Music share! and Band Camp

No drawings or anything yet, sorry, but can I gush about Band Camp? It's pretty much where I get my music now a days I just really love how indie musicians can show case their work and get money for it as well.

Though I haven't run into indie jazz musicians but I usually just pick up albums based on what I like from my local jazz radio station I listen to when I'm in the car, but I mainly get chip-tunes, electro, funk, and so on kinds of music.

Here are some tracks/albums that I just completely love.

Wandering from the album TRUTHCANNON by A_Rival is such a poppin' track I cannot get enough of it. It totally inspires me to work on Bounty Hunter Aloa stuff. This song came to my attention when I saw the Ultionius: A Tale of Petty Revenge game trailer which featured a remix of this song which helped me consider purchasing the game. Which I have to say the game is super fun. Now the whole TRUTHCANNON album is a great listen. Phoenix, and Ready are other tracks I enjoy but Wandering is my jam right now.

The Beggar

From the album Udana Prana by Amarante. All the songs I feature here are my favorite in the album and here is my favorite for this one. I just completely love the feel of the song. Really calming, a bit gloomy, a bit mysterious. Amarante does folk alternative music and being someone who never really listened to folk music of any sort it's an interesting experience that I'm enjoying. 

Of course I can't talk about indie musicians using band camp with out mention one of my favorite composers ever, Jake Kaufman. My favorite song of his is this one which is Glow from the Mighty Switch Force 2 Original Sound Track but also check out his other work from Mighty Switch Force 1, Shantae, and even in the game I mentioned earlier, Ulionus: A Tale of Petty Revenge. Jake's music has been a key background noise for when I work on my sci-fi stuff during the start of my animation school days and the Mighty Switch Force 1 and 2 OSTs are my most played songs on my phone I love these songs so much.

I can recommend a whole bunch more but I will leave it there for now.

I got one more week of vacation before I have to get back into schooling so I'm going to get as much gaming, show watching, and drawing done this week before school takes over my life again.

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.

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~

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!*

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.