And here we come to the last day that I wrote about. April 12th was the award ceremony, which you can see online, and April 13th was a rest/travel home day. I got home around 1am, and I got to sleeeep. And then it was time for work the next day!
This one has a lot of advice in it, picked up from the pros. Not so many pictures, but good stuff nonetheless!
Day 4 of our LA adventure!
Day three of our adventure!
Now onto the second day of our adventure!
Day One
Day Two
Day Three
Day Four
Day Five
In 2015 I was a winner of Illustrators of the Future, a contest for illustrators who work with science fiction and fantasy themes. It’s a sister contest to Writers of the Future, and they both sort of complement each other. The contest itself is a lot of fun and a really cool thing that happens, as the winners not only get their work published in an anthology, they also get to fly out to LA to meet with other pro illustrators and writers of the genre. They get to meet some working and very successful pros as well! Yes, it’s a thing that actually happens!
It was an amazing experience. I was in Los Angeles April 7th through the 14th 2015, and I wrote up a sort of memoir all through the 11th. It’s been a while since I’ve revisited these, and I feel like I can’t tell the experience as well as I want to this far after (nearly a year!) so I might as well post what I do have! School got really rough near the end, but now that it’s over I can go back to these.
So here we go! My account of the first 5 days of my experience winning Illustrators of the Future!
Welcome to the next part of my little cel shading experiment!
I talked about looking for tutorials, references, and various ways to play with the lineart last time. If you want to check that out, go here.
This time I’m going to play with the shading itself, and the blending modes, just to see how the colors are affected.
I’m trying to work on my cel shading. One, because I want to do a web comic, and another because I want to animate. Cel shading is a simple, pretty, and quick way to shade an image, and there are many different ways to do it.
So I thought I’d share some of my process in figuring it out! I suppose you could say that this is my process in learning to do a new form of art.
To me, learning or practicing a new way to do something in art is in itself a creative process. Just like personal trainers have to come up with ways to stretch each muscle, artists too have to come up with ways to strengthen their work. If you don’t have an art teacher to give you these exercises, then you kinda have to figure it out on your own. Which means it’s a creative process! Art is basically problem solving, only without math.
I like to think of it as a training regimen.
Cor is an Ayvion, and he’s wanted all his life to fight in the arena. Normally he looks human, but to fight he’ll shift into the shape of the beast, which he’d spent years training to master. That’s what you see here.
When he finally gets his wish, to fight under a sponsor in the arena, and a chance to join the elite ranks of the military, things don’t turn out like he’d planned.
Instead of signing him up for fights, his sponsor refuses to do anything. Instead of using the fighter he paid a fortune for, he lets Cor rot, in order to “teach him humility.” And also to feel superior over a fighter of Cor’s strength, where he, a man who lives only off of his fortune, has none.
Cor’s dream becomes the muzzle holding him back, the collar around his throat keeping him grounded. And he can’t seem to find a way out.
A little teaser for one of my novels 😛 It’s called Cagebird, and it’s prolly about 70 to 80% finished. Soon… soon.
So I’ve been re-reading the Naruto manga. And I have many many thoughts about it. But for now, I just wanted to burble about the story and the world-building in the series, which I find makes it stand out heads and tails above other manga. It’s got excellent and consistent art, but above all, it’s got spectacular world-building, great character development, and a wonderful story that can match even some of the best fantasy novel series.
This is something you just don’t see a lot of in manga, this level of detail to the world and story. There are some that come close, such as Fullmetal Alchemist, but they seem to fall short compared to the sheer epic-ness that the story of Naruto weaves.
Let’s just take a look at some of what I mean.
(Oh, and spoilers up until volume 20 of the manga, or until the Tsunade arc!)
It’s fascinating to see how Miyazaki changes these keyframes, drawn by a different animator, which he didn’t like. The animator drew Ashitaka flinching as he runs through the trees, but Miyazaki changed it by keeping Ashitaka’s eyes open, leaning forward, not shying back from the foliage. And you hardly even see Ashitaka’s face through the trees in the final image.
That’s the major difference between Disney’s current work and Miyazaki’s, I think. Disney doesn’t have a single name taking the helm, scripts are written by perhaps 10 different people. People scrabble about for the attention, throwing in pandering gags and trying to hash out a story devoid of anything even relatively politically incorrect.
Also like, Miyazaki actually still animated. Disney gave up drawing, and when kids asked for his doodles, would pass the paper over to an animator to draw, while he signed his name on it. Driving the animator into the darkness by refusing to put his name to his work.
Hm.
I dunno. Films made with a single guiding vision just seem overall better in my opinion.
Dream Diving 