My first animation and updates.

Uh this place has been quiet. Sorry about that school and such took up my time and attention. So yeah last quarter I had a character portfolio which took up all my time for a length of 3 or so weeks. This time it was an animation project.

So my language of animation and film, aka, animation history class had a final project which was to do an animation center around a technique we covered in the class. So we had the option of using stuff like single frame technique, cut outs/shadow puppets, stop motion, and limited animation. Then we had to write up a 5 page term paper on the method or methods we used. I decided to do a limited animation piece and was heavily inspired by the studio UPA. The biggest guide to this project was to animate for the sake of animating because at this point in our studies, the class has no experience working on animations before and this class isn't a technical animation class.

So my animation is called "Simply Miette"

I decided to create a character named Miette which in french is suppose to mean "sweet little thing." Yeah she a little french girl who is just strolling around until she starts hearing music of which she starts to enjoy it.

This isn't finish because I ran out of time. I basically put together everything I had and just went with it. I want to finish this animation and fix up some parts of it.

Anyways I feel that this character has potential and this won't be the last time she appears in an animation. I feel like I can start up a animated web series with her but first I need to come up with a premise.

So yeah.

Anyways my 2nd quarter at The Art Institute SF is done and I have a good 3 week break for the holidays. I plan on gaming a whole lot but I do want to do some art stuff as well. I also want to prepare for the next year because I really want to do a lot next year.

Again sorry for being so quite. Now that I'm done with school for a bit I can do more blog posts. I also want to work on my other blog and start doing some amateur journal writing stuff.

Musical Vibes Revised

This one took awhile but that was necessary because I wanted to do this piece justice.

So back in April I did a piece called Musical Vibes.

I was happy with the piece but there was a lot of problems with it that bothered me afterward. Lanavi Winter is a character near and dear to my heart so I didn't want to make bad artwork of her so I decided to revise this piece heavily and so here is the final version of Musical Vibes.

 Unfortunately it is still not well received in the places where I submit art work but what can I expect I'm a relatively unknown individual. Click here for a better view.

Basically what I did was I redrew her body and gave her a casual summer outfit. I changed where she was looking and put more detail into her eyes. I then added more range of values in the shading for more depth. Lastly, I re did the background to fit the new pose and such and added text for a nice touch. Overall I enjoy this piece and am very proud of it even though it didn't do well in the public eye.

I try to get more art finished so yeah thanks for stopping by and such.

Custom Phoebe Character Portfolio

So I've just been chilling out since the end of my first quarter at the Art Institute so now time for a lengthy post. This is the final character portfolio project I did for my Character and Object design class. Which is also the beginning concept work for a story I want to work on called Custom Phoebe.

So let's get this started.

 So here we have page one which is the set up page for the main character, Phoebe Leal.

Phoebe's body turns.

10 of Phoebe's expressions.

2 of Phoebe's action poses.

2 of 4 of Phoebe's acting poses.

 

4 of 4 of Phoebe's acting poses.

 10 of Phoebe's hand poses.

1 of 5 of Phoebe's props.

4 of 5 of Phoebe's props.

Finally, Phoebe's head turns.

Moving on to the second character

Here is Bronx's set up. He is the trusty partner to Phoebe.

Bronx's body turns.

10 of Bronx's expressions.

Finally the third character Rae Djn, the third teammate in Phoebe's team.

Rae's Setup.

Rae's terrible drawn body turns (I didn't like how this turned out)

10 of Rae's expressions.

Here's the character line up and size comparison.

Background 1 of 2, Phoebe's house on the command ship.

And finally background 2 of 2 a rough sketch of the city in the command ship. (Command ship = home away from home for Phoebe and co. since they travel the universe busting criminals.)

So yeah there we go.

Just the a little inside info. I was very much inspired by Megaman and the game Mighty Switch Force. The idea for the story came from the idea of galaxy space police force stuff through out sci-fi things as well as the general premise of the Green Lantern. Star Wars can be a factor of inspiration as well. Also Bronx's design was inspired by Earthworm Jim and he was suppose to be a human but I changed him after I though of the whole Police in space thing. Rae's design came out of the blue she was suppose to be a robot but I decided to make her into another alien species. 

Anyways that's it enjoy.

My new project, Custom Phoebe!

So this post marks the start of my development journal entries for my brand new attempt at making a web comic series. This series is called Custom Phoebe.

Now why do I think this one will more likely start off as opposed to my two other ideas that haven't gotten anywhere? Simply put I have more concept and character development work for Custom Phoebe.

Basically I've been working on the lead cast for Custom Phoebe for my character and object design class. Our final project is to make a 3 character portfolio which includes a whole lot of character design content such their basic profile, synopsis of the characters story and world, facial expressions, body turns, character acting poses, character action poses, backgrounds, and the items or props they use. So yeah it would be a complete waste if all this concept work would not be used for something so I really would like to start something with this. Since I have more of an understanding of these characters than I have with all the other characters I have made.

So let's start by introducing the characters.

First up we have Phoebe the main character.

So yeah our heroine of the story. Phoebe is Universal Police officer. The Universal Police Force is a inter-universe police organization that protects planets under the Universal Law. Phoebe was originally a cop for a space colony city but had a run in with a dangerous bounty hunter who robbed her of her ability to use her arms and legs. So she was given prosthetic limbs. As a result of the incident she wanted to become better at protecting the innocent and decided to join the ones who saved her, the Universal Police Force. So now she and her team patrol the various galaxies stopping evil.

So generally her ability is that her prosthetic limbs are interchangeable so she can "customize" her load out to satisfy any given situation.

  I've been developing Phoebe for 7 weeks now and so here is a comparison shot of when she was first designed to what she looks like now. Phoebe on the left is the first sketch I did of her, and Phoebe on the right is the one I did last week. I ended up changing a lot of her design because I had design elements from other characters in her and they were hard to draw consistently for some reason like the hair buns.

