Otherwise I finished two commissions this week! They were smooth and I actually didn’t struggle too much with them or give up really fast like I did with a number of past commissions. now I’m 6 pages behind my CP schedule haha ;; but at least I finally painted something…………

yeahhh fabric w0000000

Anime North’s artist alley registration date is finally set, and unlike past years it’s AFTER the design contest deadlines. I really don’t want to enter again, especially seeing how it is almost a requirement to draw fandom in order fill up the community spirit quota and to win. But the table application process is just too mercilessly competitive, even with the lottery–or should I say, ESPECIALLY with the lottery, reducing the total table numbers drastically and makes the sell-out time decrease from something dumb like 3 seconds to 1 second. In reality it is one of the most fair and stable application processes around; most cons try to improve every year but end up screwing up the process every single time and making it worse. It’s fair to everyone who wants a shot at AN, but it’s kinda a slap in the face for me (and I’m sure for a lot of other people as well, there are SO MANY AA artists who live in toronto it’s unreal) to have such a convenient, affordable, decent sized and long running con right in my city and I would have to worry about getting denied at the last step. I don’t think I’ve ever failed registering for any other cons for the past 4-5 years, but I’ve never actually successfully registered for AN a single time legitimately (I won the design contest twice and got lucky with the lottery twice)

In terms of other cons this year, I’m considering going to: AX, otakon, otakuthon, fanexpo and NYAF. It would be nice to be able to go to AN, and I might add one or two others if I manage to find some other ones that are close by (:

I feel a lot more comfortable starting a drawing with contours and lines even though theoretically slapping down botches of shapes or gradients should help me see a picture better ): so I did this a few weeks ago when I was at a loss of what to draw. I was going ot wait until I refine it a little before posting it because for some reason my sketches are becoming increasingly illegible over the years, but it seems like I won’t have the time for that for a while LOL… I was going to make the white space into a figure hugging and complementing the horned person, but this will probably turn into one of those it-looked-good-in-my-head ideas XD

I’ve also taken on a 30-day challenge for drawing some RO themed stuff in order to assert my status as an ro tard, but I’m going to do it slow because I don’t have the time LOL… somehow whenever I try to quickly draw up something, it turns into crack and everyone becomes derpy

zzzz hopefully when I finish these commissions I can pull my act together and draw some personal art again

wow I kinda just… died after new year’s LOL. I keep waiting for myself to sketch up something so I can post it here along with anything else I wanted to write, but I just didn’t draw anything at all. I’ve been busy rushing to finish off volume 3 thumbnails because it has taken far too long, then I started drawing them out right away because based on the pace I settled on, it’s going to take forever to finish if I don’t pick up my pace and make up for the 2 months of break between finishing the last book and starting this one. I’ve also taken my relatives everywhere to get their government IDs and school stuff taken care of since their immigration, and by the end of the day whenever I sit down, I just don’t want to draw. It’s kinda that time where I haven’t finished something serious for so long that I’ve accumulated so much I want to accomplish on the next drawing and end up not being able to do anything instead. I think some inspirational outdoors trip is long due ): So I’ve just been doing random 20-min photo studies instead HAHA (something I’ve been meaning to do for years………………..) hopefully I’ll stop caring sometime soon!

In other news, I watched the second season of avatar! I don’t remember what happened in the first season anymore but I don’t think I liked it very much back then, else I would have had a stronger impression. I did like the second season a lot though, mostly if not almost entirely because of the characters. The story is well thought out and nicely played but there are still a lot of stuff I don’t like about it, so I guess it pales in comparison to how the characters strike me. Whether or not I like the type of character I feel they were really believable. on top of that I thoroughly enjoyed the fact that toph is such a girly character and just not what I had anticipated. And even at the end, after going through so much struggles back and forth, when presented the opportunity, zuko still returned to his original ambitions because even though ideally, a character morphs for the better but realistically, no one can really so easily drop what they’ve pursued for so long just because of a couple of inspiring events, especially someone so young. I wish I could be more brave and persistent in writing character flaws but my desire for balance is way too strong ): I just feel the need to sort everything out and maintain order at any given point in the story. No matter what happens in my story, I don’t think I ever let anything feel like they’ve gone out of control.

