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.

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.