I don't have a finished sketch of the second character so let's go to the third

The third character is probably going to be the most popular of the initial three. This is Rae Djn. She is the navigator and tech wiz of Phoebe's team. Rae is a Teleqwin a species from the planet Qwina which are a species who entire body consist of a floating round head. Since they have no limbs they use telekinesis to manipulate their environment. Because they use telekinesis so much which requires a lot of brain power, they manage to gain a extremely high form of intellect and thus manage to develop advance robotic stuff and such like the robot suit Rae controls. Rae is incredibly smart and is a master of multitasking, not to mention she is a unstoppable at strategy games. Her only draw back is that she terrible at any form of combat, ie. she is a bad shot so she tends to sit on the side lines giving out information to the team and is usually behind the wheel of the space craft.

So yeah I want to continually record the progress of this project and hopefully we will be seeing an official launch of the web comic in the near future. It will be glorious and I will feel accomplished.

Stay tune for more development.  

L.A. Remembers To Update!

Every time I think about wanting to update my blog I always forget because of school. I'm so sorry for leaving this place dry for more than a month.

So what's happening with me? I've been studying at the Art Institute of California - San Francisco. I had 5 classes (now 4 because one was half the length of the others). I had Portfolio Foundations which was a introductory class for the school. This one ended half way into the quarter. Next up, I have transitional math. Yeah we have general education classes but not a lot. Then we get into the real stuff like Image Manipulation. Basically a fundamentals class on learning Photoshop and some of Illustrator. Moving on we have my favorite class character and object design class and lastly I have typography.

Character and Object design class is a class completely dedicated on the basic understanding of character design principles and such. We are spending our whole time in that class designing characters as if we were going to make like an animated show. The whole class makes me feel like I'm a character designer for a studio and such. I got some images of my character design work that is all building up to my character design portfolio for my final.

This character, which is my main character for the project, has sparked an idea for a story for me to further develop. I'm calling it The Super Ordinary Bionic Police Officer Phoebe. The main character is known as Phoebe Justine.

 So here are a bunch of thumb sketches for Phoebe. I'm basically exploring this character which is a first for me. Basically my instructor pushes us to do these assignments for our characters so we get a full understanding of the characters personality which is probably the most important aspect of a character. I don't have a clear picture of Phoebe just yet, but I actually want to try drawing her digitally in preparation for the final portfolio so yeah.

We also did acting poses. This is probably the best pose I did out of the six for the assignment. I had to draw poses conveying anger, fear or being frightened, curious, a pose of my choice, and two action poses.

And there are the acting poses.

Another assignment we did was make a big hybrid creature and give them a sidekick. We had to color it too but I had to rush the coloring job because of my limited time.

Basically the big guy is a frog headed, robot human bodied, lobster claw armed, alligator tailed, and snail shelled backed creature. which a bunny, human, snake thing.

So yeah that's only a small fraction of stuff I've been doing for the month I'll be back with more. Sorry for my absences.

L.A.'s Art: Summer Girl

Finished a piece from a sketch I did some weeks back. More digital art practice as well as pose practice and some background painting practice.

I still have a lot to learn about painting backgrounds but I feel alright with this one. I enjoy painting clouds.

Yeah this was fun and that's what counts.

More A Glass of Water Stuff

So yeah it's decided I really want to work on A Glass of Water again.

I have a lot of stories and, in turn, a lot of characters. I could say all these characters are near and dear to my heart. So what separates AGoW's lead cast from the rest? I think it would be interesting to go over that while showing some old, old artwork.

This was the original design for Lauren "Laa" Viri. The main character of the whole thing. If her name wasn't obvious enough she is, in fact, the female version of me with design decisions I made. First off I'm no red head and I don't have green eyes but if I had the choice to change some genetics I would totally have went there. Though this art piece was made a while back like way far back I would probably make her hair color and eye color like mine which are dark brown for both. Anyways yeah Laa is me in every way except she's a girl. So I for a brief description here, Laa is an aspiring animator who enjoys animations, video games, and graphic novels to name a few of her interest. She isn't really shy but finds it difficult to start and keep a conversation and she was raised to be polite, punctual, and modest. She will treat others how she would like to be treated basically. Yeah Laa is going to be an easy character to develop because she is me practically and a lot of her life experiences are from my own though she will have a more interesting life because all I do is stay home and such. As far as the art piece goes. I tried to do some perspective thing where the came was more in the sky. I think she is showing too much neck for illusion to make any sense.

Yeah for awhile Laa was my favorite original character until Lanavi came in, but even then Laa still is an important character for me because well you should know why.

This next character wasn't apart of the original concept of AGoW. This would be Philece "Pillow" Ashby. This character came from another idea that was scrapped. Basically me and my brother had an idea to make a t-shirt company and I would make designs for the shirts. I made a line up of character and one of those characters was a sleepy one which I would name Pillow. Unfortunately the t-shirt thing ended up being scrapped due to complications and this character along with another, the mascot of the company, had no where to go. I decided they would fit in A Glass of Water which at the time had only three lead characters. As for Pillow I decided to sort of revolve her personality around the fact that she loves sleeping and no she isn't narcoleptic. Basically she is this super chill character where nothing seems to phase her what so ever. She is also absent minded and getting lost or side tracked is very common in her day to day life. I decided to make her English so she has the accent and all. The decision came along when I was coloring this piece and I was thinking of hair colors and I've done all the possible hair colors at the time but never covered blonde hair and so I decided to make her English from that point. That's why her last name is an English one. Her back story is that she decided to, out of the blue, wanted to live a broad and quits whatever she was doing and moves to the city where AGoW takes place. Being absent minded she didn't have any plan so she ended up wondering around the city. Then she would visit a book store and would run into Laa who was looking for through the manga section. Pillow becomes curious and starts asking Laa what these books were and such. Eventually things lead up to Pillow telling Laa that she came from Europe with no plan what so ever and Laa decides to bring her home where Pillow eventually ends up room renting with the rest of the cast. Design wise, I'll be honest her hair was made that way because of my influence to Pokemon's artist Ken Sugimori. I would later come up with a logical reason for how it is like that. Pretty much her hair is like always in some sort of neat bed head state so that why her hair curves up and such.