now presenting mudkip on his bahamutmobile. My room faces south now so if only I slept at normal times, I would see beautiful sunrises everyday. but who cares anyway it’s just sunrise and not nearly as important as going to sleep at 4am

And Happy Chinese New Year if you’re celebrating! I’ll be having the most festive new year gathering yet tomorrow in just about 10 years, with my uncle and aunt (separate)’s families present! To think we used to have like 10+ families gatherings just because our families are huge LOL BUT I THINK THIS IS BIG ENOUGH. I think I’ll go insane if I went back to the old days…………..

so!! my dad is back home from China and my aunt’s family have moved in! they’re great so far but I’ll leave that for later because I still haven’t gotten too acquainted with them… BUT YEAH my dad also brought back 2 copies of carciphona volume 1 and 2! The rest are on the way to be shipped here. It printed really well! we had paper, size and weight ink concerns at first, also this company has apparently never printed comic books before because they specialize in art books, magazines and such, so they were really confused about a lot of stuff LOL;;; but I’m glad that after all the shit we gave them that the final books (or well just this one) is awesome. now to pray for not so many factory defects this time!!

I remember I really aimed for the thin lines and neat look for volume 2, at least compared to volume 1 because I actually went out of my way to thicken lines for line thickness variation in volume 1. It really stood out in volume 2 with the bigger canvas and the fact that I crammed a lot of material in the latter half of the book due to page count issues, and now that I’m comparing them side to side, I kinda miss the bold lines sometimes haha ;; It’s so clean and neat and organized now. I’ll have to remember to make use of both in fitting circumstances, because the thin lines and detailed look helped a lot in drawing elaborate the elaborate backgrounds the story keeps finding itself in.

yaa pictures of our yard!!! EXCITING

I’ll be posting a bigger version of this on my sites on new year’s (: but you guys can see it first as a reward for looking at my blog! I am very bad at drawing stuff for special occasions, and since I missed christmas I forced myself to at least draw something for new year’s. I wish all of you a safe and peaceful 2012! (or I guess a dangerous and exciting 2012 if you’re an adrenaline junkie)

Writing about this year feel kinda like counting down my life, scratching another year off til the deadline and I’ve got all these things that I am now bent on accomplishing. I kinda like this because unlike having nothing to do, I feel motivated and unlike having a boss, if I miss a deadline I won’t dread to be scolded and wait for my sentencing. I’m so cut off from society but at this very moment it feels like it’s not worth it to fit myself into social norms just because it will make me miserable and slow down my work greatly.

I looked back at last year’s resolution list to see what I did and didn’t do LOL. I never got around to the studies like anatomy and colour and just plunged headfirst into practical work. I think that’s pretty terrible for my growth but yeah, I never really find myself to be the scholastic type. I feel more like the apocalypse-is-tomorrow-so-I-better-finish-this-book-so-it-can-be-incinerated-by-the-sun-along-with-myself type. I also just outright threw any semblance of a balanced lifestyle out the window in exchange for productivity, and it showed I think… I remember thinking that all I churned out this year was manga pages with relatively few drawings, but while upgrading my gallery script, I noticed I painted more than last year, and most of the pictures had taken much much longer to complete than drawings from last year. I played piano more than last year… though considering I played in like almost half year gaps last year, that’s not saying much LOL… but I can feel my fingers numbing because there are some pieces that even after familiarizing myself with them, I can’t play them as well anymore simply because my hands are more clumsy now from lack of practice. It’s depressing but I can’t ask for reward without putting work in LOL.

2011 summary of stuff I remember:

• Published CP finally! and suddenly the subsequent volumes are following like the wind (in my mind ok)
• Got out an artbook too? although that’s more like putting art together into a book because I didn’t draw too many new pieces for it
• I did better at conventions than previous years because I have books to sell now
• what I’m doing is much more solid and does not involve describing abstract career concepts to parents
• I am not sure about this but I think I treated people better? I tried to go the extra mile (at least for me it is considered such) to correspond with (or just respond to) my friends and loved ones. It’s really tiring still but it’s coming to me more naturally
• I somehow suddenly found a style I am completely comfortable with painting omg?? before no matter what I did I would always struggle greatly with the face, but somehow I can finally bid this decade of struggle good bye

