Another Lonely Valentine's Day

For a man it could be either the best or the worst time of year.

Usually when I feel like blogging I have something really thoughtful to jot down. Something I would like to read when I take a look back on the blog. I had something real nice planned to write about but... I woke up this morning and realized it was Valentine's Day... Even worse I came to another realization that I woke up single on Valentine's Day! ;_;

To be honest I can't really complain about it, I spent the entire year working on getting my life on track and whatnot, and didn't even have a single serious thought about pursuing a love life of any sort. But hell, all of the neglect seriously comes back to bite you in the ass on this day. At least I'm not the only one haha. My pal Steve and I are going to go out in about an hour or so for lunch so we can cry about our ailing love lives haha. I'll probably have a glass of scotch later tonight or rum, it'll be a substitute for the warmth of a significant other at my side lol.... @_@

Okay Okay- thats my moping for today. This is still an art blog so of course I have art to show. Lately I've been super duper busy with papers and a few tests to work on in the past week. I quite literally couldn't find enough time to sit down and have a nice session of painting and drawing. Even on the weekend I had other painting assignments that I had to do for my art class tonight. In the end I've only gotten some sketch work done on a little anatomy self-study I did, a good lot of inking, and one watercolor piece in progress.

These are the sketches I was doing as a new approach to working on female figures. It turned out to help A LOT. Basically what I did was search up some new ways to draw female bodies, and came up with some really interesting references that actually went as far as drawing out the basic bone structures of the female body. I honestly felt like I was back in my physiology class laying out the bones of the human body haha. But thats when I made a huge discovery (well for myself of course)- female bodies are VASTLY different from males. I finally realized why all my female characters always had a hint of masculinity in their full body poses. Girls simply just have a lot more curves than you would normally think. Who knows, maybe if I watched more porn or something I wouldn't have this problem =_=; . 

So basically the hip area is really drawn out and exaggerated on a female body than a male. If I had to describe it, it has to have a nice "plump" feel to it for it to be considered a proper feminine body part. I never ever considered that a female hip could stick out so much because, hey, I've only got my own body to pull references from lol. In comparison male bodies are much more tubular, the only area they really pronounce themselves in is of course the chest area. There's also small differences in a male and a female, like the love handles. Male love handles always stick out, while female love handles are thankfully tucked in. Which is what makes a girl look sexy in a bikini or tight shorts with a semi short t-shirt. So the next time I have an issue with female proportions... I'll just look up human anatomy hehe.

I did a good bit of inking, and looking back on my blog I used to have inking problems. Well now it's no longer any problem at all =). If anything I've graduated to using color, my next obstacle. Inking is really simple and natural now so I didn't bother scanning over any other inked sketches. Instead I just have this incomplete water color piece. Water color is pretty difficult to control when you want to have certain values in the pic. Well in truth its probably because of my huge lack of experience in the coloring field, but hopefully I'll be able to hop over that curve once I get to use a computer instead. I wasn't able to finish this one because I was unsure of how to color in her skin. I'm really really scared of trying to mix water color paint, or trying to adjust its tone. Because if I screw up it'll be pretty damn scary trying to make it again. Well... I'll figure it out somehow.

Here's the latest thing I've done aside from my art class work. Using the stuff I learned I made a pretty a nice figure. Her arm is off a bit but my main focus here was to get all the right curves in her body. I honestly felt like I was drawing an alien because I'm just so used to drawing the simple shapes of a male body haha. But yeah, I'm starting to get a stronger and stronger grip on drawing female bodies so just a bit more practice and I'll have it down pat. I kind of want to complete this one though. I made little sketches and marks around her to figure out how to finish the pic but I'm not quite sure what to do. It's the 2nd last page in my sketch book too so I really don't want to waste it.

I'm really thankful to you guys who read this blog, I'm honestly surprised that people take interest in it. So I'll let you guys decide what to put in the background, and I'll do my best to pool the ideas together.

