The one year I wanted to watch the count down, everyone decides to sleep super early LOL THIS IS SO SAD

I went to two christmas gatherings of old high school friends and they were fun. It’s so sad I don’t get together with any of my college friends because I judge too much to make good friends in college HAHAH. We watched Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and I didn’t like it much. None of the characters were likeable except for the cheshire cat and the march rabbit, the plot was a pretty bad attempt at being serious and there was no logic anywhere… And we went to see some fun lights at waterloo, where we acted like 13 year old RETARDS taking ridiculous photos with the lights LOL. Some of the lights were so crooked and weird; there was a yellow charmander and a pokeball that was not round, plus REALLY CREEPY santas and elves moving slowly scaring the shit out of us.

yep

We also played NY chase, where 4 of our detectives failed MISERABLY to catch the thief… apparently an engineer, an archeologist and two artists don’t make a very good team of detectives

In other news I’m finally past the halfway point on the super secret manga YAYYYY! I’m beginning to not like the style I worked with for this project but I have to at least finish it first before I can change anything about it in order to be consistent. Here’s a veloce with a haircut in a suit character from the super secret manga

“does my gender look ambiguous to you”

And lastly I’ve wanted to draw them as some high school gang for a while now and ended up making an alternate world for them. Blackbird is a blur because of the sketchbook scanning problem again LOL she was next to the binding coils ): and fucking cubist car floating in midair lmao

Read the wall of text about this world »

I’ve almost gotten all of my responsibilities out of the way, but more just keep coming and taking up all my time ): am sad

One of the three gifts I finished but have to withhold until Christmas!

and a random octopus for Alex… I actually like how it turned out HAHAHA

I was talking about a portfolio I made in portfolio class in grade 12 (2004) with a friend, and decided to dig it out to look at it again. My mom crammed a lot of other crap into the case but I looked mostly at the pages and pages of life drawing that we did for the class. It was a lot of fun but MAN I SUCKED SO HARD AT IT LOL. most of them looked like bad animu because that was the extent of my artistic abilities. It wasn’t a real art class, so I received very little instructions about how life drawing should be done or what one should look out for on these drawings. I had absolutely no idea what the fuck people meant when they talked about form, negative space, tones, and other fancy art terms and no one explained it to me so it almost was a huge waste of time. I also doodled a gay anime face next to like every single figure I drew HAHAHA THEY’RE AS EMBARRASSING AS THE FIGURE DRAWING THEMSELVES. In the end I was rejected by the school, and only 2 people got rejected out of the 22 in our class that applied. At the time I thought it was most likely because I was passing out on the table when my appointment at 8am was late by like 2.5 hours (this helper came over and told me to not do that and the interviewer was unimpressed), but now that I look at the pieces, they were just bad LMAO

Here are a bunch of pictures of the matted drawings and other stuff from the portfolio behind the cut.
(more…)

I went shopping with Jenny yesterday at Pacific Mall. I was just going to buy a pencil case but ended up buying this $200 shawl, a(nother) messenger bag, a scarf, arm warmers? and of course the pencil case too. And now my arms are sore and Blackbird pages are incomplete because I was out all day… BUT THAT’S OK because I think this is like the second time I went shopping this year, after the post-otakon outlet mall shopping trip.

This pencil case is SO CUTE AND FLUFFY but it’s going to get dirty so fast LOL…

My old dakar bag was bought at the same stand and it’s so old, the black is gray now…

I took a picture of the shawl too, but it’s black so it turned out to be a black blob because of my shitty camera ): I bought it from these overpriced, Japanese fob fashion stores. For some reason they’re all pink-walled and decorated with fancy baroque furniture to go with their fob princess catalogue. They’re so expensive most of them are pretty much deserted. First store we went into I saw this very cute–or should I say, KAWAII–shirt that was supposed to be like $290. I asked if I could try it on and the lady was like no, and I was like um…… what. Then we asked about a few other items that we liked and she basically gave us the prices in this tone that’s like yeah this store is too good for you and basically hinting for us to leave. I guess we looked kinda young and we didn’t dress up so she identified us as the poor window shoppers… the next pink store we went into, in which I found the shawl, the lady was MUCH NICER and even took the shawl off the display model for me to try on. I ended up buying it even though it was like $200 and I could probably find it cheaper online or something. As I bought it I thought to myself, too bad for the first pink store I guess LOL. U DONT WANT BIZ U NO GOT BIZ

And here r sum super secret manga panels. I totally don’t get to draw stuff like this in Blackbird lmfao. Maybe one day Weirin will look like the woman, I don’t know she’s already getting pretty intense with her I-am-so-fucking-annoying-please-punch-me-in-the-face expressions

Because I’ve been and will continue to work on stuff that I can’t really post…

These two Blackbird pages are killing my hands because of all the hatching that I’m not used to. I hold my pencil really hard so after a while my thumb starts to hurt LOL… I had to take frequent breaks so my progress has been really slow…

My Shin Angyo Onshi books finally arrived yesterday from being on a ship for 2 months. The book quality isn’t that great compared to some other Chinese manga books I have that are published by Taiwan/Hong Kong publishers. It has some pagination errors too on the last book, but good thing I’ve read it and know what the proper order is. I can totally tell that it’s ripped off from somewhere because the bleeds of the pages cut off a LOT and sometimes word balloons are in danger of being cropped. But I can’t complain since it cost $20 usd for 17 books LOL…. I totally would’ve bought the HK version but the only seller my cousin found in HK said it was out of stock and has been for a while. It’s better than not being able to buy it at all I guess. I really like books much better in traditional book form than scans/digital form.

So I’ve been reading the chinese version during my breaks and I’ve noticed that I’ve been influenced by SAO’s way of inking and hatching. It has about the most detailed and well done art out of all the mangas I’ve read, in terms of both inking and toning, without looking over the top, so I really try to figure out how it achieves the effect it is able to achieve. I don’t think I’ll be able to get over the SAO phase for a while!

Other assorted randomness

And it snowed today! for the first time this year. The sun was out for a while during the snow too

Another snipplet because manga’s what I’ve been doing all week. At first I was all urrgg about having to draw an entire chapter purely digitally, especially having to use paths and stuff instead of being able to just use a ruler. But now I’m more appreciative of inking on the computer. At least after painstakingly creating a vector window, all I have to is clone it onto the perspective lines, and suddenly I have well aligned windows! I still had to add the extra step of erasing and roughing up the lineart afterwards so that it doesn’t look all perfect and digital and gross. Maybe after this gig I would’ve accumulated enough experience to be tempted to switch Blackbird over to digital LOL. At this rate every volume of Blackbird would look like it’s drawn by a different person ):

I’ve worked on translating Blackbird into Chinese because someone had asked in the past, and recently people offered to translate Blackbird again (since I forgot who the old translators were after I went on multiple hiatuses over the past 4 years). I’m getting discouraged about having to letter 170+ pages though… The time could really be better used, like FINISHING TONING VOLUME 1……

I’ve also been working Blackbird’s plot (yes, I know where Blackbird is going and at the same time, I don’t…) and noticed that even though I thought I got a desirable plot down a few years ago, I still ended up majorly altering it ): I remember making a Blackbird story/character wiki for myself a few years back when I was playing with all these oneclick installs offered by dreamhost. I was reading it yesterday and MAN was it outdated, it’s not even worth the effort to edit; I might as well restart it if I want to keep using it. At least I really am seeing a clear structure and direction towards the ending I was looking for now (watch in like 2 more years I would’ve changed everything AGAIN LMFAO I AM SO UNPRODUCTIVE) I wish I had someone to discuss story development with lol ):