December 1.2000
It's almost time for Annual Gift-Giving Religious Holiday. For this
week's update: a VERY long, long time. The left pic on the index took hours
to do, as I manipulated the letters into the phase "Select one of above."
After seeing how incredibly long that took, I merely faked "Gallery," E-mail,"
etc.by using Times New Roman (the spacing is wrong) and a yellow. Softening
everything and shrinking it be 50% makes it all better. That's the left
side. BTW, that image was sliced into 25 separate pieces to function properly!
You probably noticed that while it was loading. For Dusk's picture, I probably
should have researched the patches on Ryo Hazuki's jacket a bit more but
I can't find any detailled pics of him. As is is, I rushed the jacket anyway.
Shadows are also not so good.
I toyed with the idea of not having a separate CG of the week since
these two pics took forever as they were. However, I decided to do a simple
Alex pic and there it is. I researched an actual profile, so it's more
realistic than usual. As for the background, well, it seemed like a good
idea at the time. ^_^;
December 8.2000
This week, we have the brand-new character "Erin Vice." She's a lawyer/bounty
hunter. This week's CG was done very, very rapidly because I spent too
long looking at other CG sites. :\ Unfortunately, I didn't have time to
implement any of the good ideas I saw. It's a smooth ink/watercolour pic,
50% size.
December 15.2000
I decided that quality has been slip-sliding way too much, so I took
it easy and worked on the picture at a more leisurely pace. Other than
being completely distracted with making an RPG (those things require insane
amounts of graphics!!), I sketched on Friday and dragged drawing out for
two days. It's pretty good, isn't it? Especially compared with the 16 minutes
or whatever Erin got. The full-size pic is 2x bigger,1090 x 1240 @ 288
pixels/inch. Because of the size, lines came easier and smoother, unless
they got too long. Fine point pen, BTW. Spiffy. As for the ideas I saw
the other week, those require an even higher resolution... O_O
December 22.2000
Actually, it's um...12/31. I missed a week! O_O Of course, I still
have to finish that 4th of July pic. ~_~ Next year, next year...wah!
This is a nice picture, I think. I took a little bit to draw it out
on paper and scan it, then "sketchied" it into Painter Classic with 2B
pencil. Then, I outlined the pic with Felt-tip Pen and splashed watercolour
on't. It's here 33% of its working size. Not bad for 2 days' work. I should
have paid a lot more attention to her left arm, though. Pretty colouring.
:}
December 29.2000
Again, it's 12/31. But I actually CGed 12/22's yesterday. This boring
pic was CGed today, after having stayed up way too late last night. ~_~
The lines themselves are nice and clean but that doesn't make a good
picture. I used Smooth Ink Pen and Coloured Pencil for this one. Those
pencils are tricky! I don't think they work so well on electronic media.
Because of that, I softened the image afterwards and here it is, 25% size.
Poor Kim. She always gets stuck with bad pictures, doesn't she? :(
Also, 9/15/00's Kim picture was renumbered from 10 to 9! Other than
that, Erin's Alt text was changed to actually reflect her name. That's
2 'thousandths' of changes! I've been that careless? ~_~
January 5.2001
Starting the year off late, am I? ^_^ Well...it's not too late. This
week's CG is of Kenneth Vanderzelt, Kim, and the narrator. Oddly enough,
when I scanned my pencils in, they seemed to be a little too vertically
stretched. I ignored this problem until I finished, at which point I scaled
it vertically 93%. Bizarre. Perhaps it's 'cause of the way I made a Poser
4 scene and sketched that (for the layout)...that might have influenced
my heights inaccurately. After that, the picture was scaled to 40%! The
working size is a bit bigger than I anticipated!
Ah, well. I slowed down and took quite a while on this picture. Ken's
shirt had to be entirely recoloured since it was way too bright. Other
than that, it went pretty smoothly...I'm not entirely happy with it but
Ken (who's the main character of the pic, anyway) turned out fairly well.
Kim's OK and the narrator...ack! Well...for him, I actually modified my
style a bit. After practising on Kazuhiro Ochi's style again, I came away
with somewhat altered ideas of how to do hair and eyes. Sadly, the implementation
didn't come off as planned.
As for Kim, I completely forgot that I'd drawn her in those clothes
before. Two CGs, to be exact. The first was 9/11/98 and there, her shirt
was red. I dunno why. The second was a bit better, on 5/28/99.
