Wasn't this an Art Blog O.o?

It's been far far too long since the last time I've posted any of my art onto this blog. Shit I don't even update as much as I would like anymore. Spring has finally come (supposedly, although it did snow last week) so I cut up even more of free recreational time for working out. Before it used to be goto school -> go home and study -> Talk to friends through skype and play games together -> draw out my own non-school related art. So to fit in blogging I would I have to cut down on my studying hours or my gaming time with my friends. But now that spring has come and I feel a huge need to workout, I've decided to stop playing games so regularly and use that time to either draw/blog and use the leftover hours of the night to go out running. And with that I've made some nice strides in my artwork =). 

Tech pen and washed ink with brush

During the past few weeks I have made the gradual transition from the usual tech pen inking I do to the authentic doujinshi style with a quill pen/nib pen/dip pen lol I'll just call it the nib pen. It has made a huge difference in the way my lines behaved. Absolutely huge. I couldn't figure out why with all the effort I put into my drawings they never looked the same as a doujinshi. Heck even the lowest quality doujinshi out there had that "look" that separated itself from an American comic as a Japanese Doujinshi. The difference was simply the tools used, well the art style too, but the tools were the key things I was missing. 

 First 4-koma doujinshi, done with tech pen and ink wash

Didn't know how to end it so I gave it an abrupt one haha...

I couldn't figure it out until I finally took it upon myself to draw out a simple 4-koma (4 panel) doujinshi. It was my first one but by now I had all the techniques I needed to properly create one. No matter how I would thicken the lines and variate them I could not achieve the same Japanese looking quality I wanted. I mean it looked great when it was all finished, scanning it made the ink tones really transparent but in person it looked like a passable comic. 

First two panels Tech pen and ink wash only, 3rd & 4th are with quill pen

Here I used a quill pen for the first time, along with following a more accurate Japanese 4-koma format since the first attempt had some really weird measurements. Well I've used quill pens in the past before but the ones my teacher handed me were some god awful quality ones. To be honest I didn't really understand the concept of "nib" pens because I simply didn't understand what a nib was lol. It wasn't until I read a label saying it was a "quill" pen that I realized how I was supposed to use it. Unfortunately I didn't have beginner's luck with it. As you can see in the last two panels where it was used I had a really hard time controlling the lines and adjusting to the quill pen itself after using a tech pen for so long. In the 3rd panel I found out how careful I needed to be the hard way, so that would explain the huge blotch of ink spilling out on the top of the panel.

Quill pen only after a few days of practice

I had to do quite a bit of practice to get the pen under control. I'm glad I spotted the difference between tech pens and quill pens right from my 2nd attempt at 4-koma. It was discouraging to mess up so much, but I recognized how the lines behaved so well. With a tech pen you will always have the same thickness and quality in the line. It makes your drawing look very neat, but it will also make it look very lifeless, very inorganic. With a quill pen the lines can have slight variations in thickness without me having to even try.

One of my practice drawings

As I practiced more and more, the quality of the lines just got better and better. This one here is one of my best examples from my sketches. If I had inked it in with just a tech pen it would look so plain, blocky, and lifeless. With a quill pen I think I've gotten a whole lot closer to achieving the quality of art I've been looking for since the day I told myself that I wanted to create a book of doujinshi 6 years ago. 

... I just wish I had done this all sooner... The main reason why I had not attempted to continually make doujinshi is 1. My art sucked and 2. I didn't know how to properly make a doujinshi. I've only started now because I was becoming desperate. I honestly don't have much time left to draw so freely... I really need to make this year and next year count. If I can sell just one book at a booth at AnimeBoston then I will have achieved one of my life goals. 

Greyscale on left, Black only on Right

So now I'm more equipped than I ever was to draw doujinshi. I've been crunching out art a lot more casually now with less effort, so the aspect of diving into the world of doujinshi isn't as scary as it used to be back in high school. This one here is an unfinished one. I accidentally kicked my sketchbook (I don't know how..) and a piece of the page got torn, funny it doesn't show up on the scan =_=. But here its showcasing some of my next big hurdles in drawing. First of all, there's not enough content, so I need to get used to drawing smaller and fill in the panel with richer content. Second, is the ink washing I've been doing in place of toners. I hated using toners, but toners seriously give a huge boost making your doujinshi look an authentic Japanese one. Even when I was doing K-ON fanart I made it with toners and god, it looked like a page out of a manga. I'm pretty sure there's an example of one of my original works with toners. The art sucked but it looked good just because I used toners.

