Drawings Update 18/04/09

In the first drawing for today's list, I wanted to do some more sketches of human faces hence I picked out a random picture I had, and Mr Bean was the one I got. I found the picture ideal to draw from and the result of it is above. I kept it greyscale rather than colour because I prefer it this way for this drawing, and I also used the premade tones in Manga Studio again for the clothes in this sketch. It's a pretty pleasing result anyways and its slowly helping my confidence with drawing humans now.
This next drawing is actually a sketch my friend Tebby did for me. He wanted to test out my inking and digital colouring skills, so he drew me a sketch of a character he made up on the spot and handed it for me to turn into what you see now. All I did was ink the drawing after scanning it in and added colour to it using a colour scheme I felt was perfect fort his character after lots of experimentation.
He's going to be one of the main characters in the manga me and Tebby are going to be working on and we haven't decided on any other specifics like his name, but I think I have a good idea of how I'd like him to be in personality.

This next drawing is of Shigure Sohma from the anime and manga series Fruits Basket. I'm a big fan of his character because he is always very goofy and outgoing but he does have his serious side as well which seldom appears in contrast to his outer personality. I couldn't quite find the pattern I chose for the background with dogs in it, but I loved the style of it so I used it anyways. The style of the background is very similar to the artist's drawing style hence I felt it suited this character to a T.

This next drawing is of Ranma Saotome from the much loved and highly inspirational manga and anime series Ranma 1/2. The manga artist is considered a living legend partly because of this series and many anime have been inspired by it in many ways. Here's a twist for you though, Ranma is actually a boy but he a curse put on him and now he transforms into a girl when splashed with cold water, and back into his boy self when it's hot water. I love the colour scheme and the design of the female Ranma hence I wanted to draw "her" and I gave her a background to suit her beauty as well. Since I love the colour scheme so much, colouring this drawing was an absolute must and you can see the awesome results above :D.

This next drawing is of Roy Mustang from the Full Metal Alchemist anime and manga series. I'm quite a big fan of his personality as well as him being the Flame Alchemist in the show wo produces flames from just clicking his fingers, which is so simple but very effective and impressive. Again I chose greyscale as I favoured it for this drawing too, and I used a premade tone for the background. I'm not exactly sure why I choose colour for some drawings but greyscale for some others, I'm just weird like that XD.


Finally, this next drawing is from the same series FMA, but there's a twist. The series just got remade to match the storyline of the original manga series instead of following it's own storyline and it currently has aired it's second episode now. The author has changed his drawing style slightly in the remake making one of the 2 main antonganists Edward (pictured above) look more mature and hardended but the series still does have plenty of goofy moments with exaggerated, comedic expressions and poses. Due to the altered drawing style, I thought I'd do a sketch of the 2 main antoganists Edward and Alphonse Elric as you can see above. I did the drawing in 3 sessions over 3 days and as you can see, I accidentally did Alphonse with a thicker, darker brush setting but I think it works well in some ways now xD. I'm still currently debating whether to colour it or keept it greyscale, or just to leave it as is even.

Drawings Update 7/4/09

Sorry I havent updated in a while again, have been so caught up with doing my Identities project work as well as my upcoming Japanese oral exam, so Im very stressed out right now, but I have done a lot of new drawings which I will show now:


This first drawing is of Rangiku Matsumoto from the anime and manga series Bleach by Tite Kubo. I'm a big fan of the series and this character so she was was on my list of characters to draw, and I chose this picture especially because it was done in the Chibi art style. I am extremely keen on this art style as I love how cute and adorable the characters look (xD), but I love how colourful and joyful they appear too, as well as the oversized head proportionality to them lol. I'm trying to learn how to draw Chibi style properly at the moment using some Manga drawing books, and I hope to be able to draw my own characters in it.

This drawing is of Link from the Zelda series, but this is a new art style invented for the series starting with the game Zelda: The Wind Waker. It was an all new cel shaded art style that caused both a lot of controversy as well as appreciation and divided a lot of the long dedicated fans. Up to this day, the style has grown on people more now though and has been used in other games, some of them starring the same Link from that timeline, which are: Zelda: The Minish Cap, Zelda: The Four Swords, Zelda: Phanthom Hourglass and Zelda: Spirit Tracks (W.I.P.). I added a black border around this drawing too after seeing how well it worked with the previous one, and I have to say, it's worked pretty well with both the coloured and original black and white versions of this one. I absolutely love black and white graphic style effects, but not in insane amounts as offered in that new Wii game Madworld -_-'.