I’m actually not going to do a resolution list for next year because there is nothing I am particularly keen on overcoming above all else, and I would probably mostly just aim for a continuation and improvement from this year. Also I just have no idea what would happen to my work style and habits after my aunt’s family moves in ): but here’s to a safe and peaceful world. I hope that while the young and fed-up stand up for their own causes, they actually have an idea of how to deal with the onslaught of chaos should they actually succeed in overthrowing the “system”, whatever they consider it to be. I’m not the most responsible or considerate person out there and I’m not too filled in on a lot of the current worldly issues, but while I believe some of these world powers are fucked up in the way they operate their countries, I feel like the masses trying to spread justice are just as dangerous and insane.

Ending with my playing! My mom went out today so this would probably be the last chance I have to putting together a recording without anyone else in the house for a long, long time. I did this to record flandre’s theme for my waifu sepia but also decided to record something else too because I get asked about my education once in a while. Time really hurts my skill but I’m not out here to impress any experts haha, if I need to do that in the future I can always actually practice for it. and tune my piano…. it hasn’t been tuned for like 3 + years now LOL;;; anyway this is lezghinka by liapunov; I decided to learn this after hearing a classmate play it and it has been my favourite song to play for fun. Everyone living around me is probably so fucking sick of this song lmfao

So I like watching mayday, minus the dramatization because I think they’re ridiculous and almost comedic. I’ve always liked mechs but I just don’t allow myself to waste too much time on all things useless and impertinent… not to mention I have no idea how to draw them. But finally after years I asked myself, WHY DO I DO THIS TO MYSELF LOL… so after I watched the episode on a korean airliner being shot down by a soviet fighter jet in 1983, I decided to draw a plane.

The episode featured a cgi render of the attack and when the plane was shot in the tail, it nosed up uncontrollably until it lost lift and fell out of the sky. It’s like a giant flying whale that got killed by fishermen ): So in the end I drew the plane as some creature just with commercial jet engines, wingflabs and… wheels LOL. It felt really satisfying to draw despite my having no idea how to draw something like this. It could have been from the sketch in the first photo because nowadays I tend to draw really light and carefully due to the fact that I need the clean lines afterwards, but I really like to be able to scribble hard and brashly. I was going to just leave it at the first sketch because I honestly had no idea what the fuck I was going to do with it, but in the end I decided to etch in some harder lines and totally ruin his day HAHA

Despite being very generic, somehow I want to keep this vaguely established big bear and I even want to give him a name! I was thinking about just naming him Mayday but that’d be naming him to his doom lmao… It would be strangely cute though since he would be a summoned creature and calling his name would also be saying help me. Too bad I can’t use him in CP because of all the mechness but who knows, most of CP resulted from my forcing out of place elements into the story and working everything around it LOL SO MAYBE HE WILL JOIN THE FAMILY………… or maybe it is just for the best that I don’t do that

I went shopping for christmas presents on sunday, but I ended up only buying one present and bought myself a skirt, shoes and a hoodie LOL;;; at least each of those was under $20 and the present itself was like the same price as the three combined ):

I’ve gotten 3 books printed now; I said I would write a little something after my first book but I kept delaying it in hopes that my subsequent experiences will contribute to the post. It was originally going to be a largely review for MCRL printing which I used to print Carciphona 1, but I ended up trying to eliminate the middleman and the costs that came with it by looking for overseas printing companies on my own, so now it’s a combination of review for the company and advice I may have. Remember that I am still a total noob at this, I only know what I needed to know and some of these may not even be correct or smart, so please use this post as a stepping stone rather than as is! But hopefully this will give noobs like myself an idea of the skeleton of the process and a direction of approach.

1a. The company: Keep looking until you find the right solution for you.

At first I knew nothing about printing, but thanks to the help of Negshin, I understood the basics, and she found me various companies to consult, including MCRL. The thing about doing something the first time is you have to be willing to invest the time, effort and possibly costs to find the solution that suits you perfectly rather than settling with what is alright, especially if it is something you intend to continue doing in the future. I used to be very lazy with that and almost settled with a company that would have cost me twice the production costs to print because it was the only one that looked good within my vicinity. Thankfully Negshin beat some senses into me and we continued looking. Every time we come across some place better, we say great! Now find some place even better until we exhaust all available possibilities. That’s what the market exists for.