Technically I could use a computer to do toners digitally, but I just don't have access to that =P. I'm quite sure a lot of doujins apply toners manually. Maybe there's a trick to it... Because shit it wasn't fun spending 3 hours painstakingly cutting and pasting toners on finished inked panels. I kept accidentally cutting into the paper as well, it didn't show up on the scan but it noticeable in person.

Well this is good progress. 4-Komas are nice and simple, great for drawing out slice of life genre doujinshi. Hopefully this will develop into a daily habit. 

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 =(.

Took a mini Hiatus

I went and enjoyed my spring break so I didn't really think about putting anything up on the blog during the time. I've been wanting to become more active about making blogs buuut I just kind of blew it off once spring break started. In fact I think it has been almost two weeks since the last post was made. But now that the week is ending I should get back to my usual old routine otherwise I'll wake-up grumpy without my 4 am bed-time and a 12 noontime awakening.

Anyways back to the topic on my mind. A lot of things have happened over the week that has had an impact on anime fans all around the world. Which of course is due to the earthquake in Japan. I think going into detail about all the politics and mishaps going on with the Japanese government atm should be saved for a real discussion rather than a blog... Prime Minister of Japan - claims to have extensive knowledge of nuclear power plants ( I /facepalm to that)... Okinawa news article saying that "Operation Tomodachi" was inappropriate... the operation was a basically a relief effort from the US military stationed nearby Okinawa, Okinawans were in  tears of joy when aid came. Even 2ch was humbled by it, people were more glad to see US aid than the SDF =_=, yet we were still criticized.

Yeah, the list goes on, but at least Japanese culture allows for recovery from natural disasters to be much smoother and more civil than other parts of the world *cough Katrina cough*.

So now how do I connect this with anime? Well for an avid anime fan that carefully watches every new series that gets released every season I've noticed some very scary delays in releases. I think a few days after the earthquake in Japan a good handful of new episodes weren't released on time, so it really makes you say "Oh shit... this is not right..". I read the newspaper everyday to follow financial reports and just to keep track of world news regularly, so when I saw the headlines about Japan everything just became so surreal.

Shamefully- I will admit the first things that came to mind were "Omg I hope all the studios are okay". =( I quickly dismissed that thought and reminded myself that this is a friggin natural disaster. But god I felt like an ass for worrying about anime.

Ironically enough I think it was 2-3 months ago, so perhaps last season or the season before that there was an anime called Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 that was basically a simulation of what would happen to Japan if there was an earthquake. I didn't finish the series, but so far the simulation seem pretty spot-on except for the Tsunami bit that actually happened. So yeah, the Japanese were really well aware that an earthquake was bound to come sooner or later (70% chance of an earthquake of a magnitude of at least 7.0- yup).

It seems like things anime wise are gradually coming back under control. But it has only been a week since the quake so we won't really know if every studio is quite okay. Because even if they are deeper into the mainland, there's always family and friends that may have been victims to the Tsunami and the quake. Puella Magi Madoka- the super duper amazing Mahou Shoujo anime by the legendary handsome Shaft Studios has recently been canceled. Initially there was a ton of resistance for the show to be canceled, and after awhile it seemed like the show was going to remain in production, but right after the quake it seemed like the committee threw their hands up and said "Fuck this, we just got hit by a big earthquake lets move on"- very understandable I have to say... but damn.. its a shame that the best anime we've seen so far since the beginning of 2011 and a good part of 2010 (if not 2010 as a whole) is going to be canceled.

But other than the star of year getting canceled, there are quite a few a series that haven't been released yet, or air-ed I should say.

As of right now shows like Kimi Ni Todoke, Rio Rainbow, Freezing, Infinite Stratos, To Aru Majutsu no Index II, Yumekui Merry have not shown up yet...at all. Even the torrents with raws haven't shown up. Usually they're out at night or early in the wee hours of the morning, and even when they're late they're out by the afternoon. So there are two things that might be going on right now-

1. Our "source" of anime Japan has been affected by quake. So even it is airing, there is no one to provide us foreigners with anime.