Honestly I think Pillow is going to be the funnest character to work with because I love these kind of characters in animes and such. Also writing her dialogue will be a blast and also a huge challenge because I want her to be very British so she will say the British way of saying words like colour, centre, and such.

I decided to talk about these two because they are the only two who have artwork. Chesna has artwork but for some odd reason it is all traditional work. Yeah every time I draw on paper I always end up drawing her. She did appear on the last page of the old comic. She was the one with the tinted glasses if you are will to go back to that post I did of my old comic. I'll talk about the other three when I start doing new designs for the characters.

So yeah I'm pretty excited to start re designing these five characters who I haven't drawn in years. I great to finally give these characters a new light. So yeah sorry for the really long post. Ciao.

The Return of A Glass of Water?

So I've been thinking about starting up a web comic for the longest time and I was really set on making Newbie Bounty Hunter my "real" debut web comic, but despite my how good or bad my art skills are, I feel that I should hold of on it and that I'm not really ready to tackle an action story.

So then came the question of what will I be making a web comic of then. Two or three stories come to mind. The first being the one mention in the title, A Glass of Water. I showed off some pages from the original web comic for AGoW but like I said before my old computer broke and I couldn't work on the web comic and I lost all motivation to continue it when I got a new computer. The problem was I thought the direction the story was going was uninteresting and the biggest challenge for AGoW was always how to make a slice of life story interesting. I'm coming up with some pretty out there plot ideas to make AGoW stand out and I think I finally have some thing worth while. So now I'm thinking about re designing the characters.

The second story idea was one I came up with recently called Around the World with Amelia Wilts. As the name suggests it's a story revolving around a character, Amelia Wilts, traveling around the world. Basically it's some what of a life dream for her to see the world and so she saves up her money and once she had enough she would go on a backpack adventure with her best friend. This story is less likely to become a comic just yet because I feel I need more practice in drawing diverse environments and such. I had a fun idea to come up with the world and roughly base countries on the countries in our own world. As far as a writing stand point, It will prove to be a challenge. Or I can go the easy route and just use our world.

The third story is one that I want to keep a secret because I find the idea to be incredible bizarre and unique that I don't want other people potentially taking the idea before I can even use it. Basically the only thing I will say is that it is a story is about a waitress who has chronic clumsiness and she decides to use science to solve the problem. This is a vague description because it is probably no where near what you would expect. This story is a happy mistake that I came up with when I was working on an art piece of a maid.

So yeah A Glass of Water feels to be the winner here and I feel that the story deserves more especially since it was scrapped so quickly the first time around.

What is A Glass of Water about? Well basically it's a story that revolves around five friends Lauren "Laa" Viri, Chesna Ha, Mooni, Caprice (who still has no last name at the moment), and Philece "Pillow" Ashby who live out their day to day life dealing with fairly common situations and such. Mostly it focuses on Laa's life as she studies to become an animator. The twist is that Laa comes from Mars. This is an alternate time where the human civilization has expanded beyond the stars and so there are colonies on the moon, Mars and in space stations scattered through out the Solar System. So an education program known as the BSS FESP, The Bigger than the Solar System Foreign Exchange Student Program, was approved where college students can travel to different colonies, and or planets to study. Laa was excepted to study animation on the planet that started it all and she will meet her roomy Chesna and they will go through life. Laa will have to over come things like culture shock and home sickness as well as the hardships of pursuing a pretty challenging career. Laa will also do other things that I haven't thought of but yeah.

Yeah I guess you can say I like thinking outside of the box when it comes to story making. It's so easy to follow the same formula now a days that it becomes boring. A lot of animes and such are uninteresting to me because they seem to be the same thing over and over. There are those Japanese story creators out there who have such crazy ideas that people think drugs were involved in the development. I love that kind of stuff and those dudes are what inspire me.

What am working on: Girl Leaning

Yeah working title hehe.

Yeah this is a new pose practice which turned out pretty good so I decided to ink and color it. Right now I'mm inking it.

So basically, like how I start any sketch, the girl wasn't wearing any clothes and as I was working on this I was imagining her in a summer dress with a hat and sandals. So basically this is a summer piece. I'm not a fan of summer. Hot weather isn't for me, but yeah I'm enjoying this. This is one of the few times I have decided to draw feet with toes and they turned out pretty nice though they probably aren't my best feet but I'm happy with 'em. Oh and I'm sketching more often as a form of practice. So I'd like to sketch a new pose and so on so on.

So yeah I plan on finishing this in a week another thing I want to do often is finish work since I've started using Deviantart more, I'm working on making a presence by being more active and such more details about that later.

So yeah...

The Heads Up 5/9/12

So it's been awhile since I've done one of these but I really want to share my thoughts on a new project that I started working on. Basically what I'm working on is a remake of what I consider and what a lot of people would consider my best art work I have done ever since I started posting artwork to the internet.

This is one of the very few pieces of art work I am proud of and it's a fan art piece. It was finished on October 25th back in 2009 so that was about three years ago. I really consider it one of the mile stone pieces for me because it really brought attention when I had my old deviant art account, that is until I left deviant art.

I decided I wanted to re make the piece to see how far my style has gone and who knows this new rendition of this piece maybe the newest best piece.

There are a lot of old art works that I want to remake and give a lot of old characters a new shine because a lot of my old characters have been neglected sadly and their is one piece that I absolutely need to remake to "redeem" myself from a colossal failure back in Spring 2011.

 This is the continued attempt of L.A. getting the recognition he works so hard to obtain in the art community.

School is nearing the end and so I can probably focus on things like animations and comics during my small break before summer class so yeah.

Cartoon wittle Lanavi!

Decided to spend my drawing night on a little experiment. Draw Lanavi with a overly puffy cartoony style. I honestly enjoy the result. This was really fun to do.

Also these songs made this little picture all the more fun to work on.

and

Anyways here it is.

