Ding dong, I was wrong!!!
Last time I posted, it was Christmas Eve. Yikes. It isn't that I haven't been thinking about posting, or have a lack of ideas to post... Life is just crazy busy, and things like this sometimes get shoved to the side. So, let's start over.
Happy New Year!!!!
OK, now that that's out of the way... Let's fast forward through what's been going on. I've been faithfully keeping up with my "Miyazaki Monday" drawings for 12 weeks now... Which is harder to do sometimes than you would think!! But I've tried to stick to that once a week commitment. Not only does it help my drawing skills, but it's also a little bit of a breather for me, making myself sit down even if I've had a horrible day and no time to draw and just pick something from a Studio Ghibli work and focus on that. It's been stress therapy. =-)
I'm getting ready to do a mini comic con at Sugarcreek Library next weekend. It's set up more as a meet and greet sort of event, so I think that might be nice change of pace. I like doing tutorial classes, but I get pretty nervous having to explain my drawing process, and constantly worrying that someone is going to correct me when I say "manga"... xD So I'm interested to see how this event flows, and what people will have to say!
I'm still very interested in doing a 1950's sort of omnibus manga... What I want to do is a compilation of short manga stories set in the late forties and into the fifties. I've been checking out books from the library like crazy, writing down all kinds of things I find interesting from the era, watching some fifties movies, and putting bits and pieces together in character sketches. This whole process to me has been a lot of fun, like delving into a whole different world. There have been a few hard parts... Right now, I'm having a hard time actually figuring out how to write a storyline to be formatted to a manga comic. It's something I've been looking into, reading articles online, and thinking a lot about. Also, actually setting up a manga... The process is daunting to me. Drawing anime and manga style characters is one thing... Actually DRAWING a MANGA COMIC is another thing entirely, and it's not something that just comes naturally. I started sketching out a little Fifties Housewife short manga last year that I finished a few days ago.
I was really, really excited about it when I finally finished it, but then I realized I had made several mistakes... #1 was that I drew the whole thing on a paper size that is too big to actually fit my scanner. So it was a forty minute project just lining it up, scanning it, seeing what needed to be adjusted, then scanning it in again until I got it close... Then editing in Picasa to try to crop and adjust the colors because I couldn't close the top of the scanner and it ended up looking really shadowy in spots.
Also, some panels ended up looking crooked. Part of that was because I couldn't line it up right in the scanner, and part of it was that when I went back and looked at my original drawings, the lines were a little off. And so. It ends up being more of a really nice rough draft. Which, I admit, was discouraging to me. I was really excited and put a lot of myself into this little silly project. But, it's another learning experience, and another step in the direction I want to go. So though it's not perfect, I learned a lot from it. And I didn't throw a sketchbook or hurl a perfectly good drawing pen across the room (Yes, this has happened before). I had a brief time of despair over the whole thing, then I had another cup of coffee, took a deep breath, and decided it would be worth it to keep going. And so that's what I'm going to do. I've already invested so much of my heart into this project, I can't imagine quitting, no matter how inadequate I am!!
So, this ended up being a longer post than I intended. I mostly wanted to say this: I am sorry for not posting regularly... I know I fell off the boat again, and I would like to get back to trying to post more consistently again. We'll see how this goes. I have a very busy schedule coming up this month!!
I'll end with the inked version of my upcoming Miyazaki Monday. I chose to draw Howl this time (Howl's Moving Castle). I've been working to make more detailed backgrounds and landscapes in my pictures lately. The landscape scene here is based off one in a Chris Hart anime tutorial book, but I made my own adjustments and of course, changed the character to Howl.
I hope to be blogging again soon!!!
-Stasia-Chan '16
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