#Trying my hands on Manga styled comic

[kidokear]

I've grown tired of holding into this one.

This is a semi-old drawing. If it's looking meh, that's why. ^^;>

OK, so- I started this back in 2023 (you know, when a certain new year sketch was dropped) and I thought I was being a comedic genius, but I didn't finish it at the timeline I set up so I left it be, then 2024 came and I though, 'oh! Let's give it another go'. Same thing happened. Revisit a couple of months later and though, might as well have it ready for the next Easter. So I finally, finished it up.

I planned to wait, but my patience run out. XD

[flipppyflopp]

My most prized possession is…✨

Back at it with another Diasomnia comic! It started out as a very wholesome idea, but then I got the inspiration for just a little angst to add at the end 🤪 I had a lot of fun trying all sorts of different backgrounds and brushes for this piece! I wanted to try my hand once again at a manga style and I think I’ve gotten better at it.

It’s a lot of fun to explore the Diasomnia quartet as there’s just so many paths you can take from wholesome found family to dreaded mortality, which is why I think I keep drawing them so often. You’d think they are my favorites as I draw them a lot, but Pomefiore still ranks as number one dorm….for now, we shall see what Book Seven has in store 🤡

[eyeodyssey]

MOON AGE 15 : DAMNATION (English Translation) Moon Age 15: Damnation is a 1988 short comic by pseudonymous author Not Osada, who openly drew influence from the Tokyo Grand Guignol's work in such a way that can arguably give a loose insight to the TGG's mysteriously anomalous works. While only a slight window into what could've existed in Ameya's vision, each contemporary rendering of his world of gore-soaked medical equipment and rusted metal is valuable in what it represents. As mentioned in my prior Litchi essay, the fragments of the Tokyo Grand Guignol we have now are descendants of a cultural phantom, standing as shrouded windows to a strange intangible stage that's positioned somewhere between post-Maruo inferno, industrial subculture and decadent poetry. While Osada’s manga featured notably grizzly and cruelly morbid scenarios, his stories were made explicitly for the shoujo market with a distinctly shoujo-influenced art style. Characters appear almost doll-like with their visual perfections, all while they’re often dismantled and reassembled in bizarre surgical practices by sadistic doctors. Much like how Zera expresses horror to seeing his own imperfect organs in contrast with his youthful appearance, our pristine victims share the same internals as any other slaughtered cadaver, all in a maddening spiral of narratives that contemporary readers often described as resembling descents to insanity. This fixation of the contrast between perceived beauty and grotesqueness is arguably traced back to the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s own works, with lines accentuating the youthful features of certain characters while audience members were known to fondly look back on the actors’ appearances. Litchi himself was described as being a “cute” robot despite the violence it was programed to carry out. It’s possible that this collision is inherent to Ameya’s conceptual destruction of the TGG. A known detractor to poetic writing, he called on a romantic author to pen the screenplays to the TGG’s first three plays so he could “destroy” them in his direction. The use of beauty could arguably be a mockery of it, taking these idealized dolls and leaving them trapped in worlds of fascism and hospital rooms that are haunted by the stinging stench of antiseptics and blood. Plastic hospital drapes were used in place of stage curtains and autopsy films were shown to the wide-eyed characters, who spoke of pure blood and dirty blood, the antithesis of blood, mercuro. What is beauty a representation of in the Grand Guignol’s works with the prominent fascist leanings of the protagonists? Considering the perspectives of our characters where the Hikari Club and the deranged teachers and Nazi doctors are treated as protagonists rather than explicit antagonists, the plays could arguably be read as the decay of a self-convinced beauty under fascist rule. Songs of the pure-blooded ubermensch fading into silence as the singers all collapse, lost in their own delirium as they pump mercurochrome into their hearts and try to rationalize their own organs that resemble the internals of the so-called ‘landraces’ they rendered into lifeless meat. It’s the natural conclusion of fascism, a collapse that occurs in demented violence to the face of a denial of death. I was originally split on publicizing my translation due to copyright-related complications, but after seeing the increasing gatekeeping of TGG materials at the hands of a rapidly growing market riddled with competitive spending and scalping, I feel obliged to share it to the public who (like myself) can’t afford to spend the now literal hundreds that are required to access angura ephemera that was meant to be openly available to the public to begin with. When originally finding this story, the book it was featured in was only 5 dollars. Now it goes for 60 to 200. That's ridiculous. With all the preamble out of the way, the story is under the cut...