Wittle Lanavi is ready for the snow even though it's like almost summer haha.

She's so adorable <3. So this was a really quick job and I did all in one sitting so it's a bit sloppy but the most important thing about this piece is that I was having a blast doing it. I just want to hug her and pet her. I actually really like this new found style and it probably will replace my old super deform chibi style that I haven't drawn in ages. Anyways this was great fun and practice.

Detective Wednesday Saturn

So I did a concept sketch for my detective character here. I liked the sketch but I also needed visuals for my demonstration speech in my communications class. So I made a video of me working on this since this was a ready to finish sketch.

Wednesday Saturn is my detective character for my story idea called "Jazz on a Wednesday." It's like a film noir kind of story where Wednesday solves crimes in the illustrious but shady city of Safe Haven Metropolis. She partners up with Jazi Quartet an ex criminal hacker who faked her death and changed her identity to Jazi Quartet after a late famous singer of the same name.

So it's like one of those dark gritty dark deco style stories with mafia's and such. I have a very unique world planned up but I want to keep it a secret. Don't want anyone taking my ideas now.

Yeah this was done fairly quickly and it's not the best work I've done mainly because I was really running short on time and had to get it done for my presentation so I pretty much took a weeks worth of work and done it in one day. So excuse the sloppiness.

The heads up 4/21/2012

Yeah my attention kind of changed from my comic and animation project to doing the over haul of Lanavi in the piece "Musical Vibes." It has been awhile since I actually worked on some stand alone imagery so I guess it's fine.

I don't normally like revising already finished art work mainly because at the end of the day it's not a new piece of art. I like to give viewers something new and surprising to experience so this is why I don't refer to this current art project as a simply revision but rather an over haul.

So what have I done to the piece so far. well for one I deleted all the color layers and background layers. I fixed her face and changed where she was looking. Along side fixing where she is looking I also did some polish on her eyes in general. I'm still thinking if I should keep her expression or tweak it but yeah. I'm thinking of adding more lines in her hair to indicate hair strands. Her face is is pretty fine so all I need to do was trim things and such but her body I ended up scrapping it altogether and re drew it.

I'm also working on a character for the animation project I really want to do. So yeah.

It's way too late and I need sleep so yeah.

A Painting of Autumn

Camera's don't do justice for this. Anyways I decided to do a background painting to, well, practice drawing of course. This is an acrylic on Bristol painting. I basically used 7 colors for this which were red, yellow, orange, green, blue, black, and white. Green was mixed with orange to make the browns. I used a pointillist style of painting basically it's optical blending via painting with tiny dots rather than brush strokes. It helps give off that leaf texture as well as blend all the warm color together to make a nice autumn like feel.

Pointillist style makes it really easy to paint natural backgrounds with acrylic. Normally doing these kind of paintings with acrylic is really hard because acrylic doesn't blend so well together as opposed to oils. I'm pretty happy with this especially since I'm very new at doing backgrounds all together.

I was feeling like drawing autumn even though it's Spring. I'd love to walk through a forest in autumn and have all these colors around me.

As far as painting go I love not being restricted like trying to paint within the lines sort of thing. So this one was especially fun to do because I didn't need to be so careful.

Anyways enjoy.

The Heads Up. 4/12/2012 Tired, oh so tired

Late heads up post, but ugh too tired to do drawings. I haven't been sleeping well this whole week and as a result it has been really hard to work on anything really. I've tried to work on Paige Italic's character sheet but I just can't seem to get her the way I want her to look. I guess I have a bit of a art block due to being so tired which sucks because I really want to get the comic started.

Hopefully I can get a good nights sleep this weekend.

I also really need start working on that color contest for Sword Girls.

In other news SkullGirls came out on both PSN and Xbox Live. The game is one amazing fighting game that feels so good. Parasoul is my favorite and I love her walk animation which may sound super odd.

I've also yet again have had this thought about my style. I'm trying to figure out what I'm missing because I just feel that it is, but yeah I think I want to try drawing everyday, doing quick 30 minute sketches daily as well as do some traditional pieces and actually use my Prisma colored pencils.

To tired to think of other things to talk about sorry for now I'm just going to relax, think about the story for Newbie Bounty Hunter and watch some youtube shows.

Happy Birthday Me!

Oh man this weekend was probably the best birthday weekend I have had in a long time. So yeah I'm older now not much to say about that but let's go over my birthday celebration.

First off I don't throw parties and haven't since Sophomore in high school. Now a days I just go out with the family to eat out. This outing was special though because we went to Yoshi's in Oakland California which is Japanese restaurant, bar and Jazz club. So I had a nice dinner and got to sample high class sake (I'm of age to drink but I'm not a fan of it but I will at least spend some years drinking a little bit for occasion but that's it. Sake or rice wine is my kind of drink though) and had an alright pork chop. I don't really eat sea food so yeah I really can't judge sushi even if I did order some. It was good none the less.

So the big part of this dinner was that we had reservations for the Jazz concert that would be playing after our meal. My favorite genre of music is Jazz so this was super thrilling. It's neat because this night (we did this yesterday because school is tomorrow and such) a combination of my favorite things Japan and Jazz. The band playing was fronted by a Japanese Pianist too. Hiromi Trio Project was playing that night it boy was the performance full of energy and passion. Hiromi Uehara is now one of my favorite pianist and she had one bomb of a trio to perform with her.

I was super thrilled to experience that I ended up buying her album. Best birthday celebration ever.

I also got a gift and in my opinion a very awesome one at that.

Yup "The Art of Miyazaki's Spirited Away." Spirited Away is practically the reason why I'm here studying animation. It's the first Miyazaki movie I saw all the way through and it blew my mind. It stands as being tied as my favorite movie of all time with Summer Wars. This book has 240 pages of concept art, cells, and information on what Miyazaki thought's during the development of the movie as well as the complete script. I'm going to definitely going to sit down and read this book over and over again and take as much from it as I can. I have a lot of art books and this one has to be the most helpful. I should really do a section where I tour my art book collection.

