Finally a Break

Deprived of Sleep

I don't I've ever had such tiring week like this before. By tiring I don't mean by exercising and going out (because that usually gives me more energy), but it's more from work and lack of sleep. And believe me I was lacking A LOT of sleep... 

Typically I go through my school hours running on at least 5 hours of sleep. But stupidly enough I kept staying up later than usual to try to catch up on my anime so 3-4 days of the week I've had less than 3 hours of sleep on each day. If it I were still in High School I would have skipped every class haha. Thankfully enough my classes were interesting enough for me to want to wake up for school and go on that 1 hour and 30 minute commute. But even so I'm pretty disappointed in my performance this week. There were some really important things that needed to be done early that I overlooked and ended up suffering for. So from now on I can't let myself slip in anyway. Hopefully my grades haven't suffered too much, but what I'm really worried about is my health insurance.

There are some things you should never procrastinate on.

Yup. I went and fucked up on health insurance. I sent in my application for a new health plan the day it was due. So now I am without health insurance, and I have no idea whether or not the application will go through until perhaps a week from now. To make matters worse I have an oral surgery appointment coming Tuesday. If I don't know by Monday if I'm covered or not then I'll have to cancel the appointment. And I hope that I won't be charged late fees for canceling the day before the appointment...

But at least this weeks over. Even though I know that there will be a lot of "hair pulling" action going on for next week I should do what I can to relax and prepare beforehand. I think this time around I really need to settle down and do some work over this weekend rather than doing things at my leisure. So tonight I'll watch more anime (I have like 10 Episodes to watch...) Get some practice done, especially watercolor since my professor just gave us an assignment to do a watercolor bit on a sphere density exercise (I think it'll come out pretty cool). And I'll possibly be able to add something to that new Animetology tab I put up. I like writing analysis and review for anime in a serious fashion. It annoys me to no end when people put out low level reviews on those anime forums. Light analysis I can bear with, but I never ever have seen anyone other than myself and the denizens of 4chan do hard analysis on anime. Sunday, get shit some real shit done so on Monday I can relax and contemplate about what to do about my health insurance and my car (my car broke down too WTF). 

Bunny Drop

I'm glad I went and did a little manga shopping while I was at Borders with my friends. So on trip to and from school I read the first volume of Bunny Drop. For some reason I'm a real sucker for seinen slice of life mangas. It's probably because I'm always thinking about the future and whatnot. I mean, it wouldn't much of a  surprise if I got married in a couple years from now. Time really does move that fast @_@. But anyways, Bunny Drop, as you can see here, is very similar to My Girl. Which is basically the plot having a single Father raise up a little girl. Except in this one, our main character, Daikichi, starts off much older- at 30. 

30 is an extremely interesting age for the protagonist to start off at. Almost all the time the oldest protagonist you will see is in his early 20's or mid 20's. Late 20's obviously is just too depressing. At 30 is just the right age since you're basically coming to acknowledge that you will be in the process of preparing to enter your "middle-age" phase of life.

Its a really mature story

I put my detective skills to work and found out that the mangaka submits her work to a magazine aimed towards young adult women. She has several different random works published but Bunny Drop seems to be her biggest and main project. The manga has some really nice thought provoking moments where your adulthood gets challenged. And what's great is how all of those moments are based off on the real thoughts of her friends as they go through parenthood. So all of it is quite genuine.

The manga industry seriously needs more slice of life series to get published... They are just soooo good. I mean most of the eccentric otaku population is made up of older men in their 20's and up, so it would only make sense to make more of them. Because I'm seriously getting tired of the typical harem and ecchi series that keep showing their ugly face.

Well I'll probably be back later tonight with some sketches to talk about. I want to revisit male characters after reading bunny drop. Unita Yumi does a really good job at creating a mature male character, not just art-wise, but personality wise as well.

Practice Makes Perfect

Top Ten Signs That a guy is a Valentine's Day Loser

1. He says stuff like “I don’t like sweets anyway!”

2. He buys chocolates himself when he gets home

3. He keeps checking his desk for chocolates

4. A more popular guy shares his chocolates with him

5. He stays on at work saying he still has things to do

6. He bears a pained expression all day

7. He gets asked to call another guy over to a girl

8. He starts unconsciously fidgeting a lot

9. He’s playing a dating sim on a handheld

10. He starts picking on guys who did receive chocolates

I am guilty of number 6 and number 10 haha. After my sad meet-up with my single bros I went home got drunk out of my mind with a few glasses of henny scotch and rum. And while I was drunk I drew A LOT of erotic stuff lol!!! I won't be putting that up though, it's just soo.... I mean I could be a really good eroge artist if I wanted to lol.... @_@.

Obligatory Pic

Today was great though. I started off  with a massive hangover of course because I got home after art class around 10 at night and started drinking from then to 2 in the morning. So when I woke up at 5:30 to get to school, I was still drunk as hell lol. But at noontime I got to eat lunch with a few old good friends of mine. It was really awesome since we finally were able to see face-to-face and just catch up on what had been going on in our lives. We also talked about how we were coming to the realization that we were now entering our early 20's =_=. So that means if I walked back into school I'd basically be able to teach a class since I was the same age as those adjunct teachers lol. A little depressing if you ask me, at least we can go buy alcohol whenever.

So that was my day. What I really wanted to talk about was how Practice makes Perfection. This was a topic of an article on Sankaku news and to be frank it was quite inspiring to look at some of the progress people had made in their work. Many great artists today started out like any other person scribbling away at a piece of paper. Slowly over a decade they've come to create some very legitimate looking anime art. 

And there's still more but I didn't want to clutter up the entire page with all those pics. But yeah, really look at the progress all of these people have made. To be honest it's quite similar to my own progress. I've been drawing for quite a long time now and in comparison to these people I'd probably put myself at about halfway or a little closer to 3/4's of the way to getting to where I want. I've also noticed that there are certain spikes in progress for some of these people which I find to be EXTREMELY interesting. That means something around that year in particular helped them to significantly level up their skills. This could be anything that would've motivated them to seriously churn out tons of work and get that experience under their belt. That's why I find it so exciting because I think I'm about to hit that phase myself.

When you try to improve yourself in whatever trade it is, you HAVE to have some kind of motivation behind it. The best kind of motivation is just having fun, i'd imagine that after these people got a hold of some kind of technology or some kind of new technique they must've have gone nuts because they could say "Oh my god, I'm so close to creating the stuff I want to create". 

I want to make illustration with the same quality as you would see in anime, particularly stuff from the Shaft Studio. But the problem with that is that I simply do not have the tools to make that stuff. I would need a tablet, and the instruction needed to learn how to work those crazy programs. I opened up photoshop one day and spent 3 hours carefully coloring in a face. It had a nice finish but it was just too time consuming and I had no clue how to navigate the program. But I have a feeling that once summer rolls around and I'll have access to that stuff... man I just can't wait to see what I can do.

For now I just need to keep working on playing around with colors and learn how to create different themes with different choices in color. I really want to create a nice vibrant feel, but not a hard knocking feel, more like a soft-handed touch sorta feel. All that really involves different soft tones put on top of eachother with a good background color that won't retract to much from the pic. I think my BG coloring right now needs to rely on the white of the paper a lot more, because quite honestly all I see is a fat block of nonsense, when the focus should be on the character.

No art today since I spent a night drawing ero stuff lol, was planning to upload my old drawings from like 2000 - 2005 but I'm too lazy to go through all the old piles haha. 

Got tons of homework, so off I go...

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.