While I made my best effort to maintain accuracy to the source material in translation despite my practically nonexistent understanding of Japanese (my translation method is a Frankensteining of language learning videos, a Japanese to English dictionary from the Internet Archive and Google Translate with a lot of localizing and dissection in between), there are several details I feel I should note for the sake of transparency. One smaller one was the inclusion of the term l * lita. It was in the original text, and I was honestly very unsure of including it in my translation as it’s a term I’m personally icked out by. While I was ultimately recommended to keep the line as is for accuracy, I wish to state that it's a term I'm personally very uncomfortable with in what it represents. The other note, which is the more prominent one in the final product, are the references to The Last Attempt at Paradise. In the original text the club members solely refer to their hideout as paradise and Eden, leaving a lot of excess space in the speech bubbles after translation when making the shift from Japanese text to English. The Last Attempt at Paradise was the name of S.P.K.’s 1982 live album that documents their set at the Off the Wall Hall venue in Lawrence, Kansas. Often considered one of their best concerts and a highlight of the industrial genre, the S.P.K. Appreciation Society of Sydney in their All The Way With S.P.K. / American Tour article describes the concert as being the group's “best performance to date”, further adding that they “Flattened (an) enthusiastic audience with massive P.A. amplification of FX bass regeneration”. This insertion wasn’t done at random, as the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s works were heavily engrained in the original industrial scene of the 80s. Both the 1985 and 1986 performances of Litchi began on a playback of the S.P.K. song Culturcide (from their 1983 Dekompositiones EP), and it was likely that use of the track that led to Not Osada’s early fixation on S.P.K.’s music. At the end of Blind Beast, in a sort of reader Q&A Osada is questioned about some of his favorite music. At the top of the list he features the tracklist of the Dekompositiones EP and the track Mekano from their 1979 Mekano / Contact / Slogun single. Interestingly enough he states that he only likes those four songs from the band, following the text with laughter in regards to their remaining discography. I’m unsure if this means he was unimpressed with their noisier work (which would be curious knowing his liking of Mekano with how it originated from their earliest noise-adjacent album) or if he was directed to their later Machine Age Voodoo material and was alienated by it. In the same Q&A he also mentions the band Funeral Party, who featured specially commissioned art by Suehiro Maruo on their Dream of Embryo single. It's apparent that he also had a copy of the compilation album Vision Of The Emortion, as the list also includes C·C·Mekka and Ego'n Mole, who were both featured in the album alongside Funeral Party's only two other documented tracks, Das Sunde and Gears - Night. S.P.K. references are sprinkled throughout this story along with Osada's other Litchi-adjacent entries. Aside from one of Zera's henchmen being named after the Mekano track, it's very likely that the frequent references to Eden are in homage to the lyrics of Mekano. The first lines of the track include the verses "One by one, odd to even. Break the scenes, rudely eden...".

Moon Age 15 was originally printed in 1988 as a two-part miniseries in the horror magazine Complete Collection of Horror and Occult Works - HELP, namely in volumes 5 and 6. While being an early work that derived from the TGG, it still wasn’t the first comic to adapt the Litchi stage play, with Das Blut : Blood and Eternal Girl preceding it with their 1986 publication in Osada’s debut anthology Night Reading Room, sharing the same year as the TGG’s early closure following creative conflicts between Norimizu Ameya and K Tagane (the group's author, who remains anonymous to this day). It’s to be noted however that while Das Blut and Eternal Girl were the first stories to feature the Hikari Club as antagonists, they are only tangentially related with Moon Age showing more distinct Grand Guignol archetypes (musings of the full moon, examinations of the Hikari club’s misogyny, idealization of technology, and even an early rendition of the Litchi robot itself). First kept solely as a brief serial, Moon Age was later reprinted in abridged form as a short story in the 1996 Blind Beast anthology. While copies of HELP are notably hard to find and demand high prices, I was given an in depth view of both volumes that featured Moon Age’s serialization by a collector earlier last year. While the drawings are still the same on a rudimentary level, the length of the serialized version is notably longer than the later Blind Beast variant, with the HELP serialization being over 40 pages while Blind Beast’s is only 24. This was the product of the manga being entirely revised for Blind Beast’s print, with the layouts being drastically altered along with basic revisions of the line art. Certain scenes that would usually take 2 to 3 pages in the HELP version were condensed to 1, resulting in a unique tradeoff where one version feels unusually spacious in its framing while the other is heavily condensed and almost chaotic by comparison. It’s only a thing that springs on you once you compare the two variants, I saw the revised version first and originally didn’t pay any mind to it. One thing that is certain is the polishing of the art. The brush work in the Blind Beast version is refined with a more elaborate sense of weight and flow while the HELP version is notably rough with the prominent use of rudimentary screentones. It reflects as a somewhat rougher variant of the art shown in Night Reading Room. It feels strangely digital, like it’s the product of early computer art. The line-by-line reuse of the decapitation scene from Eternal Girl being shown on the TVs further adds to the strange digital feel of the art style.

Similar to Moon Age, Osada's other stories of the Hikari Club featured the members luring girls to their brutal deaths. In Eternal Girl the members bring in a student and film her mutilation for a snuff film that acts as the story's namesake, in Das Blut they corner another student to the woods where they hang her, and in Jinta Jinta they kidnap a student who bullied one of her classmates to suicide before trepanning her with a strange device that's somewhere between an electric chair and a drill. Not Osada was very recently namedropped in the concluding essay of an English print of Kawashima Norikazu’s Her Frankenstein under the alternate Nagata Nooto anglicization of Osada’s pseudonym. Their name is a curious case as while there is a prominent written variant (長田ノオト), it’s seen numerous English iterations. In Osada’s own English signatures it is written as Not Osada (with the name apparently being derived from a German phrase), but other variants include Osada Nohto, Osada Nooto and Not Nagata. If I'm not mistaken, it could count as one of the first English acknowledgements of Osada's works in print.

[sugarpasteltmnt]

You write unhinged Leo so well, and I really like how you write him. I was wondering if you had tips on unhinged characters 😂, or do you just get inspro from existing characters 👀

aksdakjsdh thank you so much ;w;

And honestly???? I’m not totally sure how to give tips— but I love, love, love unhinged characters in media, so I’ll use them as examples

(long rant below lol)

I’ve always been a big fan of silly, ‘crazy’ characters in animated movies and cartoons. I grew up on Batman the Animated Series and the original Teen Titans, which were full of silly, fun tragic characters.

Don’t get me wrong, i love a good edge-lord— but as a tot i thought the colorful, theatrical, insane bad guys were more fun to watch than the big scary serious ones (ESPECIALLY if they had a good villain song. A+ good shit)

(From left to right: Ratigan from Great Mouse Detective, Joker from Batman the Animated Series, Mumbo Jumbo from Teen Titans, Martin from Secret of Nimh 2, Bill Cypher from Gravity Falls, and Spinel from the Steven Universe movie)

And not just bad guys!! There are a ton of unhinged good/neutral characters that i absolutely adore.