I looked for mostly local places in order to save shipping costs by picking it up myself, and places in the USA because USA’s market is always bigger and cheaper than Canada and might be worth it. I ended up submitting quote requests to like 10 places and MCRL was the one with the cheapest price. Before I sometimes feel bad asking for quotes from places I am almost sure I won’t use; sometimes they even call back/write back to follow up and I have to tell them I found some place better. If you don’t feel this, great! If you do, suck it up and after a while you’ll get used to it.

1b. The company: Don’t feel bad to ask for service. Do everything to make sure they can do your job before committing.

I ended up choosing MCRL because it was cheap, it looked professional and it has an office near my home. The next on my list was to make sure they can make what I want to make and they know the answers to everything I don’t know about printing. Even though I’m printing a very VERY short run compared to what their other jobs might be like, a few thousand dollars is a huge deal to me and I should treat it as such. While it is a highly valued courtesy nowadays to google and look up answers before asking, when it comes to things like this, you should always double-check afterwards by asking your printer. They won’t ever say something like “that is the first result on google, did you even look first?” because you pay them for their service, it is their job to get your project printed even if you don’t know what a computer is.

I made an appointment to go see their sample products. The owner, Mankit, was a nice guy; I saw many of MCRL’s previous works in various sizes, formats, materials and purposes. He had some books with professional looking art, as well as amateur books, which gave me peace of mind that the only difference between the books are the artists’ input, not the company’s treatment. I was impressed by their quality as well and I was honestly really excited to think that this is what my book would be like. It felt like an extraneous visit afterwards but really, it beats wondering about what I should expect for the next month and a half.

1c. The company: If you don’t know what you want, know what you don’t want.

As I mentioned, I knew nothing about offset printing procedures, standards, let alone any paper/coating that I should ask for or want. So instead I brought a few manga books that I owned, in combination with books that Mankit had shown me and asked him to tell me what papers I should use. I had concerns about pages bleeding onto the back and thickness concerns from shipping (my final book was about as thick as it can be to qualify as a letter, and it was only a few grams underweight). While it was probably an easy choice for someone experienced, if you’re as clueless as I am, do not feel like you have to suddenly be a print guru to have a book printed; show them what suits your purpose and if they know what they’re doing, they should know what kind of paper you’re looking for. I initially estimated an 80lb paper, but he suggested 70 which I agreed to, and in the end it happened to be perfect. Any thinner the paper would’ve bled, and any thicker the book would have been overweight and too thick.

This was all taken care of for me by MCRL so I didn’t actually really learn about different paper effects because I didn’t have to. I had to for my art book, and I found this handy paper weight chart (for when you actually need to use a different measurement if you find a printer in a different country) as well as this general glossary off the top of google for reference. I feel the weight chart is only meaningful after you’ve thoroughly familiarized yourself with one kind of paper by getting a project printed on it, and then comparing the rest with it. Otherwise there is little you can decipher from staring or holding sheets of blank paper and trying to imagine ink on it.

2a. The file: Format

What you submit to a printer is typically a multipaged PDF. Although so far I’ve put together all my books in Photoshop, I wouldn’t recommend doing this because most of the vital settings are difficult to spot/change in photoshop. InDesign I believe is the standard program for this task.

If you are creating a book where your artwork cuts off at the edge (no border frame around the page), aka full bleed page, you must create a file that is bigger than the actual size of your book. You should ask your printer what their bleed size is (usually it is 1/8 inch in North America, or 3mm in countries that use the metric system, which means a 5″x7″ book will need pages that are 5.25″x7.25″ in size), and create your file in that size from the start. If you enlarge it later, pixelation may occur.

Printing a book is just like printing art prints; your file should be around 300 DPI if it is in colour. Lower is fine and higher is not always better. Again, ask your printer what they would recommend; 90% of the time you will not be surprised by their answer, but there’s never a need to take the 10% risk if it only takes 2 seconds to ask. If possible, the more vectors the merrier since pixelation is only a bitmap problem. And unless impossible, you should always embed your type/lettering as vector outlines. Most people wouldn’t care to notice, but that one graphic designer or type fiend may actually be able to tell rasterized text and be put off by it. Your little extra effort will always be appreciated.

