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 ):

I remember doing a manga page process way back when I still do everything with pencil (and badly to boot) and all I did was scan it in. My method changed a lot since then but as always, I made it up to work for myself so it’s really lacking in the professionalism area and it’s probably got a fucking ton of wrong ways to do things. I also do a lot of weird stuff with Blackbird pages that I would not do if I were drawing another manga; I don’t know why but it also makes parts of my procedure unstandard. Lastly, I think it’s too difficult to capture work process because all I can do is show what the work looks like and not really show how to do what I just did. So, I never made another tutorial for a long time. I decided to make one today anyway, and tried to make it as detailed as I could, (at first I seriously could only think of like 3 steps) hopefully it’s somewhat useful!

Here’s the finished page first, and the full process is under the cut (:

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A friend showed me some twitter pics of Japanese doujin artists , and one guy posts his WIPs not as screenshots but as… photos of the screen? I tried to do it but it’s got all these rainbow lines across the screen ): maybe it’s because of my setting lol

Here’s a rough character line up I did for the client to make sure all the chars are distinguishable since they are all guys, all similar age, and wear similar clothing. Hopefully I can come out of this being able to draw suits on a whim since I never ever do them

When I got to the little guy I kept thinking of Iriel, so I started comparing them to Blackbird chars. It would be like… Iriel Blackbird Weirin Veloce/Meron? LOL and idk what for the guard cus there is no such character yet in Blackbird. Time to make one!

On a different note, I’ve been eating so much lately because my grandma suddenly took strong interests in buying/making me extra stuff to eat like sweet soup, pork soup, pastries, crackers, FFFF I go to the dinner table with a bloated stomach it’s ridiculous. I’m starting to understand where people get their eating disorders from. Too much food in the wrong countries. I feel so bad telling her to stop cus she’s totally enjoying it but my tummy is going to explode soon if I don’t ):