That's it for today, I'll be back in a few days or less with the things I really wanted to blog about.

Deciding what you want to do.

A few days ago sano asked a really good question in his comment. He basically asked what was it like in the art department of studies.

Because I used to be just a business student and nothing else, it was one hell of an experience to get into some art courses. It's completely different. The work ethic is like day and night compared to the business courses. By that I mean you could have a management class with one or two bozos lazing around and not caring about how each class they doze off in costs them $300+ or w/e it is. You will almost never see that in an art class. Never. For a good reason too.

Recently I've had a lot of mental conflict about how I've been going about with the things I love in life. I'm a really really laid back guy. It's one of my good points haha. It's one of the reasons why I get along with a lot of  people even if they are not on good terms with friends on the other end of the relationship tree. But that's also my problem, being too laid back.

I finished my dot project on the final piece of 19 x 24 bristol paper. It was horrible. Absolutely horrible. I went along with doing it with my usual swagger- "spend only a couple of hours on it, and not give much of a damn of how it comes out, it's all good as long as it is done." That sort of mediocre effort in an art course WILL show. And it will show it's ugly face in the most embarrassing way possible in an art course. Because when the projects are done, we hang them up for everyone to see. Needless to say, with a half-assed paint job and the obvious evidence that I had spent less than half an hour designing and laying out the composition- it was a complete disappoint. I even saw the professor sigh when he looked at it. I was the only one in the class who had done poorly, and everyone knew it.

So yeah it's a tough environment. But thats a good thing. If you truly love what you do, and you want to improve- you have to have people who will push you to become better. After the critique session, I knew that it was my calling. This is it, this is the time for me to really step up and really forge a career out of the things I love.

Money is just money, and money isn't everything. I used to believe that money was everything last year before I went on my "break". But in truth money really isn't what makes you successful. It's that fulfilling feeling you get when you accomplish something in a field you truly feel passionate for. In regards to Sano's comment & question, he mentioned about having trouble deciding between doctor or art. To be honest man, the right choice is always the one you feel more passionate for. If you really love helping people then aim for those medical schools, if you love art, go for an art school.

Here's real advice from a guy who already went through the "What do I want to do with my life phase". The biggest mistake I've ever made in my life was deciding on what school and major to take based upon how it would pay off and how difficult it would be to obtain that job, rather than choosing based on what I really love to do. It sounds cheesy, and some would call it risky- but following your dreams is actually the best decision you can make for your life. And you don't have to be too far from reality to achieve your dream. Some people say "I want to be a star", sounds silly right? But in truth you can come close to your dream by being realistic, while having an opportunity to still achieve it.

And you cannot be afraid. I was afraid, and I ended up wasting a year because of it. Even if things don't work out, you're still in a win-win situation, because then you'll come a step closer to figuring out what you're going to do for a career. I wasted a year trying to be a finance/accounting major, but it was also a worthwhile year because I found out that I really hated that form of business. Now I am completely content with my switch to Information systems (because I'm better than the average person with computers, and I love it) Major and Graphic Design Minor.

It's a struggle to achieve my goal of one day working as an graphic designer/illustrator, but I love everything about it.

Since yesterday after my failure I've been sketching non-stop. These are just a few of the whole lot I've been doing. I've been putting in a lot more effort now, and tackling those problems areas I've been having. It's gone to the point where I've tried new things like using guidelines to help me make sure everything is even like in the first sketch. Another thing I've been lacking is energy so I've had quite a few sketches like the first one at the beginning the sketch in the middle here, where I tried to give some humor or funny expressions. And then the dreaded female figure... sometimes I get it right, sometimes it's completely off. The one to the far right here is off in certain areas, it makes me want to throw a fit lol.

Instead of just taking a picture I scanned these from before. It sure looks a whole lot better scanned...

Well back to work, long blog is long.

More Dots and Snow

Rain, sleet, and snow. Lots of snow. Too much snow. Seriously it's been like what? Three weeks straight where we've been hit with like a snow storm, and a week or two before that where we've been hit by a storm.