Yeah anyways I love my family they made my day incredible. I'm happy to have the family I have. Now back to making them proud by producing incredible art.

It also neat that every once in awhile my B-day falls on top of Easter. Which is a pretty important day for Catholics. I'm Catholic but not so religious but I still attend church and such maybe that fact added to how incredible my celebration was.

Anyways stay classy and ciao~

Art Work of the Past: Failed Web comic AGoW

So the web comic I'm currently working on isn't the first the I dabbled into comic making. There was a web comic before but it didn't last long for two reasons. I was looking though my old files and actually found the old pages to this web comic which was called "A Glass of Water." So here they are.

Click for better view.

Man this was way before I took life drawing class the proportions are so wacky.

Anyways why did this comic fail? The first major reason was the computer I was using back when I started this comic died and so I was with out my major art tool for several months. The second reason was when I eventually got my new laptop I really didn't know where the story was going and every direction I tried to bring it wasn't working in my head.

So A Glass of Water is on a long hiatus. Yeah I don't want to give up on the characters of this story. The character Laa (the character with the "!" sign hoodie) is actually a female version of me or at least how a female version of me would be back in that time. The other character appearing in the third page is Chesna. It's basically a slice of life story about my life interpreted in a female version of me in a fictional world. I wanted to add a unique twist of which I've been thinking up from time to time. I have an idea but don't know how to approach it just yet and right now Noobie Bounty Hunter is the story I'm working on.

So yeah I just thought I would share my first attempt at a comic. I have Manga Studio so I have a better tool to make comics and a much improved art style. So yeah.

One thing I learned from trying to start this comic was that people were genuinely interested in how the story would pan out. Sorry to those eager for more but maybe they will stumble across Noobie Bounty Hunter when I bring it into the web comic community. Yeah I posted this AGoW on a web comic community and got 4 subscribers. That's not a whole lot but it told me that anyone can be interested in a comic it don't matter the quality. I'll tell you here and now the quality of this comic is bad, but that is the magic of comic making the art is relevant and important but the story factor, and how you tell it is just as important or even more important.

Let me apologize for making such lengthy blog post I just get carried away sometimes. I hope these aren't wasting your time and if it is bothersome then just shout out and I'll try to shorten it. I can't help it >_< when my mind rolls it rolls.  

NBH Character Sheet #1

Noobie Bounty Hunter Character Sheet #1 KI-WI!

Click for better view. (I don't know why a black lot of something appears on her left hand with out her weapon when you full view it but ignore that, that's not apart of the design.)

Anyways yeah character sheet done for now! I will finish it up in the future like clean up the lines and add color but since I want to start working on other characters and get this comic rolling, I'm happy with just sketches and such. Colored cleaner versions will be done when the comic is actually getting pages posted on the web comic page under the characters or casts section.

So yeah here is KI-WI the heroine of the story. The super fighting robot created by Paige Italics. So I will be explaining what is written here mainly because my hand writing is terrible. So KI-WI is to be 5'4" around a little bit shorter than me (yeah I'm a short guy.) The thing on her head, the egg shaped thing is where you could access her brain via plugging in a wire so it opens as seen there. The thing on her left hand is the Solar Lens, her weapon. It absorbs light and stores it as energy of which she can use as a laser to cause harm. It is attached via a rectangular socket just below her wrist joint(edit: no I'd rather it be on the back of her hand much like in her body suit sketch over to the very right.) and can be adjusted back and forth so that her left hand is more flexible. Lastly under her clothing is her body suit. Even though she's a robot and has now explicit parts what so ever, Paige felt she needed a body suit just to have some modesty. She has feet under those boots I just didn't feel like drawing them.

So things to know about KI-WI. She's short but taller than Paige, Paige is super short. Her clothing serves no practical function what so ever, it's all aesthetic (more on that when the comic starts rolling). She's left handed (again more on this when the comic starts rolling). Lastly she was seen with short sleeves in previous sketches I decided to give her, her longer sleeves like in her 2010 design because I love drawing those sleeves and she looks right with 'em.

Next up I want to design Paige Italics. So yeah now for a little break and then back to work!

The Heads Up 4/2/2012

Plans for this week go!

Click image for full view.

I guess here is a little screen shot showing how I generally make my guidelines for the body. Oh and this is the second time I did KI-WI's character sheet. The first round was not so good in my opinion and her body just looked off. This one is much better and more true to her previous character illustration here.

First order of business is to finish KI-WI's character as seen above for the comic, and work on the rest of the frequent cast. I think after I get KI-WI done I can start thinking about laying out the first page and getting  the story all ironed out. I already have a good idea as to how I want the story to roll I just need more characters to fit the roles in certain plot lines but yeah. 

I hope to get the prologue chapter all done by the end of this month and when I'm half way or so done with the prologue I will make a web comic site and start posting pages, but first things first I need character references mainly because it's a very good way to keep your artwork consistent especially in comic making since it is typically important that the characters look relatively the same from panel to panel.

Next thing I should consider working on is a personal art piece that has been worked on since June of last year. The issue with this art piece is that I keep learning new techniques and such and I end up editing this piece with all the new stuff I learned. I mainly want to make a top quality illustration out of this piece as to avoid disappointing myself. With that said I feel like I need to re work the background after doing a bit of background study. I need to better refine the line work and stuff.

Oh almost forgot to mention. Sword Girls is holding a coloring contest. I actually want to consider doing it maybe I can get some colorist experience under my belt. I don't plan on being a colorist but it would help to have that skill. Colorist are basically professional artist who color other artist's line work. Usually you see these guys work in comics and stuff.

So in a nut shell, work on and finish KI-WI's reference sheet, start the other Noobie Bounty Hunter character's reference sheet, and work on my personal art piece which I will call "Walking."

Back to work so bye.

Spring Break, art equipment and web comics

Ah so happy to have a small break from school. Bio 101 is kicking a lot of our arses. You'd think an exam would be easy and you'd get a decent grade when the test are group test. Apparently not and the whole class scored badly on the last test. Our professor is probably being super strict or something.