(From left to right: King Bumi from ATLA, Clara from Welcome to Demon School Iruma-kun, and, of course, our silly 2018 turtle boys)

((There are many more characters in both categories, but I’ll slide these examples in here for now))

My personal brand of “Unhinged” or “Crazy” characters definitely leans on comedy. That’s what i enjoy seeing and reading! I personally like it because it can help keep a story fresh and interesting. There’s an element of surprise and unpredictability with what a character might do, and i love that!!

I also really enjoy a touch of feral behavior in my unhinged characters. The lack of clarity and the danger that imposes can be a very fun tool to use, no matter the character’s moral compass. (I’m feral for feral behavior lol)

And impulses. Whether a character has a few screws loose or is generally a goober, they like to act on impulses. This often goes hand-in-hand with comedy, and that’s something I enjoy!! We get a lot of moments like that in Rise, and that was one of my favorite parts of that TMNT iteration.

But as far as writing goes, it’s been tricky for me. All of the characters I grew up or love have been visual— trying to find a good balance for reading has been a puzzle I’ve been figuring out as I go.

I read a lot manga (lol nerd) and comics, and I love how thoughts/dialog are depicted. Especially the really dramatic or impactful moments. (I’d add examples but I’m already at the Tumblr image limit LAME)

As strange as it sounds, I try to capture that “impactful visual” style in my writing. If I had ANY advice on writing unhinged characters, pay attention to pacing—

Short. Fast. A calculating thought. Perhaps a run on sentence that lacks punctuation to represent the rushing and disorganized thought process. A question? An answer with little thought. Is this moment amusing; describe how. Is it upsetting; describe how. Are the thoughts starting to scatter? M aybe s o…

Big moment statement.

Action or plan of next big move. Flow should never seem too uniform. Even in normal writing. Don’t be afraid of accentuating— but don’t overdo it. Remember, unhinged characters are impulsive. Have fun with that.

Just as a quick and dirty summary— when it comes to unhinged characters, I like to use comedy, feral behavior, and acting on impulses. I also like to keep it as visually appealing as possible for characters to give the eyes a little treat after reading walls of text. I like to use fun text formatting to help with the fun too (But don’t overdo it! Don’t make it feel like a chore to read) (<- says the girl who goes into way too much details sometimes lmao whoops)

But ultimately— have FUN!!! Unhinged characters are fun, so make sure you have fun writing/drawing/creating them!!

[zephyrine-gale]

Your art is so pretty 😭🩵 do you happen to have any advice on how to improve/ any art tips?

Thanks for sharing your work, stay safe!🩵

thank you so much!! these are some things that come to mind

study your favorite artists + what they do successfully (i think this person has a neat way of doing studies! there's a lot of artist studies on youtube, I think it's a respectful way to emulate and learn from an art style without claiming it's yours)

real life is your best reference! you'll be able to see how values, shapes, textures work irl, and in turn that could also help you see how other artists choose to simplify and stylize things

also don't be afraid to use refs for your art. my reference doc for my kzsc comic alone was 179 pages, with the first 60~ being ingame pose/outfit/weapon refs, and the rest being inspos from manga panels I liked + other art pieces that I felt captured motion and paneling really well.

draw things you like! and don't expect that every piece you draw has to be perfect (especially if you're trying to gain an audience with your art). you'll get burnt out really fast that way :'> not every piece has to be posted; even for me, I think 60% of what I've been drawing has been OCs that I don't post, but they make me happy!

it's normal to feel like you're missing out on trends given how fast things go by nowadays, but its important to work at your own pace.

but also don't force yourself to draw if you're not feeling it/haven't had breaks in a long time. it's really important to get up and stretch so you don't injure your hand too, health is important!

[lemissingmask]

[ID: Scene drawn in sanguine type colour showing a crowded street in the darkened background and Kotetsu Kaburagi and Barnaby Brooks Jr in the foreground, wearing their season 2 clothes. Kotetsu is holding up one hand and looking to the sky, a speech bubble beside him saying “Looks like it’s gonna rain”. There’s another speech bubble in a darker shade on the other side over the crowd, near where Albert Maverick can be seen within the crowd but not entirely present, this one saying “You’re still not alone Barnaby”. Barnaby is looking over his shoulder towards the image of Maverick with a shocked expression. Only Kotetsu and Barnaby’s eyes are in true colour. End ID]

-

Whumptober Day 16: Hallucination

Speech bubbles translate roughly as:

Kotetsu - “Looks like it’s gonna rain”

Maverick - “You’re still not alone Barnaby”

Some season 2 era Barnaby still being tormented by Maverick because that sort of mind manipulation can’t just be shaken off

I’m trying to work on trying some comic/manga style arting and this is my first attempt at something that could work as a panel

-

Context for people not in the fandom who don’t mind spoilers:

Albert Maverick killed Barnaby’s parents when Barnaby was 4 years old, and Barnaby saw him do this. Maverick used his powers to change Barnaby’s memory so it was a stranger with a tattoo on his hand who did it, and then adopted Barnaby to raise him and basically groom him to be a pawn to be a superstar hero and boost ratings for Maverick’s show about superheroes tackling crime and natural disasters. Eventually, after meeting his partner Kotetsu (on the far right), Barnaby learns the truth via some more memory editing and stuff to break the edited memories, and Maverick ends up being killed.

