I went to a lot more conventions than I had planned to, and sold better than expected too, so I ran out of some prints I ordered this year and had to print again. I thought I would write another brief review because of how much I love these guys haha

What I printed this time! I ran out of 3 of my newest Carciphona illustrations so I reordered some, and I also printed 3 new pieces and 2 copies of display only pictures. I forgot about the rude pic in this picture but I put everything back already and I’m too lazy to retake ): I ordered the prints last Thursday and wanted to have them by this Wednesday latest, and I got them right on time again with no hassle, go them!

But as I have mentioned some of my prints from last run turned out dark because of all the blacks I used on it. I’ve been really confused and trying hard to figure out this CMYK stuff Finni was trying to explain to me. What she said was to not have a high % of K in the colours I use, but with painting style it’d be impossible to monitor every single colour I use in RGB, so I can only adjust final image brightness.

In order to figure out the safe levels because I have no idea what the standards were, I compared the veloce print to my original psd with eyedrop and tried really hard to guess at what % do the blacks start to become indiscernible in print.I eyedropped all dark areas of the images to be printed (eg. on the harp picture: the sky gradient, sharp shading, floor shading; on veloce’s picture, the base colour and the shadow colour her black stockings) and my originals usually have 60-80% K in those areas (eye drop, then open colour picker, there should be 4 fields at the bottom right, each for C, M, Y, and K). In the Veloce pic the shading in the stockings goes to like 90+%. In the end my estimate was the base colour (the lighter shade) should be around 50%, and the shadow colour should not go too much beyond 70% because anything beyond that would just look like a botch of dark crap. Later Finni told me that K is usually kept below 50% so I guess those are the general numbers, but every place is different. If you’re printing with another company you’d have to figure their range out yourself.

I upped the brightness of my images using Color Levels (Ctrl L), moving the middle slider on the graph to the left to adjust the midtones. I use this and not brightness/contrast so that the whites on my image don’t get destroyed when the image is brightened. I was really really worried about this test because they look alarmingly light on my screen, but I was relieved because this adjustment made pretty much everything look exactly like I see them on my monitor. The 50/70 rule allowed the darks to print dark, and also allowed the levels of shading between the dark and light would not get lost. Like last time, the colours are more vibrant than I see them on my monitor, but that’s a good thing. And unlike last time, you can actually see veloce’s legs HAHA. The harp pic is fucking GORGEOUS and made that one good Staples run of the picture look bad LOL. I’m not even trying ot be narcissistic about my prints or anything, it’s just that a printer doing your images justice is truly a magical experience, especially after printing badly before so many times HAHA

Ok that’s enough cheesy flattery from me, and since I have been working nonstop on my artbook I don’t have any scraps to post, so HAVE SOME MORE NOT VERY ARTISTIC PHOTOS until after FanEXPO when my life will finally return to normal again

My cat taking a break from drawing in her computer chair

Rainbow outside my house! We see full arcs so frequently from our patio, this location is like magical or something I bet my closet leads to narnia

Or I’m probably in narnia already cus narnia is just another word for canada

I’m just going to airdrop some pictures here and go back to drawing up a storm for my artbook lmao. Otakuthon was good but very weird outside the con due to my accommodations, and I will write about it after fanexpo probably because I walled myself into a deadend and now I have to draw like crazy HAHA. All these three months I’ve really just been planning out the artbook but never did get down to drawing much for it, so now I’m feeling the consequences of announcing a date I probably can’t meet! I usually never do this because it’s not like I have a publisher to appease and I despise putting myself under unnecessary stress, it was really a mistake and bad planning on my part.

I want to be able to open preorders from Sept 1 to Oct 1 because I like nice dates but I don’t know if that’s possible or smart anymore, especially if it is affecting how much I would like to put into the artbook. I could push the preorder back to October instead, but November is too late for shipping since I am worried that it might snow by then. The only concern I have left is any artbook-exclusive pieces that I had wanted to do, but honestly I don’t know how much that would matter for anybody really and it’s just there to make the artbook sound a little better than “here, I printed out pictures in a book come buy it!”, so I might not do that anymore!

I was surprised at how long this took because in the beginning I had pretty much envisioned cel shade/gradients with backlight, but decided to put effort into it because I actually liked the piece, and my cel illustrations actually don’t sell well because they look mediocre next to all my holy shit 30 hour illustrations XD Then I was surprised that I actually got it done for last night (I had to reprint some stuff and today is the last reasonable date imo to send in my files for next week’s convention). It was hard to preserve the texture because the whole image is basically in shadows, and what I’m shading in is only the subtle shadows within the shadows. I had the urge to do very high contrast and definite shading but I was able to keep it down haha

for someone else’s art book!

A commission I did for Setsuna22 at Otakon! She was nice enough to scan it and send it to me since it was one of the pictures I forgot to scan XD This is her OC Deniz I think? I love all the curves on her, it was so fun to draw XD

And cats in a basket is always a good stress reliever

I was looking for a landmark date in my blog yesterday, I never found it, but I did end up reading through a lot of my old entries. Aside from sounding retarded, a lot of them were pretty funny to reminisce on, like that one entry where I was like YEAHHH FIRST YEAR OF COLLEGE CALLS FOR CHANGE, I’M GOING TO SLEEP AT 10PM AND GET UP AT 8 I CAN DO THIS. and then 1 entry later I was like lol fml I’m going insane back to sleeping at 3am. I don’t remember much of the actual events anymore, but I remember my college years being very stressful at times and it was comical to see that transferred into rage posts lolol

And all these plaaaaanns of stuff I was going to do, lists of pictures that I was going to draw but never bothered to, artbooks that I was going to make. I was never a planning person when it comes to this kind of project stuff; if I feel like doing it I can do it even if it’s a big, elaborate project, without writing down anything (like now). I knew this, but I think I just tried anyway to see if they would help me get things done. They didn’t but hey, not every trick works!