This 3rd drawing is of Konata from the anime and manga series Lucky Star. I'm a big fan of this character as I find her personality pretty similar to mine and I love the colour of her particularly (xD). Hence I had to draw her too, and this picture I used seems to depict her in some sort of a Phantom Of The Opera outfit, which I haven't seen before, but I never watched the series through though. It could be a fan art for all I know, as poeple these days can actually replicate manga artist's work perfectly from scratch which is actually very intimidating for people like me now lol.





These next 2 drawings are of characters I created by "accident" when working from some step by step guides in my Manga books. What happened is as I was following the instructions, I drew the characters to close to the paper's edge and hence I couldn't fit on the whole of their hairstyles so I had to improvise and change their hairstyles to make them fit on the page. On the second drawing with the character at the top, that si a pretty accurate recreation of the original character as that one I managed to do fine. The first drawing was ironically a boy to begin with, but as I continued to draw him, he started to look more feminine due to how I drew him, hence I decided to make him a "her", and there's the final result of what happened lol. The bottom part of the second drawing went through a pretty drastic change too, he had huge spikey hair in a semi circle fashion, but as you can see, I changed his hair quite a lot lol. Also, I changed the colours of this drawing and that boy (who's now a girl), and I added face markings to this character to make them more like my own creations in essence.


This next drawing is one of my favourite characters, Rukia Kuchiki from the anime and manga series Bleach by Tite Kubo. I really loved the original picture for this, hence I decided to sketch it out and this is what I got eventually. It was a pretty demanding drawing especially compared to some of my more modern ones, and I decided to start using different shades of gray and highlights for the black and white pictures to add more depth to the composition anyways.



This drawing is of my closest friend for quite a long time now, Leila Fox. She is a serious art fanatic and is one of the best artists I've seen especially non professional of course, and she is extremely popular with my old school's Art department for obvious reasons. I've been trying for ages to sketch a decent drawing of her, but I always struggled due to my lack of skills and experience with drawing human anatomy, hence I never managed to do one successfully. I finally managed to do this drawing though recently after a random, unexplainable surge of determination I got to fulfil this wish of mine and I used the same style I did with my self portrait to to draw this. I started using the Tones feature in Manga Studio, to help with the shading of this drawing as well as make it more eye appealing, particularly the background as you can see. Completing this drawing was a serious achievement for me and it gave me a fairly strong confidence boost as a a result too, and it was all thanks to getting a graphics tablet in the first place :D.



Finally, we get to another drawing of Phoenix Wright I've done, but this time in his original form as drawn by the artist. I loved how this one turned out after it was coloured, it really does resemble the original artwork for him very well, hence it did my confidence a good boost. Embrassingly, I was lazy with shading and colouring the bench he's on actually, as I was too tired to finish the sketch and I wanted to get it out the way at the time, so I cloned the bench from the original picture to save a lot of time and effort. It looks good of course being the original bench used, but it's also a pretty cheap result because I didn't draw and shade in the bench myself >_< bleh. Im still pretty pleased with the whole picture though regardless.

Drawings Update 11/03/09

Blimey, it has been a fair while since I last posted, but I have got some more drawings to show off. These were all done specifically for the Identities project, with the the 3D avatar in mind of course:


This drawing is off a new character I invented through total randomness XD. Im a massive fan of Ninjas and Meerkats, and I felt like combining them for some reason lolol. This is a basic sketch of what Id like my Ninja Meerkat character to look like anyways. I used a photo of a meerkat as inspiration and guidelines for this sketch. Ideally, I want him to be the pet of my main 3D avatar, although hes fine to be a stand alone character too.






With these pictures, I wanted to create a 3D avatar version of Jeffrey the Seal who's a character invented during the editing of my version of my group's one shot film lol. He started off an as ordinary imaginary character in the film, but I dubbed it with seal sound effects and thus Jeffey the Seal was born due to that XD. To produce these drawings, I bought some ceramic seals from the charity shop I work at, and I took photos of them, and used photos for one of them as the basis for the drawings. As you can see above, I took photos in an orthographic style, hence I have drawings of the Top, Left and Front views of Jeffrey as a result. I'm going to use these to help model the 3D version of Jeffrey neways.