Anyways spring break yes I can sleep in. I've been dead tired in the day time these past couple of weeks. I'm not a morning person yet I would rather take morning classes just to get them out of the way. Oh and April is coming up which is when I will really start getting into gear and actually start producing content for my web comic/manga how ever you want to call.

Tangent: I draw in the anime/manga style but yet I call it web comic and such. I know no one has pointed it out but I find myself thinking about this oddly enough. So when I say web comic it can be defined as either comic or manga since I honestly consider the two words to be the same. Same goes with anime and cartoons. I would rather refer to the two as animations or animated shows if all possible but anime is generally the fastest way to type it so yeah. If anything I could just refer to my comic as web graphic novel, but yeah that's a bit of an odd tangent I pointed out. I don't care how anyone calls it comic, manga or graphic novel they mean the same thing so yeah don't be too confused.

Tangent 2: I feel like getting an Intuos well more like on the fence. See it may not be a good investment right now because of the fact that I'm not a professional and such. I've been using art tablets for 5 years and my good partner, Wacom Bamboo has been a great help for those 5 years. It's far from kicking the bucket too, but I feel that I want to try out the other great pen tip pressure options Intuos has. Maybe in two years I see to buying one especially when I really get down to the nitty gritty of animation university. 

I've been lagging as far as work on Noobie Bounty Hunter. Video games kind of got my spare time these couple of weeks ehehe. I'll get KI-WI's character sheet done and will move on to the rest of the current cast promise.

In other news, I've been reading a lot of web comics. It's a way to get into the comic making mood I guess. So what am I reading? List time!

What web comics L.A. is reading:

First off is Andrew Dickman's The Roomies . I don't remember if I talked about Andrew Dickman in my favorite artist part 1 post but yeah Andrew is one of my favorite artist out there. He's an animator and or cartoonist and The Roomies is a project near and dear to his heart. He started this comic a long while ago but he dropped it because he didn't know where he wanted it to go. After some many years, he finally figured out how he wanted to tell the story and here we are. This web comic is new and started earlier this March and though the story hasn't caught on just yet, it is looking pretty solid.

Next up is Mary "Cube" Cagle's Kiwi Blitz. I actually really like Cube's style because it follows a similar philosophy as my own style which is being simplistic. My character KI-WI and her name was not inspired by Kiwi bot that is strangely coincidental. If anything KI-WI's name is based on the fruit not the bird and she was thought up during my freshmen year of high school roughly 8 years ago. I have no idea why I named her KI-WI but I did. Anyways this is a pretty entertaining comic I'm not much for serious sci-fi stuff but I can totally chill with colorful and relatively up beat sci-fi stories which in some cases Kiwi Blitz is. Granted the more recent chapters (or in the comic's case tracks) are much more darker in tone it's still very interesting and fun to read so yeah I'm eager to read the next track.

Jim Zub with the help of talented artist Shun Hong Chan put together a very, very beautiful and incredibly interesting web comic Makeshift Miracle. The art is beautiful and the story is very well though out and written so far. It's like one of those very good animes or anime movies that seem like a slice of life but actually have a bizarre, out of nowhere element to it. Like Haruhi or Summer Wars. Of course there is less of an Japanese influence in this comic and more of a western feel which is a great change of pace if I had to be honest. I'm eagerly waiting for new pages.

Snafu has a good number of on going web comics. I plan on reading Endling's Ever After as well as catch up with Bleedman's comics the Powerpuffgirl one, Grim Tales, and Sugar Bits. I'm not sure about the other comics but as far as it goes, Endling and Bleedman are my favorite artist here. Sadly I think Ever After hasn't been updated for 4 years but I haven't read all of it so I can make some head way.

Lastly we got Gigi D.G.'s Cucumber Quest. A very colorful comic that may remind people of Adventure Time. I've never really been fond of Adventure Time but I find this comic to be interesting. It has a neat sense of humor and though the art may seem cute and colorful for a man like me to enjoy I do. I remember some one told me once that I draw too cute for a guy and in some cases I agree. The visuals of this comic are nice, the story pretty interesting so far and the humor is really something. I like the food theme going on in it.

Some other web comics I'm thinking about reading are Sanctuary School, Romantically Apocalyptic, and Eerie Cuties.

So yeah sleep in, work on some school stuff, but mainly work on my web comic! So I'm off! *Wosh!*

Hello, Hello

So I decided to go post one completed art works here. This one was done just for practice, for stretching my art muscle.

Click image for full view

I titled it Hello, Hello for some reason but yeah it was decently fun to do and very simple. I was also experimenting with the line art and used a brush 5 times bigger than what I would normally use. It gave me some interesting results and I might try it again but with a 10 times bigger brush. I actually like the design of this character even though this kind of hairstyle boggles my mind as to how it actually works or how it could work in real life but yeah who knows, this character might find a home in one of my stories. Actually yeah I will think about putting this character into one of my stories and give her a proper name.

I was looking through my files and sketches and found this. I'm actually thinking about finishing a lot of my old sketches. Some of them need some major tweaks while others need to be re drawn all together but that's not too bad at least I will not be getting any art block anytime soon.

Anyways enjoy and ciao~

The Heads Up 3/21/2012

I've boycotted facebook, but I'm so tempted to update my status there but I know I shouldn't. So I'll do it here. You know I feel a whole lot better know that I don't have to worry about facebook. I'm happy.

My plan is to do this as a weekly thing and I guess maybe on Mondays instead of Wednesdays. So what's going on in my crazy head?

I figured maybe the illustrations I do don't grasp as much interest so start telling my stories. I've been told one of my strengths has been in story telling and the best way I can do that is through comics so let's do it with Noobie Bounty Hunter!

I've pretty much putting all my focus on Noobie Bounty Hunter. I want to start it up as a web comic. Currently I'm working on character reference sheets. I've started with KI-WI since she is the main character after all. I also need to start thinking up some bad guys and such and get a full cast rolling. I'm also thinking about the script for chapter one.