There’s not a massive amount in canon that addresses the psychological whump, other than Barnaby keeping a photo of Maverick in his apartment but turning it away, him having a fear of betrayal, and him admitting that he doesn’t feel like his life is his own. So here’s an addition - hallucinating his whumper in a crowded street.

[lesbianjobutupaki]

Art practice by trying some other artist's styles that I'm a huge fan of!

From Top Left to Bottom Right:

@ghostishere0 - the original reason I started this doodle, as I wanted to draw a "shepherd lovers squad" and their OC (who I don't know the name of F) was the perfect fit for it.

@luminesparkz - the best interpretation of Pom pikmin. If I were Mr. Nitendo, I would make them the official comic creator along with the manga comics.

@marblyso - If I was a little more unhinged and made a shrine to Erma Shepherd, it would be mostly marblyso's art of her, it's my absolute favorite Erma depiction <3

@rexscanonwife - another OC that I don't know the name of, but she makes such a cute pair with Shepherd and has such cute art that why not, let Shepherd have multiple canon wives at this point.

@citruscrisp - I think this is secretly Alph in an alternate universe where he makes comics about himself, because citrus has Alph's character SPOT ON, and also loves to put that boy in a situation (which I am happy for, I enjoy seeing that boy in a situation)

@daisythecomic - oooaaaaaaaaaa they look like little mice people they look so soft and sweet I love them so muuuuuuuuuccchhhhhhhhh

@louie-posting - I can't not include actual Louie Pikmin on this list.

@kiwilittle - the soft, the sweet, the one who makes the best family style art, really making me wish I was an inch tall so I could go to holidays with the olimar family, also their wife design is so cute that if Olimar didn't already get it I would shoot my shot for her m a a m

@pikbugz - really nails the soft aesthetic that makes pikmin such a calming series, and their coloring style is so soft and good that it gives me the ratatouille nostalgia flashback moment.

@splitster - more than just the wraith au guy, they are the one who makes incredible and funny comics; I've seen so many fics with the rescue corps where I can pick up that yes, this trait came from a splitster comic, and that's a GOOD thing. Made me actually LIKE Dingo, the nerve.

@diesaur - I can't do diesaur's incredible, unique art justice, they are amazing at using geometrics and have the best charlie (his little teefs...)

@solluxander - Cars, one of my favorite pikmin Ocs I've ever seen! Collin deserves a slightly unhinged sentient fluffball boyfriend, and I always love seeing the new ways Cars will interact with him.

@sillypikmin - all hail the best pikposter, who I'm still convinced is an actual leafling living on actual pnf-404, literally every time I have a bad day I look at drawings of Moss and feel better.

@eggpathy - thank goodness they came back to give us old man yaoi. I keep their drawing of olimar kissing the pikmin good night on my phone and look at it before I go to sleep and so far I have yet to have a single nightmare.

@the-knife-consumer - the only person I trust with Louittany, toxic yuri my beloved, I just adore their beasty brittany design so so much, I wish I could have a small brittany to live in my house...

anyway they have the best headcanons for our beloved blorbo hamster people

@natibranch - there's a voice line of Louie going "wa-ha!" in this really cute sing-song voice and every time I see any art by natibranch I hear that sound in my head as a little burst of serotonin, they just nail that exact feeling so so well.

@pikked-min - Another of my favorite Pikmin OCs, Yuva! A really interesting and unique character concept with a lot of thought put into the worldbuilding, followed by a strong unusual personality that had me looking at the pikmin world through a new perspective entirely. Please, someone, give them some sunglasses. Read the fic it's so good

@ssserf - artistic and deep while still somehow looking like official nintendo tm art, genuinely the best at the pikmin proportions, how could I resist trying my hand at the classic amazing beautiful Brittany Fruit Sweater moment, literally SO iconic

@kashi-pon - while I was working on the part of this that was just kashi's various highlife dresses there was a part of me that wanted to dedicate the rest of the space to paying homage to the joke comic of Louie lifting his skirt to show Olimar that he's wearing shorts, except this dress....well......

@diamondwerewolf - the reason we got louie in a little bunny outfit anyway, and thus why we got kashi's dress version. you single-handedly turned Louie into a tumblr sexyman, how could you

[kokiriri]

Hi!

I really like what you draw, I like how you draw your character.

Looking for an art style, I wanted to ask you. How did you find it?

Hope my question doesn't bother you... 😓

Have a nice day!

Hi!!

First of all, thank you for your kind words! I’m really happy that you enjoy my art :)

Great question! I think there’s always a lot of confusion when individuals are trying to discover their own styles (I’m often confused myself) but hopefully by sharing my experiences, it can make things a little more manageable for you.

I really think that my style now is a conglomeration of everything I’ve so far been interested in. And I’ll try to explain what I mean. When I was really little, I would draw things like “The PowerPuff Girls” or other shows like that because their character designs were simple and easy for me to draw. It wasn’t until I was around 10-11 when I started reading some Pokémon manga/comics (called “Pokémon Special” in English) I found at my local library. I really liked the style of these comics, so I would copy the way they drew eyes and such. My art began to get slightly more complex, and I began to move away from drawing simplistic cartoon bodies to more anatomically founded figures. These Pokémon comics are honestly the major foundation of my style.

Here’s some examples of what the comics looked like.⬆️

I was also obsessed with the Megaman EXE television show around the same time, along with this one comic featuring Megaman X. You would probably agree with me that the Pokémon comics and Megaman share a very similar style (at least, in terms of character design and structure.)

For years, I drew exclusively in a style very similar to the images you see above (albeit, I was still pretty young so my drawings weren’t nearly as good.) When I turned 13, I started watching Inuyasha, and again, my style shifted. I was largely inspired by how they drew hair in Inuyasha, especially the poofy bangs Inuyasha and Kagome have (the two characters in the image below.)