2b. The file: CMYK

Regardless of how you make the files, your final PDF colour profile must be in CMYK. Here is an explanation by my friend Finni who actually understands the hows and whys and is the person I learned most of this from. In photoshop, this can be done by going to Image > Mode > CMYK, or by Edit > Convert to Profile. Failure to do so may result in your printing coming out with strange botches of colours in places, and it’s a problem that is more serious than most people can imagine. I actually have an example of this because I thought I created my art book pdf in CMYK but I didn’t. Many people ask me whether or not it is necessary to paint in CMYK; Finni’s answer is yes, my answer is no. It depends on your preferences. You just have to accept that your colours will change during a colour conversion, and keep in mind certain colours cannot be printed, such as those painfully bright saturated colours that make your pictures glow on the screen. I am personally not that anal about my colours; I don’t calibrate my monitors and I am used to seeing like 5-10 different versions of my pictures across different screens and through different printers; but if colour accuracy is very important to you (nothing wrong with that, in fact I believe something is wrong with me) then it is best that you work in CMYK from the start.

Finally, If you paint darkly, ESPECIALLY if you’re like me where you use a lot of dark and desaturated colours, you will want to lighten your pictures quite a bit before putting it into your book. In my case, my files worry me every time I print them because they are just so light after the adjustments, but I know it’s necessary because I’ve had multiple runs before where my dark colours were indistinguishable in print. This is due to what Finni talked about in the link above. I check K levels now when preparing print files by opening colour picker in Photoshop, then holding my mouse and dragging my pointer all over the screen to see if there are any K that are higher than 60 or 70 in my shading. Additionally, coating and lamination on the printed book will sometimes add to the darkness of the image and make the problem worse.

2c. The file: Other concerns

Some very practical concerns apply to the page count, size and content of your book and are often neglected. Think hard and always ask your printer for opinions, because seemingly simple quirks can sometimes make you weep and regret like no tomorrow and being an annoying (respectful, but annoying) customer is better than being a scared and sorry customer. Here are some examples:

• I would have made my art book a hard cover one, but it would exceed the 500g limit Canada Post has and force me to ship it as a parcel and charge even higher shipping costs than I do now, discouraging even more people from buying the book.
• Same thing with the page count of Carciphona making it too thick to qualify as a letter to send.
• I made my art book cover predominantly white; coincidentally the new company I used handled ink drying poorly, so a number of my books had colour smudges and specks on them that would have otherwise gone unnoticed had it been a colourful detailed cover illustration.
• I had planned to use a fold-in cover to create the effect of a dust jacket without having one, but my printer informed me that something like that, when piled to ship, will make the actual cover crease under the weight of all the books stacked on top of it. I would not have known that had we not demanded the printer to actually communicate with us, because before that they just did whatever we told them to do, neglecting to tell us even glaring mistakes that they see just because they’re not asked to.

3. Proof

MCRL’s service included one proof (ie a sample copy of your book), with additional ones available at an extra charge. The point of a proof is to make sure your pages are in order and you are using the right paper and right type of printing on each page. Getting your book in the correct order is not as straight forward as you think with digital printers spitting pages out of it in order. Depending on what kind of binding you get, pages may have to be organized by an actual person onto a sheet, then cut/folded into the correct booklets before glued together into a book. This is why despite having the correct order pdf, I still had many page order mistakes in Carciphona 2 (not printed through MCRL) because my pages were not all numbered, and every page looks the same to them because they are just a mess of panels.

The proof is usually handmade from regular printers so if you think the quality is crap, don’t worry; the final product’s quality will be higher unless there is something awfully wrong with your printing company.

Random note: in the case of a right to left manga, I got asked this several times and I questioned my solution at first because it seemed silly, but there is no printing orientation setting. If you want a backwards book, order the pages backwards in your pdf file.