Buuuut of course Suffolk still opens its doors despite the fact that we have raging blizzard going on out the window of my ISOM class. TBH it's a bit of a mixed feeling now. I actually like the fact that the school is still open, because well, I enjoy  going to school lol. Not going to school for just a semester completely changed my views about what I want to do. And that just happened to be going to school and learning the stuff I want to learn.


Here's what I've been in class recently. At first we were doing just tons of Dots. Like literally dots across a 19 x 24 piece of bristol paper. It was too boring for me to take a picture of so I decided to not upload it. Using tumblr (trying out tumblr now yes...) with pictures and whatnot turned out to be pretty troublesome anyway... But anyways here's two resolved thumbnails I did. I drew out a ton of smaller ones to get my ideas worked out and did 2 of them to scale here.

It's pretty basic. Rules are 3 - 4 shapes per region. If they overlap change its color from either white or black accordingly. I felt pretty happy about the one of the right. When the professor reviewed it he was like "oh shit, this is great" he didn't really have anything bad to say at all about it. It had a lot of small areas where the color would change so I guess he just liked how there was so much attention to that particular detail. TBH I just threw shapes around randomly without having to really worry about placement lol.

In the end we would end having to paint it out using acrylic on bristol paper. The actual painting itself was only 6 x 11 which is stupid imo since I just wasted a massive sheet of bristol for almost nothing. Surprisingly enough, the small painting took me about 2 hours to finish since I really had to be careful not to make the lines too "organic" looking. Making things look straight and civilized is not one of my strong points so it sucked....

But yeah since I was able to learn how to draw out figures properly I finally saw some real concrete progress in my stuff. The three earlier were done observationally, but it was quite good just going over all the body parts and drilling them into my head so that I know what goes where. This pic here was pulled out of my ass, I screwed up a few times at first but eventually it came out pretty well.

Last pic here is one that I've done recently. I was originally just testing out my sumi ink and brush while practicing different dots, but then I ended drawing out the face, the coat, her scarf, and went on from there lol. For some reason I really like those dark cityscape pictures. In the future I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes one of the main themes of my stuff. Especially once I take those computer art classes so I can use illustrator and photoshop.

Well that's all for tonight. I'll stick around tumblr to see how it is. Not too happy so far though =_=, too many little annoying bugs.

Busy week as usual, but there's always room for fun.

I don't I can ever get used to how irregular the weather is in New England. The order of events makes sense.. but the weather changes so often that it really screws up my mood =P. Like for example one day it'll be really nice and sunny, and the next day it'll be pouring down cold hard rain... And to make things worst I wouldn't dress properly for the day lol. On the sunniest and hottest day of the week I had a jacket and a polo on because it was chilly in the morning... when the sun was up I was sweating my ass off... the next day I wore just a T-Shirt and a beater underneath... it rained. But I still found ways to get around all the homework and office appointments to find time to draw and practice a little bit here and there. I sacrificed a chunk of my library study time to read up a bit on different techniques in sketching and learn about interior design so I would be able to draw out rooms for my characters. But in the end I just continued to work on fixing the body proportions of my characters, and I'm happy to say that success can be seen.

Here's my first attempt for the week at improving my proportions. I had a little advice from Hana saying that my torso's were a bit too short. So since I had no other leads as to why my characters looked so odd before, I got straight to work. Here in the picture above I drew out a boy and a girl, obviously I extended the torsos, and in my opinion it was a little too much lol. The guy doesn't look too bad, he's probably just a tad bit too long in the torso area, like as if the area around his stomach and down were dragged around. The girl has the same problem except its a little bit more severe. Plus her head is fat.. lolol.