Well...I have to admit, I was getting rather tired of the picture when
I was working on the narrator. Even though I stopped and took a day's break
after doing the lines, I still got antsy when I was finally colouring the
narrator. ~_~ I guess I don't have enough patience for even a picture of
this low complexity...And what's with the hands?!
January 12.2001
This week, I just went ahead and drew straight on the computer...this
is 'cause I've just been feeling lazy. So, I just went ahead and drew.
That's all. It's typical 2B pencil + watercolour but I drew in a much softer
style.Other than screwing up the right pocket, I think I did fairly well.
Crys' head's also a bit too big. Well, overall the lines, I feel, are nice.
Just that they don't necessarily mesh well together. Hmm. I took my time
colouring and used a mishmash of colours. I tried giving her jacket a sub
coat of green-yellow. That also became the button colour. It's 100% of
its working size. However! When I coloured it, I blew it up 200%. I think
this helped a little. Also, I drew and coloured the picture at 100% of
its size here, for the most part. Interesting...
January 19.2001
Interestingly enough, even with a pencilled drawing (or in this case,
2), I can still really screw up a picture. Of course, this shouldn't come
as a shock for those of us who looked at the winter break pictures...
Karen and Henry again, this time no story, no BG. Karen's eyes always
looked weird no matter how many times I drew them, so I couldn't fix. Blah.
50% of working size. All is the same in the world. Wait a minute...I flipped
it horizontally? Oh, well...It looks better this way. ^_^;;;
January 26.2001
I really like this picture! I took time out to step back and look at
the picture with a clearer head. The Size & Proportion is pretty good,
I'd say. I don't really know about her feet in particular but then, girls'
feet are weird. They always look out of proportion, even in real life..?
Taking a 15th look at it, perhaps her torso is a bit too tall? Or something?
Huh. But still, pretty good, I think. This picture was actually drawn over
a few hours in short bursts. I cleaned it up a bit. Notice that her face
in particular isn't exactly how I usually draw. And is that lipstick?
February 2.2001
#1 reason picture isn't completely coloured: I can't find my colouring
chart.
Reasons #2-11: Phantasy Star Online.
Ackkkk!
I think I did a little better this week. After letting the picture sit
for a few days, I was able to go back and see with clearer eyes. Unfortunately,
that also meant that it was far too late to fix her right shoulder...
This picture is actually 25% of its working size. Eek.
February 9.2001
Well...I was so close to getting this up on time except for having
unbelievable problems scaling Hikaru's feet to fit the rest of her body.
I took a screenshot of Sakura (SFA2) via Mugen and because the SFA characters
in Mugen are all made with chunky PSX characters, had to scale it 90% horizontally
to get a feel for her actual width. After that, I eyeballed it and sketched
the pic out in Painter Classic, after which I doubled the resolution to
600 DPI to make finer lines, refined it, then made a Super-Clean version,
which is the basis for this coloured pic. Hmm. I see I REALLY screwed up
her ear-tail. But other than that, I think the pic's not too bad. This
is presented at 50% of its working size! And I'm gonna start this week's
TOMORROW. Really.
February 16.2001
Actually, I didn't start until Friday. ~_~ But since it's Sunday...I'm
not too far off! Wahoo! This week's CG took an extremely big amount of
time and generated 15.7MB worth of work files! Some of these are intermediate
steps, yes but I felt I needed them. It's a Fine Point Pen and Watercolour
drawing! Presented here at 50% working size, including a sample of my not-improving
handwriting! I was originally gonna make it a 3-step colouring job but
hell, this thing took way way long as it was, so forget that! I have other
things I unfortunately need to be doing...homework? I'm going to rest for
a few days before tacking the next CG, though! I hope I can keep this up!
February 23.2001
Motto: A new excuse every other week!
Well, this time, I took advantage of the cool, cool Wacom offer and
picked up Painter 6 for "cheap." As a result, I had to struggle with a
brand-new learning curve and pick up the new quirks of P6! Some of the
colouring was done using the lasso, so the picture looks a bit ugly up-close
but from far away, squinting...
The picture is presented as 40% of its working size. I was gonna make
it 50% so that it would be closer to Jun's pic size but then no one would
like this one enough to justify taking 114kB. I wonder why the compression
ratio is so awful. I guess it's the street backdrop. I mean, Miko's wearing
a white shirt and all...This caused 19.5MB of working files, though...
O_O I was able to keep my colouring lines and colouring guide hidden on
a different layer along with each relevant file, though! Nifty. (How to
balloon file size...)
Next week! (Hopefully, in 3 days...) We'll see a more interesting pose...perhaps
one of my own devising, not like Hikaru's!