What I plan on doing is maybe get half of or all of chapter 1 done before I start posting that way I can consistently push out content and keep the readership interested while I work on chapter 2, but before I can even start getting a chapter rolling I need to establish the character designs and figure out how the story will roll in both chapters 1 and 2.

As far as characters go, I only have a solid design for KI-WI. Bunny Italics and Gilroy Straightedge still need a design. Of course I also need designs for the antagonists.

So yeah I really, really want this to be legit so I'm going to be working very hard to make this web comic real as well as work on a publishable version of the comic to submit to publishers to, just maybe, get a book deal.

It's time L.A. stepped up and made a name fore myself in the art world!

Left Direction Returns!

A little off topic here but I decided to revive my old media coverage blog Left Direction. Basically I wanted to do indie journalism since I do enjoy watching video game review shows and such, but I also want to talk about other things revolving around stuff like video games, animated shows, graphic novels, and so on. Basically it's going to be more professional than what I do here since this blog is more of a personal blog for me to spout thoughts mindlessly and post art and recent purchases.

So my goal is to give an honest resource as to what people could spend their time on. So yeah I'm going to start sprucing up the blog so yeah keep on eye on that readers.

So yeah stay tuned for that.

Sketch it up: KI-WI Action Piece

New section I guess. For when I do sketches because not all my sketches become actual finish stuff and even some planned projects never get finished so this is a bit better than a work in progress section.

So I'm yet again practicing with new poses and working with foreshortening since foreshortening is something I have trouble with. I want to do more dynamic illustrations so yeah.

Click image for full view

I decided to re do the earlier sketch I had of this character KI-WI. I felt the jumping pose she was in wasn't very exciting and so I made her tripping or in a very hap hazard fleeing state. I'm planning on putting something in the background to indicate what exactly she is frantically trying to avoid. I'm also working on expressions. I want to have a much more expressive style since they are really fun to draw. I still need to finish her right hand. I don't know what I want to do with it but something will come up eventually.

I'm also thinking about seriously making a web comic out of this character and the world she is apart of. Though I wanted to make a game about this character, I think it would be easier to start with a webcomic. So I'm hoping to start making proper character design sheets for the main lead of this story. The story is called Noobie Bounty Hunter KI-WI. 

So I guess I should start doodling up characters for Noobie Bounty Hunter.

New layout!

Yeah lots of green because I really like green.  Not because it's St. Patrick's day that just some really odd and well timed coincidence. If I had to choose a favorite color then it would most likely be green or maroon. Musical Vibes original purpose was to be a graphic so I can strut my graphic design skills because if there is anything I know how to do right it would have to be finding new and unique ways to use art programs.

The Girl of Knowledge and Shadow

Click image for full view.

So I did some fan art of my favorite character ever (outside of my own characters), Patchouli Knowledge. This purple lovely is a character from the Touhou Project series appearing in a lot of the Windows era games. 

There is just so much I enjoy about this character. First off she is a proficient elemental magician. I love elemental magic. I guess I just enjoy the ability to control the elements. I really like her design: her night cap, the crescent thing, all her ribbons, and purple color scheme. I actually really like the color purple and I think Patchouli made me enjoy the color even more. Bits of Lanavi was inspired by this character. 

Anyways this will not be the last time I'll draw Patchouli she is just too fun to draw. Also this is the start of my Touhou fan art series. Yeah I plan on doing fan art of all my favorite Touhou characters.

This was done solely in Sai while listening to Patchouli's theme, stage theme and a mess of remixes including my favorite remix. Weekend Clock ～週末に鳴る終末の時計～

Some of my favorite artist. Part 1

It's been awhile since I've done a blog post. So how about I go look back at all the artist that have inspired and molded my style to what it is now. I guess it could be an interesting insight for me and the readers here.

Let's start with my very favorite artist, Ryusuke Hamamoto (also known as Ryumoto) http://ryusukeworks.blogspot.com/ http://ryusukeworks.com/

Like I said above my favorite artist of all time. Thanks to this guy's drawing videos I've gotten a good grasp on how to color digitally and such. I just enjoy Ryumoto's sense of energy in his work and the vibrant colors he uses. He has a very east meets west kind of style in a way though it is more apparent in some of his works as opposed to all of his works. He has a very comic book feel as well being that he does like a lot of American comics. One last thing I enjoy about Ryumoto is how he has interacted with his fans. He likes to converse with others especially from out of his country. Though he doesn't do it so often anymore, he use to do sketch request on his blog. He actually drew something for me which was when I requested he draw Rachel Alucard from BlazBlue and I felt some connection because of that even though it was a very small interaction.

Next up is Takehito Harada. http://www4.ocn.ne.jp/~u1h/

He, was for the longest time, my favorite artist of all time until I came across Ryusuke Hamamoto. Now his claim to fame is that he was the character artist for the Disgaea series. The thing I was in love with, with his style was the way he colors. This painted line less style along side the petite body type (most of the time) he uses a lot for characters made his work stand out from the crowd. Unfortunately my taste have grown. I use to draw characters in a similar petite body style but after taking life drawing I just can't see any right from my past, anorexic characters. I still enjoy Takehito Harada's character design sense.

Chika Umino http://www13.plala.or.jp/umino/

Chika Umino is known for creating the manga Honey and Clover which was adapted into one of my favorite animes of all time. She is also the character designer for Eden of the East. I won't lie some elements of my current new style comes from her. Even the laid back down to earth feel in some cases. I think the most obvious design aspect I got from her work is how I draw noses which I really love.

