News on Current state of Anime-related things in Japan

People in Japan are stocking up on bottled water

It's been nearly 2 weeks since the last release of several series since the earthquake. Before in my last blog I had mentioned that it could be either the sources providing us with anime or the people themselves who help make the anime that could've have been been badly affected by the quake. Well I've just found out that it's the  mangakas, seiyuus, musicians... pretty much a broad variety of people within the anime industry have been affected in some way or another, and cannot continue work as a result.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/lv?hl=en&key=tlRwC3JdVoCl2MEjKOqPDUA&hl=en&f=true&gid=0

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?hl=en&hl=en&key=tJGqk96XYAsMueFout6fz4Q&authkey=CNjfz9sC#gid=3

Those are the 2 spreadsheets that I looked over to find that information. Hopefully the unconfirmed people are safe and sound, it has already been confirmed that Kakoi Hiroshi, the 1980 Astro Boy animator, former Macross series animator then producer, has died. When someone like the animator for Astro Boy dies, its just really really tragic...

I've been going down the list of unconfirmed people and I really think I'm going to go to church for once and pray for these people, seriously its a huge loss for anime fans everywhere if these people are in trouble. I really just wish there was another way to help them directly rather than donating =(.

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.

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.

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...