I started meshing those kinds of hairstyles with the Pokémon/Megaman styled bodies. Keep in mind that as I was doing this, I was drawing A LOT. Nearly everyday, during class, whatever. Because of that, I started to grasp a better understanding of what character design features I liked best and so on. However, my major flaw that I wish I realized sooner was that I hardly drew from reference. Please please please use photo references or other artworks you enjoy for poses or expressions because it really does improve your art! (Don’t blatantly copy and claim them as your own though, that will earn you a shadow ban from the art world.😵‍💫)

Fast forward to this year. I recently started getting into manga by Adachi Mitsuru because I fell in love with his retro comic style. Some of my favorite works of his are Touch and Cross Game, feel free to check them out! Anyways, I’ve been studying his art and what makes it appealing to me, and I found that I like the simplicity along with great dynamic poses. So I look at those panels that showcase those aspects the best, and try to redraw them! The first few drawings always look terrible, but after a bit, you begin to understand what you were missing the first time, and slowly you improve. Here are some panels from Cross Game to help you get a taste of what the art is like.

For me, it took years to develop my own style, and it will probably be the same for you. It doesn’t come easy, and although it sucks to admit, your art will look bad to you for the first few years after starting to draw. But know that each time you draw, your body memorizes the way it moves whenever you draw an arm, a hand, whatever, and it learns. Because of this, be sure to draw referencing styles that YOU like. That way, your body becomes slowly accustomed to a better way to draw hands that you enjoy, rather than getting stuck and not improving. And don’t be afraid to experiment with different styles! I try to draw out of my comfort zone, and that’s where I feel I learn the most.

I hope this post was helpful and provided good tips. Of course, you shouldn’t feel the need to watch/read all the shows and books I’ve referenced here because at the end of the day, you’re looking to forge your own style, not replicate mine. Find what shows and comics you love, and then ask yourself “Why do I find this appealing? What about the style is speaking to me?” And then draw those aspects/designs you enjoy. Just draw. Things will start to come together after that. :)

Bonne chance!

[soshadysoquiet]

TUA Rewatch Drawings: S1E1

[ID: Five panel greyscale drawing. Panel 1: Klaus' two booted feet pause behind a small pile of ash. Panel 2: Klaus' feet rotate on their heels to face the ash. Panel 3: Klaus' feet draw together to a standstill. Panel 4: Klaus crouches facing the ash pile, he has a cigarette in one hand and an open umbrella in the other, he's smirking slightly and writing over the image reads: The team, back together again. Panel 5: Klaus' cigarette has been stubbed out on the ash pile. End ID.]

So I'm finally getting round to rewatching TUA - at my usual speed I'd be done rewatching by August 8th but I got it into my head that I wanted to do a single page "comic" from a fav moment in each episode... so we could be here a while if I succeed!

Favourite Moment: There's so many stand out moments from S1E1 to choose from, but aesthetically Klaus' dream-like feet and the classic stubbing out of his cigarette on Reggie's ashes just sticks to my brain.

Favourite Line: "He hates children too and he had plenty of us!" -Klaus.

Most likely to skip moment: Can't think of anything I'd skip!

Most likely to rewind moment: Tie between Klaus trying to protect Five at the Funeral Brawl and getting his hand slapped / Istanbul fight at Griddy's.

Manga-style black and white pages shaped so much of my drawing interest growing up, so I wanted to practice in that style. It's interesting to me because I really like their neat and fine detail lines, but I really struggle to do fine detail inking on a drawing tablet. With a pen and paper I think the feel of the drag of the pen helps a lot with that for me.

So this ended up a bit of a mesh but the main thing I wanted: those absolute black shadows, turned out so nice I'm very happy with this image. And the smoke was very fun to draw.

[kradeelav]

so i've got two strips going in parallel.

(this is a long 'talking shop' post about how both comics are diverging in visual style for different reasons.)

the first strip (I'm calling it 'combat instructor' for now) is the gunter/corrin porn comic i've wanted to do for ages, lol. me fucking around with hentai tropes, but also having fun subverting some Stuff with making the fanservice about him.

fanservice, see? :3c

keen eyes will notice i really like the textured inky style i used in 'dead is calling' - it was quick, it's got a slick dynamic sinister masculine quality, but with enough shades of "regular manga inking" so i'm re-using that for this one to block in the characters especially in the latter half of <combat instructor>.

(you see how deceptively simple that style is in the below two images from 'dead is calling' - it's actually very hellsing inspired with the high contrast almost graphically "flat" quality.)

that wasn't really working for the few backgrounds in this new strip though, which i kind of needed to just... fade as a more neutral color. so i started messing with my watercolor brushes, which are working so far here - i think the inherent messiness of the watercolors-as-shading will mesh well with the inking, and the surprisingly more intimate parts of eros. (rendering boob shine, gonads, etc)

pause on that.

this other strip... really should be titled 'the mortifying ordeal of being Known'.

it's uh. haha. it's about my self insert in fe: heroes (spin off gacha game) and meeting a few of the characters. (it's so much more than that with the emotional core - i ain't gonna explain everything but yumijoshi will Get This one on a level everyone else won't - but that's essentially what happens.)

it's also much less serious than the 'combat instructor' strip in a lot of ways. a good half of it is ribbing fe: heroes' gameplay (ultimately being a gacha/gambling game) but the latter half ... deals with a lot of delicate emotional undercurrents? more so than the other one which is just straight up uncomplicated porn.