Satoko Kiyuduki https://www.google.com/search?q=satoko+kiyuduki&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=zmW&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=7X1IT6K7LIiTiQKXiL3aDQ&ved=0CCoQsAQ&biw=1150&bih=644 (because I can't find an official blog or site of hers)

She is known for her character designs in Yggdra Union and her two manga series G.A. Geijutsuka Art Design Class (one of my personal favorites) and Shoulder A Coffin Kuro. Geijustuka was adapted into a decent anime which I enjoy but not as much as the manga. I really enjoy her character design sense especially in her fantasy work. A lot of exaggerations like in the eyes or how characters with glasses would have them worn extremely low on the face but huge and round at the same time. I wish I could draw eyes like she does but I'm too use to making them tall and narrow. The round eyes I draw were inspired by her style as well as Ryusuke Hamamoto.

Alex Ahad http://skullgirls.com/ http://oh8.deviantart.com/

Alex is probably best known for creating Skullgirls, the awesome fighting game that is coming out some time very soon as of the the publication of this article. He has a style that screams "his own." It's a melting pot of his inspirations from east meets west to monsters and cute but still disturbing monsters. I wish I could draw like he does but my mind just can't accept me drawing such exaggerated proportions and such plus I'm satisfied with my style and how it's practically my own. I wouldn't want to be a copy of Alex here now. I've seen Alex in person while test playing Skullgirls when they were demoing it at Comic Con some time ago but I never got to converse with him being that he was in the middle of a conversation and I didn't want to be rude.

Omar Dogan http://omar-dogan.deviantart.com/

Omar is just an incredible artist. I love his sense of realism but how he still manages to keep it in the anime realm. Of course me being a big fighting game fan, I just absolutely love his Street Fighter art and such. His work is very clean and beautifully executed. I also like how he enjoys conversing with his fans and such. When he use to do a lot of drawing streams he would talk with the viewers while working on his artwork which brought more of a connection to him and his viewers. He is also one of the artist I have met in person even though I just said "Hey I'm a big fan of your work" type deal. I love how he draws hands I think some of my ability to draw hands comes from him in some way.

Mark Crilley http://www.markcrilley.com/

If there is one person who is great at keeping in touch with people who appreciate his work it would be Mark Crilley. Known for creating the mangas Miki Falls and Brody's Ghost, he is an artist who loves to share his wisdom and it's something I respect highly of him and I hope to someday do the same with my Youtube channel. He is an outstanding artist. Much like Omar Dogan, he too has a very clean and excellently executed style, but I feel the Mark is more down to earth in his style than Omar.

Chamba Jeffrey Cruz http://lastscionz.deviantart.com/

Chamba has an original comic out known as Randomveus. I love his dynamic style and his cel-shading. I hope to develop a similar cel-shading style as he does because it is incredible. He also has some wicked ideas especially when you look at Randomveus .

Bara-chan Rose Besch http://barachan.com/

Bara-chan is one of the first artist that sort of introduced me to the idea that people as young as me could draw at such a high caliber. She also indirectly introduced me to deviantart along side other artist within the same group of friendship as she. She has a very bright and vibrant style which also has a lot of pop-culture feel to it. I really want to get that urban feel in some of my work as well. She is also an individual that will talk to you and give you advice and she has given me a number of advice through out the years. It was great to finally meet her in person at Anime Expo back in 2010. I wish I got a picture with her and bought a print oh well for sure the next time I run into her at a convention.

Yoshitoshi Abe http://abworks.blog83.fc2.com/

Another legendary artist who was the character designer for two animes that are up there as my favorites list, Serial Experiment Lain and Haibane Renmei. I just enjoy his attention to detail and the organic feel of his works. I believe the reason his work appears more organic is that he is known to not use rulers. I'd like to make backgrounds like he does some day. 

I guess I'll wrap it up for now, but I'd like to continue doing this so this is going to be a multi-parter. I still got a lot of artist to cover.
 

L.A.'s new: The Legends of Zelda Ocarina of Time 3D

So I had a gift card laying around and decided to go and use it to get a new 3DS game and one that would take more advantage of the 3D functions. I got one of my favorite N64 games remade for the system.

Yeah The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time 3D. Sadly, I never experienced this game all the way through. I've seen the end and played through the early bits. I've never owned this game and if I did have it, it was for a short time. So the things I know very well about this game are the young Link dungeons, the forest temple, and then I would stop at the water temple. I've seen the end of the game by watching my friend play it, but I never read any of the dialogue. I know the general idea of the story but never full immersed into the world of Hyrule in this game. I'm happy they remade this game so I can finally fully experience this game.

One thing in this game that impacted me was its music. I enjoyed video game music before but because this game had a playable instrument in game, it encouraged me to play the various songs from this game by ear with the piano. That was the first instance that I knew I had a sort of natural talent to play by ear. I was tempted to expand this musical ability by majoring in music theory but I decided to shift my talents to drawing later on. To this day though, Saria's Song remains to be my favorite song in this game.

Saria's Song

 

and a nice arrangement.

I also enjoy the character Saria I ought to draw her and the other characters in this game like Malon, Zelda, and such.

So my first impressions. This game was incredible back in the day. This remake makes it that much more incredible. The game looks gorgeous the 3d adds to the games aesthetics. I love the added animations to the characters. Link has extra frames of animation when he is in mid jump and when he runs articles of his clothing move more fluidly. The music some maybe a bit disappointed. What they could've done was remaster the soundtrack and maybe give it an orchestrated backing. They just slightly improved what they had. Now for me it's a hit of nostalgia to her some N64 esque chip samples since it is one of the consoles I grew up playing (the others being SNES, Genesis, and NES). The new controls for the ocarina are a bit odd to me. I'm just use to seeing c button arrows. Some bits of the plot fall victim to old school gaming logic but that's fine.  Another thing that was a disappointing was the manual for the game. It's just this folded leaflet thing. I was expecting some official art because the art for this game is amazing. I'm sad at how manuals are dying I love getting a game and then looking through the manual checking out the art and learning some mechanics and such.

This game is well worth the buy if you are a fan of Zelda and if you wanted to see what all the buzz is about this game, this is a great version to try because let's face it the N64 didn't have the prettiest graphics out there. 

Now I really want to get another N64 remake that is actually my favorite of the system, Star Fox 64 3D.