my artistic skills. Good thing its a productive activity.

I remember when I was 8 years old. Man I was obsessed with doodling, I would draw over any piece of paper I could put my little hands on. I don't know why I did it, but I doodled away and naturally I began to like a certain way of drawing. Which ended up being Anime characters =P. I'm so glad that I kept almost ALL of my old anime drawings since 7th grade. I still have first sketch, my first attempt at drawing someone, which looks god awful now but I was so proud of it when I was a little boy.... What's really interesting is looking how a person's skill and technique become better and better as they get older. Each one of my sketchbooks represented one year of drawing (until my junior year when I doodled through sketchbooks like nothin). Each year I noticed that I would improve in certain areas where I was weakest because I hated lookin at how ugly my drawings would be. And each year after that I would notice new things about my old artwork from last year that needed improvement that I had not noticed the year I drew it. Pretty neat stuff...

So I did some research and it turns out that your brain subconsciously goes through your thoughts when you sleep and basically sits there and ponders over it so that when you wake up you'll have a better grasp/understanding of it. So that means when I draw a picture in one year, I may not be able to pick out its flaws until I have another year of experience in art. That's probably why we have Professors rushing us to steamroll through books with their guidance... Learning to improve my art alone will obviously mean that I'll be practicing for years and years before I can get on the same level as the mangakas themselves.

Well I finally went out to buy some new pens and a nice big drawing pad to work with. With all the ingredients for a page of manga-styled drawing I got to work and came up with the pic above. Things really come to life when you ink it in and use some toners. Looking back on pencil sketches were nice but nothing can beat a fully done job. I'm just really surprised at how clean it looks when its scanned because when I was puttin in the toners I didn't use the right kind of knife... so the whole thing looks REALLY butchered up when you look at it up close IRL. But yeah.. it was a fun thing to make, its a nice representation of my break from WoW, Kruloc is the name of my character.

Theres definitely a lot I need to work on though.. One of the biggest things that separates authentic looking manga and mediocre doujinshi is the consistency of the line quality. Like the lines can be thick and ugly but as long as its consistent, it really looks like an authentic piece of manga. Here my lines are shaky and they're in different sizes. Probably due to my inexperience with inking =(. I'll just stick to one pen size for now and let the toners do the rest.

Tried to scan it in black and white like Connie said but it didn't work =(

So I figured that I needed to practice inking a lot more. It turns out that one of the biggest causes of a bad ink job is "lack of confidence" lol. I was too scared of screwin up so the pic with the toners and everything looked unnatural. Here I did a quick and harmless sketch and inked in a little bit without stressing over anything and they looked a lot better. Buuuut I still got to work on getting the right body proportions down. Deep down in my mind I can tell that something is really off proportion-wise, therefore making the whole character look freaky... its just that I can't pinpoint what it is because I haven't practiced enough =_=

I'm going to have to search up some kind of Manga-related art program to help me do this stuff because toners get used up quick and they can get expensive. Having a tablet and knowing how to use all those complex programs will probably cut down the time to make a page in half. Toning and inking things can take up a whole day of work =P.

If I drew more every week during high school I'd probably be a lot better now. But nope... late nights and video games were a real cock-block there...Well letsee... work on inking and bodies. If I keep practicing heavily and not screwing around maybe I might be somewhat decent by the time I'm 22 or something. Bleh who knows...