so i waffled on the style for the longest time, feeling like it needed a much "lighter" (almost shoujo/romantic/dreamy style) - but trying to do precise delicate thin lines almost murdered my momentum on the YRMR epilouge strip. (gotta keep the momentum going.)

on the other hand, i was going fast enough with the watercolor approach for the backgrounds in the 'combat instructor' strip and wondered if the looseness couldn't be applied to the whole panel here, almost like scalera's work - the above is a great proof of concept to see how it works in action. watercolors have that soft dreaminess that works with the subject matter (emotional distance vs closeness etc), and more importantly, i can draft out the basic value/dynamic shapes quickly without getting hung up on specific parts.

i was getting stuck on anna (ponytail lady) in the above part when it was just the lines, but being able to block out the values of her hair vs the other character's outfit vs the background in five minutes is ... enormous.

that's the easy part.

hard part is making this consistent for ~20 pages :D;

[jesncin]

How would you describe your art style and the techniques you use, if it’s not too much trouble?

I'd describe it as a mix between modern american tv animation style (Gravity Falls, Steven Universe, Bee & Puppycat, etc) and trad pub middle grade graphic novel art style. I've purposefully pushed for my art to be as "marketable to the american market" as possible, but my hand also leans towards western styles. I do end up sneaking in some manga influences every now and then (Yuhki Kamatani's layouts are beautiful, and I always liked Haikyuu. Art wise I find the characters really appealing) plus my coloring style comes from years of being inspired by webcomics of all sorts. Basically we try to be Gurihiru haha (those power Asians are way above my level though).

Professionally for work, my techniques are fairly standard for comics I think? Except instead of like penciling, inking, coloring a graphic novel in various stages- we just finish everything in one go a page at a time to keep the process fresh ("the webcomic method"). For the fancomics I draw for fandom, it's a looser version of what I do for work. Apart from Sons of Mars, all of my fancomics are just cleaned up sketches with colors slapped on and handwritten speechbubbles. I do everything digitally.

[hannibalthemanga]

Hannibal - Manga Adaptation

Hiya!

This blog is dedicated to making a manga adaptation of the first two seasons of the NBC show Hannibal. And, also, some fun Hannibal-related posts.

I was searching for something like this on the Internet as reference material when I wanted to draw some fanart. Disappointed by the lack of manga-style Hannibal art and comics, the urge to take matters into my own hands struck me. While I would typically overthink starting a hefty project such as this one, I have no doubt I will actually follow through with it. (Worst case: I get to print this whole thing and have a full Hannibal manga. That seems like a pretty good worst case to me.)

I'm doing this alongside my Masters in Psychology so bear with me if there are small breaks during exam seasons. However, I will try to plan ahead.

Do feel free to shoot me asks/messages concerning Hannibal, art, or anything else you can think of. I may not be very sociable but I am a very curious person. Expect (about 2) weekly updates on the project!

-Jamy

[bugbart]

I'm going to be asking a lot of artists I follow this question, but how did you develop your style? It SEEMS like most people find their style and stick with it forever, just making improvements and iterations. I tend to work in a lot of different styles because I enjoy doing that, though I know there are things I gravitate towards as well. But I wonder what your journey was and how you got feedback and improved while staying true to what you enjoyed?

hmm. I think the first thing i always come back to is that "style" is more or less just a code word for shorthand, especially if you're looking at a simplified, "toon-y" style. An art style is just an artists toolbox of learned techniques and shortcuts.

stylized anatomy, stylized backgrounds, etc. for a lot of artists is just how they're visually translating or abbreviating the thing they're trying to draw. If i find something works as both an efficient and satisfying visual shorthand for me, It'll find it's way into my art style.

for example, drawing faces in this style does not take very long at all, which makes the style choice good for a comic where this character is present in nearly every single panel. It's simple, its cute and fun to draw, and also to most people will effectively "read" as a face.

My style comes from taking inspiration from things I like to look at, I don't know how else to better describe it. There's a lot of influence from western comic books as well as anime/manga in my art style, (also a lot of techniques that i picked up when I was learning how to draw characters come from how to draw manga/anime books, that i still use to this day). A lot of it just comes from experimenting with what tools I have at hand (and when you work digitally you have a Lot of tools). Occasionally if there's an artist who I really like the work of I'll spend some time in a sketchbook trying to emulate their style and I'll learn something neat I can then add to the proverbial Toolbox. Either that or I learn that just because I like to look at something, doesn't mean I enjoy making art that way.

As for feedback and improving, going to college was where most of that happened for me. College was a really mixed bag, but I was and am super lucky to have had a handful of professors who really Got what I was doing and gave me genuine mentorship as well as honest, sometimes harsh critique when I needed it. Taking a figure drawing class also helped me improve soooooo much

Granted I also had at least one professor who made me want to quit doing art entirely for a couple terms, and I kind of got better/started making art that was more What I Wanted To Be Making out of total spite.

I hope any of that is coherent or helpful, and honestly if having a range of styles you like to work in is fun for you theres no reason not to make it- theres no need to narrow yourself into one distinct style if you dont feel like it.

[comicaurora]

Sorry if this is a weird question but how long did it take for you to start making art you felt was good enough, at least at the time? I have a lot of ideas for projects I want to make but I'm slowed down by not quite being at a level I'm happy with for professional endeavours. Wondering if I should quit while I'm ahead and just hire an artist I like.

Hoo. Good question.

It's hard to keep track of, honestly. I think every artist is going to feel a degree of "this could be better" about anything they make, and if that's all you're keeping track of it can feel like no progress is being made - but in hindsight, I think "this could be better" means a lot of different things, and what it means for my work has changed over time.