OR

2. The studios and broadcasting companies themselves have fallen due the natural disasters, so no one is getting anime.

I still feel a little guilty just going on about anime, but hey I'm just doing my part as a blogger, or in other words, an independent journalist haha.

Be back hopefully by the beginning of the week  can get back on track with the usual art stuff. Over break I've started applying what I've learned and put it in 4Koma Manga format, and it came out surprisingly well. I was thinking that if I can keep it up I can do a daily manga strip everyday. Well thats it for now, got to enjoy the little time I have left. No pictures this time... or maybe I'll just add  them in when I get home. It's boring to just look at a wall of text.

"I love you Kana"

What, you're 21? Hmm, how 'bout be we go for a drink tonight?

Odd title for a blog entry? I would agree as well. But its one of those days you can't help but feel that way. One of those days when everything in the world seemed right for once (I haven't smoked any weed in about a month so this mellowness is legit! =O).

I woke up, 5:30 in the morning- not hungover, not pissed, in fact I was feeling great. I've been meaning to make a post earlier in the week to put up some of my drawings and paintings up for critique and self-analysis, but I've been doing something much more important that has taken up all my free blogging time. And that would be me doing away with my horrible procrastination habits. That's right, damn straight, I didn't procrastinate for once, and it was great. I painted everything that needed to be done a day beforehand, did all my chemistry work, AND took 30 photos for my next assignment that was due a week away! 

"うん！いいよ。"－ And I was like "Awww yeaaa"

So I had a lot of free time to enjoy for myself. The greatest part about getting things done earlier is the fact that it relieves all that built up stress you have from worrying over work. Living with stress is actually one of the biggest downers in life that most people disregard. Instead I find that most people put the blame on the actual work thats due. But really I believe that it's just the stress going along with the work that makes it such a pain in the ass. So instead of saying "Damn, all this work is fucking my swag" it should be more like "Man if I don't get this work done the stress is gonna fuck my swag". 

One of my sketches, used a really soft ebony pencil for it

Hmm, I don't I've ever touched on the subject of love in this blog. I've spent the last 3 years ignoring it. Plus I've always deplored the aspect of pouring out my personal life on my blogs, especially after the old years of using xanga with my friends =_= ( /facepalm). But over the past few years of using this blog, it's really becoming a nice personal window to reinspect myself- a place where I can get away from my friends and just throw my thoughts out up into the air. So why not, it'll be fun looking back on this.

Inked in

I think it was after Jessica that I stopped caring about looking for a girlfriend. First it was Diane... but I dumped her because I knew that I just wanted to have a girlfriend for the sake of having a girlfriend (highschool lol...), and after realizing that I really really loved Jessica it was just wrong to keep going out with her. I get mixed message from Jessica after confessing (rejection or what?), then we try to give it another go after she opens up a little to me, then I get rejected again after the date... Since then I've forced myself to just focus on becoming successful. So after finally reaching a calm, which was today lol- I've given it some more thought.

It's not like I wasn't tempted to try again. Beginning of freshman year of college I was seriously considering on trying to go out with a girl who had a similar temperament like mine. She was really smart, she was chill, and she was sweet and we had a really easy time talking to each other. But literally a few minutes before deciding to try asking her out to the movies and whatnot I decided not to. I don't know why. All of the sudden I became disinterested. Since that day I've been extremely indifferent to love, during my terrible months of work I obviously had no time to even give it a thought. But now- after the calm after the storm... it's a sweet thought to have. Sometimes you just want someone there to be with you.

On a funnier note I DID WRITE A LOVE LETTER! And yes it was super effective =D, she wrote one back too! So love letters exist in America lol, maybe I'll upload it if it's still sitting around somewhere- none of my irl friends know that I blog anymore so no ones going to find out! It's gloomy to type this all out, but I can't help but laugh at the stupid things I've done or how out-of-character I've acted in front of a girl I like. And once in a while I wonder what'd it'd be like if I didn't break-up with Diane... or how different it would be if I was more of a mature person when I first asked her out... 