So just because it didn't come as I wanted it to be right away, doesn't mean it wasn't a step forward. I don't know if its just me, or manga, or art in general- but goddamn... the subtlest changes in a picture can make a big difference. It still looks off but it still looks a bit better than what I had drawn before. So I was right, there really were hurdles I wouldn't be able to overcome within a year of practice. I mean I would've gone on for another 3 weeks resizing the leg, making it longer and making it shorter only to find out that its still not right- after those weeks I'd go about doing something else which still may not be the solution. Hana's little bit of advice went a long way, I finally came to terms with that and I went out to the library to read some GOOD drawing/sketching books. So I practiced this time making thumbnails!! =D I did a whole lot of them, and to be honest it was a lot better making thumbnails than drawing out detailed drawings bit by bit.

After going through 5 pages completely filled up with messy thumbnails I gave it another try. It was really "meh" quality. I didn't put much effort into making it look good, for the most part I was focusing on getting the right proportions throughout the bodies. At least I felt a whole lot more comfortable with drawing a full figure. Yet it all looked jumbled together. I had all the pieces to the puzzle, but couldn't put them together neatly and smoothly. Soooo it was back to thumbnails, eventually I got a little bored of drawing random still drawings, so I made a bunch of thumbnails for panels.

I drew a bunch of thumbnails for some panels but this was one of the few I through with. The top half of the pic is inked in, but the bottom half was left alone because of laziness lol. It was pretty mediocre, but the idea behind it was not bad at all. I remember when I was over my friends house at a bbq, some guy asked his girlfriend to make him a sandwich. So I thought hmm, how about the guy make the sandwich for the girlfriend lol.

Here's the second lucky thumbnail that was published into a drawing. I really wasn't happy with how the first one came out so I drew this one out with a more comfortable mindset. It's a weird thing that's hard to describe.. like when I draw my characters with the goal to give them moeblob-esk eyes, bodies, school uniforms, and faces- they always turn out to be unauthentic looking (probably because I compare them too much to the real deal). Here in the picture above is how I draw my characters the way I've naturally done so before last year when I started to attempt to go more into those moeblob styled characters. I think less, try less, and feel less exhausted after finishing a drawing in my own style rather than following what other people have done. It doesn't look bad but.. I don't know if it'll fit well with slice of life genre manga lol. But in the end I was happy with it. So I went ahead and gave another push to improve body proportions.

I must say, this has to be the most successful attempt I've made to date. I liked what I did in the panel sketch above this one so I took those characters and redrew them out on a sketch I made of Boston Common the day before. Once again I brought out everything I learned and did my best to make it look proportional AND too make it look good. I would've been pissed as hell if I screwed up again and made them all look like a bunch of scrambled together body parts. But alas I didn't screw up, the trio came out great. I didn't draw their feet, but everything from the feet and up look good. All in All I'm very satisfied with the progress I've made after this week. Just judging from this pic it looks like I've just about jumped over another hurdle on my way to mangaka level drawing, and man it feels good.

Haa... Not a bad week.. not a bad week at all. Played poker, got work done, not too much stress, nice and easy going... hehe. For next week I'll have to force myself to ink... I'm still too scared to do it.. but my drawings are improving so its about that time to ink more. Hmm it wouldn't be a bad idea to find a book on it too, oo I should buy nibs to see how those work. But what's really been on my mind is my guitar. It's buried under a mound of clothes and its E string has been broken for months. Ever since the second season of K-ON!! came out I've been itching to play. Their new songs look like a lot of fun to play to. Learning and playing Cagayake Girls was friggin awesome, so it wouldn't be a bad idea to pick up the guitar again to play. I just don't like the reason I began learning how to play my guitar... I learned it in order to play tunes to my favorite anime songs lol. Yes sir, that's right, I learned to shred so I can play along with a bunch of anime girls. It just sucks when people ask me to play an actual american rock song... /facepalm.

So many things to look forward, if only school wasn't in the way. Finals are coming in less than a month *shiver* =[ At least I have a long summer vacation and a trip to France to look forward too hehe... well its time stop typing and watch all that anime I've been downloadin during this blog.

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...