One of my earliest art-related memories is having a very clear image in my head of a pencil sketch I wanted to make (a family portrait of some wizards, a mom and dad flanking a young daughter) and then being immensely frustrated that what I produced was a pale, inexpert shadow of that image. The starting point I was at was "this doesn't look right and I don't know why," and I stayed there for a long time, even as I got overall better.

The first time I remember trying and failing to emulate a specific cartoon style, it was the manga Steam Detectives - I'd mostly been exposed to newspaper comics and scientific illustration, so I had never seen that sharp-angled straight-lined manga style before. There was a liveliness to it I couldn't capture, and that frustrated me. At this point I could see what was wrong, but couldn't yet correct it - my unconfident pencil sketching wasn't going to produce the same kind of three-dimensionality and flow as the brush strokes used in the, in the same way that a traced figure can look strangely odd and off-balance because it's only mimicking the outlines. At this point I'd hit "this doesn't look right and I know why, but I'm not sure how to fix it."

At that point, practice was kind of the only solution - unconfident linework can only be improved by honing the muscle memory and confidence of the artist, which I didn't know at the time or do on purpose but ended up happening anyway, especially once I got going on the channel and was regularly doing dozens to hundreds of drawings per project.

I do remember the first time I thought "oh, that's actually better than I expected" - I had broken my clavicle and my right arm was in a sling, and my art teacher encouraged me to try drawing something with my left instead. I am very much not ambidextrous and my lines were spidery and shaky, but when I stepped back at the end, the thing I'd tried to sketch - a portrait of a regal-looking elf man - actually wasn't too bad. The muscle memory in my right hand was completely absent from my left, but apparently my basic understanding of shapes and shadows had come through and made something that got across the gist of what I wanted. That was the first time I felt "this doesn't look right, but I already knew that, and what it does do is actually pretty solid."

At some point in the process of cranking out channel illustrations, and later chibi character commissions, without even noticing I hit a baseline level of confidence in what I was doing. Certain things got easier because I was doing them a lot more. I stopped thinking about whether a facial expression was communicating exactly what I wanted it to, stopped spending long stretches of time trying to refine poses - because in those specific areas I was no longer experiencing "this doesn't look right and I don't know why." I'd draw a face, realize it could look angrier, redraw the eyes and brows to be angrier, then move on. I'd block out a pose, decide the leg didn't look right, redraw it, line it and move on. It wasn't that I was nailing everything first try, it's that I'd had enough time and practice to quickly diagnose what wasn't working and quickly try something else to correct it.

Instead, I was thinking "this doesn't look right and I don't know why" about other things. Trees, buildings, figure shading, fire, water, metal textures. I still didn't feel ready to do the comic in earnest, but I'd started doing digital illustrations of the characters and mock-up pages/covers, and I kept finding problems in the composition. It didn't look right and I didn't know why. If I didn't know why, I couldn't fix it. A lot of that process boiled down to redrawing stuff until it managed to look right, then trying to reverse-engineer what had worked about that. I'd accidentally draw the most perfect torso and try to figure out what magic combination of lines had made that work. And again, it was a slow process, almost unnoticeable from my perspective, because I just gradually stopped worrying so much about unsolvable artistic problems because the solutions had just arisen with practice and experience. The background looks wack - it's probably under-shaded, darken some corners to make it match the foreground. This texture looks off - probably needs some particle effects to help give it detail. Etc etc.

At present, I very rarely think "this doesn't look right and I don't know why." I still have moments of "this doesn't look right" - almost constantly, probably - but they aren't noteworthy because I've had enough practice improvising solutions that it turns into a brief experimental phase before I fix whatever was bugging me and move on. It doesn't mean it's perfect, it just means whatever problems or places it could be improved are either subjective choices that are fine either way, or small mistakes I don't notice at the time. The process of error-correction and bug-fixing becomes quick and painless enough that I hardly think about how I used to spend ages agonizing over something that was wrong that I couldn't make look right.

The point I eventually got to could probably be best described as "I could make this better if I wanted - do I want to do that?"

Making a comic like this, it's very important for me to consider the value of pouring too much into any one page. If I vastly overdesign anything, I'm going to need to keep up that level of design every time it shows up. If I drew every forest shot by hand-drawing every single tree I'd never get anything done. If something looks off and I know the solution would be more detailing and more texturing, sometimes I'll do that - filigree and particles and all that good sauce - but sometimes I'll just try a few things until I find a shortcut that makes it look fine to my eyes. Art can always be more polished, so that's not really a metric for completeness or ready-ness - I really do think the most helpful metric is whether you're regularly struggling because you can see something is wrong but you can't figure out what. If you consistently know what's wrong - or, more accurately and less judgmentally, what could be polished if you wanted to polish it - you're probably in a pretty good spot.

[dullorangepulp]

Art tips for thinking of outfits/poses for fanart illustrations

I saw someone on reddit a while ago say they struggled to think up new poses/outfits for when they're drawing their favourite characters, and I gave them a whole bunch of tips to help. I thought maybe more people would like to hear my thoughts, so here you go! I hope this post helps!

My secret to thinking of new poses/outfits is one word: Pinterest (and google images, tho i'd recommend that one a bit less bcuz google's being finicky rn).

