alright, now this is more like it

I've spent the past few nights working on a new coloring style and here's the progession, in chronological order. The drawings themselves are pretty old, but I'm still going to work off of them for consistency's sake. I think that even with their multiple errors and levels of unfinish in the drawing stage, if I were to draw them now, they'd be very different.

yeah, i don't know either

On the left: watercolor on moleskine.
On the right: digital colors.

The one on the left was done after the one on the right. A lot of people couldn't figure out exactly what was happening when I was working on this, and to be honest, now I can see why. It was intended to be a final rendering for a conceptual illustration class last year; and this scene tried to capture the climax of the story I had come up with at the time.

End result: meh.

I did learn some nifty tricks in the digital version, however.

watercolor candy

These pictures were drawn and colored listening to lots of pumpin disco and Midnight Juggernauts.

They're all watercolor and ink with slight digital touchups, mainly on the skin.

On the right here, we take a sneak peek into Jenny's everyday going ons, and on top we sail straight through the sun on a cosmic disco train. :D

...

I wonder if I pick these Fruit Loopsy Starburst Trix colors because I'm slightly colorblind.

Digital Love

So I was hard-drive rummaging this past weekend and I found two unfinished digital coloring sketches that gave me painting bug. One of them became the new header for the blog... do you like it?

I put up the old header here for nostalgia's sake.
There's also this really old rendering of Jett fighting some weird insect rock monsters or something. I don't know.
Slapped on some color and well.. that's it.

CRASH rakugaki

And with this my first rakugaki sketchbook comes to a close!

ALRIGHT I CAN DO THIS

You know, it's been getting hectic recently. Juggling around a lot of work, ideas, and problems.
The lack of internet at home has made it possible to focus on the work that needs to be done, comics wise. Ideas always come and go and the future's troubles are always the clouds on the horizon... which draw closer every day.

Thats a fancy way of saying that I've fallen of the boat in updating this blog.

The One Piece fanart is set to be done at the end of the month while I finish up some other things and prep myself for a one-shot story.

I'll post the teaser pages when all is said and done, but in the mean time, here's the continuation of the RAKUGAKI BEAT.

more haikus- i mean hiatuses- i mean

Hey there fellers! It's been a busy month of work and also work. I blame my sudden rush of productivity on the lack of available (unlocked) internet in my homestead and THUS I am forced to channel my boredom into horrible jokes drawn on paper.

I'll leave that for another blog post, however.
This one's just to touch base and display something you won't find anywhere else: the workings of a secret project!

watercolor splash!

So! After finally picking up the watercolor sketchbook and dabbling in color after a summer-long hiatus, I also ended up scanning the thing and much to my dismay this is all I have... it's not even one picture for each month I've had the sketchbook! In order to rectify this, I'm gonna... start drawing in the watercolor book!

The oldest picture is last with the most recent one right below.

rakugaki re-imagining

So if you've been keeping track of my blog posts, I've been trying to "re-find" my self and style.
Seeing the New Getter Robo OVAs helped put me back on track as Bandai's interpretation of of the Getter Robo mythos provided me with the energy needed to evolve!

Here's a link to the first 10 minutes of the show; watch to the end to see some sweet fighting animation!

I also ended up drawing a little Cutey Honey fanart before going back to freesketching.

The last picture is an idea for an short animation music video set to Radiohead's Lurgee.

That's all for now, thanks for stopping by!

shin rakugaki restsuken!

So here I've got some more interesting pictures... I hope.
Some old villains redrawn along with some philosopers on the right hand side.
The second picture is something I thought up while listening to Mew's Snow Brigade.
The third picture came about as I was riding home one night. For some reason I thought this was how the universe came to be.
Man I have a headache.

rakugaki gawker

This next sequence of pictures is going to be rather boring...
I kinda hit a funk, so I tried drawing through it, and this was the result.
Still feeling inept at drawing clothes on... women... Hmm..
Oh well, back to drawing!

shin rakugaki mangaka

For today's rakugaki installment... well I wish I'd not post the trashy sketches (it only gets trashier from here) but a post is a post!

The Zangief drawing is a copy of Bengus's MVC2 art and most of the SF characters there are copies as well. Man.. drawing the gief was tough... since I try not to do any underdrawings in this sketchbook and just sight everything, copying Bengus's fantastic proportions was quite the ordeal.

There's something that's been bothering me as of late. I've been reading a lot of One Piece lately. And I do mean a lot. I've managed to see 1200 dpi scans of some pages and the amount of detail in it is astounding. I know it sounds wierd but seeing a stroke as big as my finger on the monitor makes me feel like I'm understanding Oda's process better. With seeing how he constructs his characters and world, I've taken in some of his stylistic choices to see how they would work out.
The one thing I have an IMMENSE respect and admiration for is Oda's ability to take a stock emotion/face such as shock and implement it into ANY character. The characters emotion is not only clear but one can recognize the character even though there might be up to 5 people exhibiting the same emotion. Or his animals! The all have the same face, but they all read as individual! I guess this is what you call... mastery.

Oda's ability to model the human body from any direction is also astounding. I've started leaning more towards his approach to character creation, both in face and body, but I feel as though its made me lose whatever originality I had. I feel like I can't create women anymore, or work off whatever ideas I might have had in the past.

I guess what I'm trying to communicate here are my feelings of ineptitude and the experience I'm gaining as I work towards a cohesive drawing style. I feel like it's time to start settling into something. It's time... TO HENSHIN!!!! FLLAAAAASSSSH~!!!! GYAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH~!!!!!!!

YOU PUNK TRASH RAKUGAKI BULLY!

EEHHHH!? WOT'S THAT?!
MOAR?!
YE WANT SOME... MOAR?!


Start reading Hajime no Ippo recently and... its definitely a great shounen. It took me 73 chapters but I cried. It also features some classic punk bullying. I want to have Alex's story play out like a bully boxing arc.

The two pages of dogs there was from this one dog I saw while I was eating at Zunzis. It was this really unique mix and it had the biggest diamond head and the cutest snout. The giants name was Buddy Roe, and it wouldn't let me sketch him. I think he was scared of me :(

rakugaki with robots!

Today we've got some sketching around of Kung-Fu Ramone, Jett's heroic idol and to-be mentor. He's based off a good friend of mine, one who has picked me up from the depths of despair twice already, and it just all seems to fit together and feel right.

I also downloaded the soundtrack to Giant Robo and spent about a day listening to it and the Big- O Soundtracks as well. The fruits of that labor are obvious. Some girls, and a mini portrait of my girlfriend when I took her out for our anniversary. She wasn't really looking that angry.. just... looking at some bread.

rakugaki update

So here's an update on the Rakugaki sketchbook. I've actually got more than these scanned and stuff, but I figure I'll just spread the wealth throughout the posts.