If you've been following my 3D avatar diaries, then you should know who this fellow is^^. It's my character from IMVU, KrazyKakashi! Its the avatar I also want to recreate in my 3D avatar work for the Identities project, as the two different oufits there both contain the exact elements of how I'd love my ideal self to be! Anyways, to help with recreating my avtar from IMVU in 3DS Max, I thought I'd take screenshots of both outfits and draw them out, so I could look at them whilst I'm sculpting the avatar in 3DS. These were tough to do, as the quality of the screenshots (due to the quality of the game) weren't fanatstic and looked fairly horrid when imported into Manga Studio, it made zooming in difficult as a consequence, but I finally managed to draw them in the end. I drew basic versions of them by the way due to this problem as the finer details were much harder to see as well, but these will do perfectly fine for my 3D avatar, although the wings may benefit from some added detail.

Drawings Update - 1/03/09

This first drawing is of the main antagonist Gintoki from the absolutely amazing, hilarious and random anime/manga series Gintama :P. Everyone who has seen this picture loves it, and reckon it's at least the 2nd best one I've done so far, which is something I strongly agree with it. It took quite a while to draw you may have guessed, but not as long as the Kakashi one.

This next drawing is a self portrait I did as part of my practise of drawing myself, which is something I need be able to do for my ideal 3D avatar. I was meant to draw myself in manga style, but I decided to draw it in a more realistic style for now instead.

Ironically, just earlier today I decided to draw a manga style version of myself as you can see above me. This is pretty how I'd love to look as a manga character before I actually joined IMVU and made my ideal character there XD. I used the same photo of myself for guidance and drew this face with it, along with some help from one of my manga drawing books. I will attempt to do some more manga drawings of myself and also possibly different angles and expressions too as these will come in great importance for how my 3D character will look and function.

This drawing is of two of my most favourite anime characters, Tama - Chan from Love Hina and Hatake Kakashi from Naruto, who both have been mentioned a fair bit by me in the past, especially Kakashi. I'm going to try and use this drawing as part of the logo I have to develop for both my personal work and my Identities project, and once the final logo is ready, Ill post a blog all about the logo, the other ideas I had for it and my design process. I will also be colouring this drawing anyways as part of the logo.

Identities: A Photo Based Summary of Me

After seeing Tebby's blog, and what he did, I decided to try for myself what he did. I've taken a photo of a lot of items that I believe can summarise who I am pretty well and reflect my personality as a Multimedia practitioner.

1. This is a giant white tiger plushie I won during a raffle at a Diwali festival at my local temple, and it's one of my most prized possessions. I love animals like white tigers, huskies, foxes, wolves and so on thus you can probably get an idea of how much I'm attached to this.

2. This is a collection of games and DVDs I took out which I believed could summarise my personality due to what genres they are. I do like a fair few action films as you can see, but I do prefer comedy films the most, particularly spoof ones such as Kung Fu Hustle, Kung Pow and Shaolin Soccer. There are also a couple of Tim Burton films there, Nightmare Before Christmas, and Corpse Bride. I am a fan of of his work, and I finally got to see what inspired him to create his style, after seeing the film; "The Cabinet of Dr Caligari". There are also some "Point-and-Click" PC Games there which I am a keen fan of, I particularly enjoy playing the ones shown, due to their brilliant, unrivalled humour.

3. This is the official manga series of the "Legend of Zelda" game series, which I'm a massive fan of, and hence decided to try reading the manga for it, as I'm extremely keen on reading manga and watching anime. I love the uniqueness of the games, I started playing from "Ocarina of Time" on the Nintendo 64 and fell in love with the series from there.

4. Over here, we have a doll made for me as a Christmas present back in 2007, by my best friend. This is another treasured possession of mine, as my friend spent a week making this, in order to replicate the look I had at the time. I treat it as a mini version of myself anyways, and it's a good way fo symbolising my personality.

5. This is a Christmas card I received in 2008 from the same friend, and I chose to show this because of the Japanese design of it. As I've mentioned in previous blogs, I'm very keen on Japanese anime/manga, music, culture, history and so on, hence this card was a nice gift for me.

6. This shirt is one of the many Wolf shirts I own, as I said earlier, I love animals particularly the canine family such as dogs, wolves, foxes and coyotes. I love Native American shirts and jewellery, so when I discovered them on eBay, I was in paradise! To be honest, this is something that I cannot be described without mentioning, I am fairly keen on Native American culture too.