Just searching through certain aesthetics/moodboards for outfits ideas helps for when i genuinely just don't know what to make a character wear. And searching up swimsuit/underwear models, who may be modelling their clothes in a really dramatic and dynamic pose, helps too. (the models being specifically swimsuit/underwear models is a very important detail. it ensures that you can actually look at the human body without clothes blocking your view and understanding of the basic forms)

facial expressions are also important! it looks weird when the pose doesn't match up with the face, like with for example, a character pointing at something in the ace attorney 'objection!' style all dramatic and stuff, while their face is a completely blank smile. Of course, the best way to fix that would be to open their mouth and frown, while also scrunching up their eyebrows and nose. This is very important to remember when posing a character, because poses can only tell you so much, but the facial expression can completely change the mood and presentation of the character.

let's use my art as an example:

Now, imagine that, instead of the drawing above having just a normal smile, it was instead haru looking sad/disappointed while looking down at the floor. picture this sprite

the face, combined with the pose, could make it look like she was trying to say something important, but got cut off before she could speak (probably by her dad). It gives the drawing a completely different vibe! I could list many more examples but you get it.

Of course, poses, outifts, and faces are just one fraction of the process; you also have to take into consideration the character's personality. like take Haru for example. Haru is very kind-hearted, shy, reserved, and soft spoken. so for illustrations (original comics/animations follow different rules, this advice just applies to single standalone illustrations) you would want to pick a pose/outfit that best conveys those aspects of her personality. You wouldn't put Haru in like, a giant fursuit with a slouching pose, giving the camera the middle finger with a standoffish expression on her face (or maybe you would, idk how u roll ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). But you could put Haru in a sundress, with her hands clasped at her midsection, and giving the camera a shy smile with her middle finger up.

ALSO! you can break these rules! you don't always have to put Haru in only outfits that suit her, a good exception to this is all the DLC costumes. some of those are... hilariously absurd, and something that Haru would never normally wear, BUT they're funny, and aren't meant to be taken as a serious outfit that conveys the character's personality, they're just meant to be for fun, so it's totally okay to draw original outfits with that idea behind them.

The same applies to poses/expressions. there's many scenes in the mangas/anime where Haru makes poses/expressions that she would never normally make. that's fine too! those scenes out of context aren't meant to capture the true essence of the character--- theyre just meant to be one-off drawing that you'll see for only a second before moving on (that's why i said they were an exception, it's because thered be so much you'd restrict yourself off from if you followed the rules to a T).

Idk what else to say so uh yeah. I hope this all helped!

[gillianthecat]

I have got to get over my grudge against face filters or face-tuning or whatever it's called when they blur the actor's face so their skin is completely smooth and texture free and very pale and has no dimensionality.

I'm watching Light On Me, and I'm charmed by all the characters, but I keep getting distracted by the fact that none of them look like human beings. grrr. Like, it kind of fits the comic book tropey-ness of the story, but I still would prefer to see their god danged faces.

(Fun fact: Shin Woo's actor's face is the reason I started watching Light On Me in the first place. Kang Yoo Soek has a small part in Beyond Evil, and within a minute of his appearance on screen I was like, who is THAT???👀, and immediately went to MDL to see what else he was in. Turns out he was in a BL! so I decided it was finally time to check this one out. Maybe I'm just resentful about them hiding his face from me. On the other hand, Beyond Evil and Light On Me are from the same year, and he looks a decade younger in the latter, so I guess the filtering helps with that? idk, I'd prefer everyone's real faces. But I realize that with this, as in many things, I am not the target audience.)

My thoughts on Light On Me so far (im on episode 3 oops, actually it was 4): It feels like a high school romance comic book aimed at 12 year olds come to life. Which is not at all a criticism! But the aesthetic—bright, flat lighting, wide open spaces, saturated pastels and primary colors, the aforementioned face filtering—along with the trope filled, bare bones nature of the story give it this artificial feel. I don't read comic books, manga or manwha of any genre, so I could be wrong in this comparison, but it does tell like it exists outside of the real world in the same way that Disney Channel kids shows do (though not in the same world.) The characters, so far, don't feel like they exist outside of the story, not shallow, exactly, just that the rest of their lives and relationships are a vague blur, and the initial conflict—Shin Woo doesn't want Tae Kyung to join the student council!—feels like the sort of artificially induced high stakes of a kid's show. The—gasp—pratfall with a dildo.

I probably sound judgmental, but that's partly because super fluffy shows aren't my thing in general, and partly because I'm in a weird mood right now where even the real world doesn't feel all that real to me, but I reiterate, this is not a criticism. The show is creating a certain feel to tell a certain story, and (so far at least) it's doing it effectively.

And I am intrigued by the story, and the characters! Tae Kyung who has been convinced by the wise teacher to try making friends. Da On, the student president who is so kind and can't say no to anyone. Shiwoon, the class clown who can see what's happening but won't get involved. So Hee, the girl from the sister school, persistent in her three year (!) crush. And of course tsundere Shin Woo, possibly with some internalized homophobia, and who we know, based on Shiwoon's hints and the laws of Romance Tropes, must have a crush on the new boy and can't handle it.

The taundere seme is a trope I love when it works well, and loathe when it's bad, and I think it's working here for me because Tae Kyung is such a weirdo. He's no blushing maiden uke, he's blunt and doesn't care that's he's awkward, and still not sure if he wants to even bother with other human beings. It makes Shin Woo's attraction to him more specific and real, and makes me curious to see how their dynamic develops.

So even though the character don't feel anchored to any reality outside of what we see on screen, in the small slice of a tv world they do exist in they seem complex and worth getting to know.

(They also intrigue me enough that part of me wants to see these same characters and conflicts, but framed in more gritty realism style, like that of Weak Hero Class One. I think there's enough there to make it work! But that's more about my personal taste than anything else.)

edit: not that Weak Hero Class One is exactly realistic. But it's a different kind of fairy tale atmosphere. One that sometimes gets called "gritty realism."