4. Get the books!

In the case of MCRL, because they print overseas and they use shipping by sea, the turnaround was 4-5 weeks. The actual printing time for such a short run as 500-1000 books is just a few days in a not-busy season, so if you get books printed somewhere local, I imagine you would expect a turnaround of about a week. You should definitely check your books upon receiving them, eg. number of books, any corner damages overall from delivery, and check at least several books from each box to see if there are any defects in general. Errors, smudges, cleanliness and binding quality are some things I would check, and if you find glaring mistakes that are present in all books (and not in the proof) or unacceptable quality (eg bad gluing), definitely don’t be afraid to either ask for compensation or demand a rerun. Whether or not you’ll get it, I can’t say, but 50% chance is better than 0% chance. However it is generally common to have isolated factory defects in all mass produced products as long as the occurrence is very low.

5. Selling the books

Because this is not really a marketing tutorial, I’ll be brief. Since local printing takes such little time, most people have taken the preorder route to take orders before printing the actual book. This helps you gauge how many books you should print and makes sure you don’t have enough books leftover in your home to create furniture with, or have people throwing money at you and you don’t have books to sell them. But most importantly, especially if you sell well, this helps you pack, ship and take care of all orders in a fraction of the time.

Some people like to use paypal buttons, some people like to use kickstarter, some people like to have manual orders, but right now I love using storenvy for this purpose because their checkout process makes it impossible for someone to enter the wrong information or choose the wrong shipping options, and the spreadsheet they generate is ridiculously easy to manage once downloaded for shipping labels.

For packing supplies, I recommend Uline. Their stuff is cheap but sometimes their shipping takes the appeal away. They actually have a customer pickup option and I saved about $100 in shipping once by doing that; just remember that gas and time is actually money so don’t do something like drive to another city to their warehouse haha.

And that’s all I can think of for now! There are a lot more aspects to actual publishing than this ranging from decision making to career moves, but this post is solely for those whose immediate concern is to set the compass straight for getting books printed for the first time. Hopefully someone who is as confused as I once was will benefit from this. Work hard and good luck! ‘u’b

the ox tail was realllly good

oh look it’s like a scene straight out of the upcoming pages in chapter 6

I hadn’t even opened them yet and they were already falling apart hahahah

In other news, I wanted to draw something for my spanish translator celes because she is so punctual and nice, but she requested meron paired with des or veloce so I’m not sure if this even counts as a request LOL… but it’s not something I would have drawn myself so I guess I can pass :D…?

I clearly have no regard for age here because veloce is like 10 years younger than meron wahahahaha r:

BUT YEAH I took some pictures to show HA HA ha… I didn’t improve much back then over the course of YEARS because I was a narrow minded bitch type character and I genuinely could not see what the fuck was wrong with my art or myself. I think I am still the same just… less… severe…

The pencil crayon ones were from this sketcbook we had to fill for a class called comprehensive arts in 2002. I’m not quite sure wtf we learned there but that could be said about most of the classes I took ): I did a bunch of these what’s in your locker comics, drawing myself and my friends (I’m #2, look at my fashion sense)

and holy shit lol one of the most primitive versions of veloce after she got the white hairdo I think??? In the very first environments for this character–even before the retarded manga high school manga I did and abandoned–she lived in a vague fantasy world, and she had a LOT of animal sidekicks as well as weapons because I was so head over heels for fantasy creatures and magical shinies sdlfjdlfdl

but I was also still crazy for pokemon at the time so I stole suicune’s head crystal for her sword…

and then I guess I got a tablet and started playing ro…… lol so I topped drawing on paper until grade 12 (2004?) the next 2 small sketchbooks (my last ones until I was gifted one at AE and forced to use it again) were FILLED WITH RO DRAWINGS. and builds, really bad builds because I am a fucking noob at everything. but mostly drawings since that’s why I played ro in the first place: so I can draw a character and say it’s mine LOL I HAVE PROBLEMS. magma dungeon~

I don’t know why I never finished these (probably because I was too busy playing instead of doing anything meaningful) but back then I really liked drawing scenes of happenings.

I am SO ASHAMED of my old works and my old self because not only are they bad, I also thought they were good at the time. Now going to wait about 5 years and then say the same about the art I post all day erryday now :B I fluster so hard it turns into uncontrollable rage when people dig up my old stuff and show them to me because I deny it so much, but once in a while I suck it up and stare at my old shit for long enough to accept them so I could post them so people know how much I sucked even when I was 18 and not think that I’m any different than them.

Ending with some korean bbq from last week. censoring my parents ya!