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.