I don't know when, but eventually I'll meet someone with the same attitude towards life and love as I do. Someone to spend a night with drinking, talking about our day, someone you can spill out all of your true feelings and thoughts to.

Someone to grow old with... yeah...

Everyday you grow a little more

A collaborative painting our class did. It's made of only dots.

I woke up today. Smelling like alcohol. Dazed out of my mind from a hangover. I propped my laptop onto my belly while still in bed and started reading manga. I think manga has always been my source of "getting away" from reality, although I never ever really wanted to word it that way. But this morning, now then ever it has become even more apparent that alcohol and anime have been my way of escaping from all the loans, the health insurance, and the fact that I'm seriously leaving my childhood, my teenage life, for good. Technically that should have been years ago, but the fact that I still watch anime to help relieve myself of reality is starting to become a problem. 

Another huge collaborative painting.

I've had moments before in my life where I've seen signs of myself growing up, maturing slowly on the inside. I woke up this morning as well feeling the same thing. The worst thing about it was the fact that I try to shun away those facts. It's really really depressing if I sit around and think about it. But seriously I have some very serious looking life changing loans to care for, a health insurance plan to sort out before getting hit in the face with the premiums, and a slowly deteriorating family that I need to get away from soon. 

I have a very good game plan set out for me for my future. So I got that part of my life down pat. But who said life would have been that easy? I've always known that I was a very very laid back and carefree guy, but I never realized how frighteningly laid back I was. I'm almost a borderline NEET, at least in my mind. I can be a good actor, so I give off a very nice image of a man who has his head on straight, but the real dilemma is inside. I think I've finally started to come to terms that I'm still a child within my own mind. Just having a good time, enjoying life regardless of what it throws at me. That's probably why people may look at me and think everything is okay, but in reality my life will take a very violent and steep dive into hell unless I don't get a grip of myself.

I painted the one in the middle here =)

According to older people it seems like these responsibilities will only just keep piling up as I get older. Which is a bit disheartening, but at least I've laid out a solid realistic game plan for my career life (which to my relief is a very good chunk of the problems everyone has to face). For now I'm just going to have slowly mature even more, this time changing my usual habits. There's one thing that every responsible adult will tell you, NEVER PROCRASTINATE. It used to be a thing you could laugh off in your high school years, but transitioning into college and going on your way out... procrastination can very easily ruin your entire life. So the least I can do now is buy myself a planner, and get serious about getting things DONE. Because that is the one major flaw in my life currently, I say things, but I don't do things- that's bad.

K-ON! Cute, Innocent, Adorable... but...

So back to this morning. The reason I felt like blogging this one out was because of a K-ON! Doujinshi I read. It drew in a huge amount of attention because originally it was thought to be your typical dirty hentai rendition of K-ON! but it turned out to have much more of a plot than pornography at all. If anything the sex scenes only proved to make the whole story more real (too real and depressing) and prove a point about how life and dreams are. If anything it could be a really great work of literature, satire is often my favorite genre in literature but it is also my most feared. 

Basically it added in all the elements that the original K-ON! had left out in order to keep the series as an innocent cute girl band group. In the doujin it had a lot of very dirty real drama. The reason why soap operas and today's typical dramas only have romantic unrealistic drama is because no one wants to watch what REAL drama is. Because seriously, it will fucking make you depressed (so it wasn't the best thing to read with a hangover on a Monday morning). But unfortunately the plot of  the story was very relevant to me, so I read through the whole thing ;_; 

Yeah. I couldn't stop saying "WHAT THE FUCK?"

Right now I'm debating whether or not I should rewatch K-ON! to regain my innocent image of them, or to retain the more realistic depressing mature side of following your dreams that this doujin has shown me. Because for one, this is actually good motivation to get off my ass and finish the bigger problems in life instead worrying about social life and what not. And I'm afraid if I go back I'll end up like Mio in the doujin... Now that I think about the artist does a really good job at representing the different types of people that you could grow up to be like when you get older. Ritsu, as boring as she may seem, is the ideal life many people would like to live.

The artist's name is Takotsuboya  for anyone interested, but beware if you snoop around for his work you'll likely end up on some really questionable websites lol.

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.