7. And over here, we have one of the most important items to describe me, Phoenix Wright. Anyone who follows my blogs or work on Youtube, will know about my tribute to the Phoenix Wrong spoof series and this is the official manga of the game series anyways. I'm extremely passionate about the Phoenix Wright games, hence why I went onto making my Phoenix Wrong spoofs, and also one of the reasons why I chose to become an animation artist for the games industry now.

8. I think it's safe to say I'm a fan of Chuck Norris here XD. Just like Mr T, I have a lot of respect and admiration for him (believe it or not). I love making Chuck Norris and Mr T related jokes, and hence I link this to my life long passion for comedy. I've alwasy been passionate about comedy, and making people laugh with what I do whether intentional or not, has always been a life long priority for me. If you miss out my passion for comedy, you practically removing my entire personality away from me as at least almost everything I am and do, is related to comedy in one way or another! I'm also very keen on martial arts, both practising it and watching it, which can also link me back to the Kung Fu films from earlier. I've only ever done Karate for one year-ish, but I'm keen on learning Tai Chi after picking up a book on it.

9 and 10. Over here, we have another manga volume and an anime dvd. Manga and anime have a very important role in my life now, and I always feel that I can connect with and thus relate to the characters in them, especially since of them have gone through similar experiences to me. I love their sheer randomness, hilarity and their uniqueness, which are all very important factors in describing who I am! Being as unique as possible, without following the crowd whenever possible, being who I am and as funny as I can be for others are extremely important objectives for me. The manga volume shown is I swear one of the most random anime/manga series ever, if not the most! It has no real plot most of the time, the characters are literally everything and anything, and that principle also applies to what will happen next. You really cannot predict what this anime/manga series will throw at you, it's pratically the embodiment of randomness!

11. Yes...it's hair gel. Since I had my hair restyled, having "funky", "wild" and "crazy" hair is a non-negotiable decision for me, which is partially influence by my love for anime and manga. I'm not me, if I don't have a ridiculous hairstyle involving spikes in it, and colour too preferably.

12. Ah my MP3 player, this is my equivalent of Oxygen! Not the MP3 player itself, but music. I definitely could never live happy in a world without music in it. Music is as important to me as Oxygen is, and as you've probably guessed, I'm extremely passionate about it too! My music taste is very wide ranged now, due to experimenting with several genres over the years and having an open mind. I use music to help me get through life anyways, from helping me to revise, to lifting my spirits when I'm depressed or stressed.

13. Seeing as I've already made my point clear about loving almost everything Japanese, I shouldn't need to explain this, except for that it is the textbook we use for my Japanese course at NTU which I study alongisde Multimedia as a supplementary course.

14. This is my Nintendo DS Lite, which I have redecorated using some free Zelda stickers I received from a games magazine. Games are extremely important in my life too, they are also like Oxygen to me (Wow, I have so much that I can't live with, by the looks of it! XD), I only really got into them when I moved to the United Kingdom, as I was a sporty person before I came here (yeah, you better believe it!). My ideal career that I'm aiming for no matter what now, is to become an animation artist for a games company, hence games are important for my career too now.

15. I'm very keen on drawing actually, I can draw a lot of existing manga/anime characters fairly well, although my skills do need a lot of refinement. My feelings about drawings do vary a lot like a stormy sea, but I would love to be able to draw professionally, even though I do not want to become a character designer anymore (which was the reason I took Multimedia before I started the course!). I'm so busy with university work as well other things going on in my life, it's very difficult for me to squeeze time in to do drawings, hence I cannot make a regular commitment to it which I need in order to continually improve my skills further.

16. Finally, we come to the rabbit mousemat (yeah, go ahead...laugh), but I do love rabbits a lot, and I used to own 2 of them back in Kenya, but unfortunately I lost one of them on the same day that I got them, due to one of my stupid dogs and it just happened to be my 7th birthday too... But yeah anyways, as you may have noticed, it says Krazy Kakashi on the mousemat, which is my new nickname for myself, one that I am very attached to. Its is the nickname I used for my Phoenix Wrong series, and I've had people saying to me what an awesome name it is! XD

Here is my logo for my work anyways, which will appear in my portfolio for this module too:

Actually, there is one more thing that I could mention, that would summarise me well...I forgot to include it in the picture >_<. I own this reprint poster of an original painting of an African Masaii sitting underneath a tree in the Savannah. I was born in Kenya in Africa, and lived there for 8 years before moving here, hence Africa has had it's important role in my life.