Back to now! I’ve been cging like a mofo trying to get stuff done in time; all these conventions really take up a lot more time than they seem because each take up 4 days including traveling, and then another day or two for prep ): and Otakuthon is this weekend! I hope no one jumps up to me and start talking french lol

commission wip! It’s kinda like Heavens 2.0 but only because it was pretty much the commissioner’s request for it to have the same vibe. Happy pictures yay! I am in desperate need of some of these

I spent forever on this boot lol, and it’s not even because it has ornament or anything. I coloured too systematically and it looks soooo out of place in the picture. I spent a bit of time drawing the actual ornaments and twice the time trying to make the edges and shading coarser in order for the texture to blend in with the rest of the picture. This is as good as it got, but I’ll be wasting more time to make it work lmao. It was the same problem in the veloce visrin pic but I didn’t care that much on that pic LOL.

A few days ago the books and prints I ordered from Aurore arrived! They’re so soooo precious and i spent so long staring at all of them and trying to put my fail grade 9 french to use LOL;;;;;; I’m keeping her glorious hand written note forever like a creep wahahahah

*v*

Then today I went out to buy some convention supplies, like stands and binders and stuff, and I came across this ULTRA BADASS BINDER. I was like holy shit this is fucking perfect for my manga pages, not that I show it ANYONE LMFAO BUT I DON’T CARE it was practically created just for me. I’ve been using cardstock paper for most of volume 2 so the old binders I use for CP pages are not thick enough anymore; I have 1 more chapter to go and the poor thing is already bloated. There were only 2 of these in the store though… I hope I will be able to find more when I need more in the future LOL ): pls don’t go extinct badass binders

SERIOUSLY LOOK AT THIS SHIT. These things make my manga pages a lot more epic than they really are. I wish I could bring this to a convention or something LMAO people would be like holy mudkips look at this amazing binder

Ending the long post with my cat. People who I talk to on msn/aim knows that all I ever talk about are my cats sleeping. So here are some pictures of my cat sleeping! Seriously I turn around and there she’d be sleeping somewhere near me.

On the stairs.

In my chair. because she has no fucking bills to pay.

It’s almost done!! I’ve done the layout for all pages, and all that’s left is to finalize printing info (trying out a new printer!) and finish as many images as I can before September to add to the book! It doesn’t help that I still have cons to go to though lol ): I’ll finish Duel and the kanzeon pictures at the very least. I would like to do more but I don’t think I have enough time to and I don’t have any easy but effective compositions in mind. What I have is shit like this:

this picture will have to wait until the next artbook LOL OH WELL. I sketched up the composition at otakon and did this today. This is similar to another scrap I did a while back where blackbird was carrying veloce away while fighting some amorphous blobs on their tail, but I like this one a lot better than that shit LOL. The original inspiration for this pic was a story I remembered from elementary school literature class from the revolution in China. The army was journeying through the mountains but the enemy was catching up; a squad of men volunteered and lured the enemy off a different route up to a dead end at a cliff over the mountains. 5 of them fought there against the full enemy force to distract them and buy time for their main troops to get away, and when they finally exhausted all their ammunition, they destroyed their weapons and jumped off the cliff. Then I remembered Chris showed me a gorgeous piano piece of some socialist song called “the people united will never be defeated” and I was like oh my god THIS IS PERFECT… now blackbird/veloce is commie

And here’s what I have so far for duel! I was really frustrated with the image last time I posted a wip of it, but I realized it was because of my livestream mentality of getting things done rather than making things good that I was having trouble getting it to look the say I wanted. I livestream really only because I thought it might be beneficial to some people, to get a recording to post on youtube, and to have fun chatting sometimes while working. I didn’t do it to force myself to draw faster but it looked like I did it subconsciously out of awareness that the people watching would become impatient. It had a negative effect on some of my pieces, especially one like this one where I’m going out of my comfort zone. So I decided to just not care about the recording for this image and take as long as I need to fuss over everything like I used to, and redraw entire parts if I need to like I used to. Sometimes when I compare my drawing process with someone else’s, this stuff I do feels redundant, a waste of time and seems like a bad habit that I should correct, but it’s obvious to me now that this kind of neurotic method is what people like the most about my art when it reflects on the final product. Although I only got very little progress into the picture since last time, I’m a lot less discontent about it now because at least it’s going the way I want it to go.

I’m back from Otakon! It was unexpectedly great and very different from my previous 2 years, I can’t figure out why BUT I WON’T COMPLAIN. The artist alley was huge and this year my idols from everywhere all came to otakon, including many people who I’ve never met before. I also got to hang out with like 4 different groups of people I knew over the years and meet a whole lot more, and in the end I walked away with an almost empty suitcase. I guess it kind of displaced how pissed off/annoyed/anxious I was a few days before lol ): I was thinking about never going to otakon again because of the stress it puts on me before the con but now I’m reconsidering.

my blog is going to be hella boring for the next month because all I have time for is work and conventions UGH. I haven’t had a chance to sketch ANYTHING but I think I will be spending some time on working on my art book next, so I may be able to bring you a few more scraps and sketches and wip lol D: BUT FOR NOW. WALL OF CONVENTION PICTURES AND TEXT IN THE FULL STORY! Read the rest of this entry »