I should stop staying up till dawn.

rakugaki robo

Some designs for an old style giant robo. I want it to be inspired by the generation of robots that came before the super robot in 70s. Tough to balance a look that at once recalls the simplicity of Tetsujin 28, the power of Giant Robo and the grandeur of Big O.

so this is rakugaki power

Just another dumpdate! Had an idea for a paper delivery comic. It'd be like mad max/intial d on bikes with lots of painful bruising crashes! I think I drew the last page while listening to Muse's Exogenesis, the finale in particular. It spurred me to draw the finale of one comic. I drew the creatures on the right after reading Yukinobu Hoshino's 2001 Nights, a masterpiece of science fiction comics.

rakugaki returns

I guess in order to make up for lost time I'll just start updating semi- daily?
The 2nd rakugaki book I started didn't really have anything great... a lot of it was rut-ridden, but some interesting ideas still managed to poke through.


My favorites in these pictures are probably the thugs. Mean, ugly thuggy thug-thugs. Thugs with faces that would make their mothers want to punch them. Maybe I should just make a book with nothing but thug fodder in 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.

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~!!!!!!!

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.