Ugh With a Side of Procrastination

[artistbettyanne]

Well, the last few days have not been productive at all. Hubby was home from noon on the 12th through the morning of the 14th, so I got zero sketching done during that time. (Somehow, this always happens...go figure. >_>) I also had a bout with depression, which thanks to its overwhelmingly positive nature made me realize how little time I have left before my graduate show and triggered an anxiety attack. My brain completely wins at defeating itself. .__.

I got three sketches done before noon on the 12th, and six done yesterday. It's nowhere near where I wanted to be at this point (I wanted to have them all done and have started on inking by now) so you can probably guess what I'm going to be doing after I make this post. ^^; I've realized I can no longer do all-nighters to make up the difference in lost productivity; I tried that last night, only to end up with a headache Aleve wouldn't fix, followed by passing out and waking up when my dog started shuffling around the room wanting out at 6:00 AM. :/

Onward to sketch discussion!






Puar from Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z! Strangely enough, as simple as his character design is, he's also one of the DBZ characters I've never really drawn before. ^^; I'm finding this project to be great for being able to draw a lot of characters I love and have meant to draw over the years, but have just never got around to. Puar's face, of all things, is strangely awkward to draw. Toriyama's animal-people have some of the cutest and most cuddly-looking designs, but when it comes time to actually sit down and draw them it's an exercise in "F^(#! THIS DOESN'T LOOK RIGHT!" ^^; He's replacing Saturn in the layout - I'm sure she's thrilled about that. XD

The next three characters are from Gaia Online and are NPCs and/or storyline characters who appear in the Gaia manga. It's sometimes kind of a treat to be able to draw the NPCs, and there are still others I want to draw in the future - these three just happened to work well for the theme of this work.

By the way, I'm intentionally not being specific about the theme at this point - I'm letting all of you readers see the characters as they're revealed and how they're interacting with each other, but it'll be interesting to see how many people guess the theme before it's revealed. ~_^




First up is Cordell, of the Kuro Gang, replacing Neptune. Cordell's not my favorite character by a long shot, but she won some kudos from me during the Rejected Olympics for having badass skills and being able to admit when she was wrong. I initially thought her coat was going to be a pain in the butt to draw, but it was actually not that bad and a lot of fun. In the end, I struggled more with her hair than her coat. ^^; Cordell's arm probably will be cropped at the hand just like Neptune's is, but I drew the rest of the arm in just in case I need some wiggle room as I'm adjusting the layout.




Josie (Shopkeeper at Global Imports) ended up being a lot more difficult than Cordell was. I'm still not 100% satisfied with how she looks, but I hope to tighten it up a bit when I get to the inking stage. At this point I was also drawing way, way too small on the paper - this image is probably only about 2.5" tall (if that) in real life. The sketches had been getting smaller and smaller as I went along - probably because I was working in increasingly cramped quarters. My room was turning into a small landfill, and I was huddled on a corner of my bed to draw because it was the only place I could find adequate lighting in my room. Thankfully, this is the last figure to diminish in size.

Josie replaced Pluto in the original layout. It's another one of those cases where I found myself thinking it was an overly-appropriate match. (I also spent most of the time I was sketching thinking, "This bitch is fierce! :D" I'm such a bad feminist. XD)




Brennivin, the FABULOUS Shopkeeper at Dernier*Cri, replacing the (somewhat less) FABULOUS Pegasus. I know, I know...quit picking on the Sparkly Unicorn Boy. But hey, knowing Brenn, he probably has a Starmony, so maybe he's a Sparkly Unicorn Boy too! Only a bit less so, and more FABULOUS. XD

Words cannot describe how much I enjoyed working on this sketch. It came out fantastic, and I'm totally stoked for inking and coloring this one. It's almost a shame he doesn't have a more prominent spot in the layout. (Though if he did, I know I would have managed to eff up the drawing somehow. XD) It helps that I totally adore Brenn.

While working on Brenn's face, however, I realized that I was spending way too much time erasing and redrawing in order to be able to see details well. I decided to remedy that by sketching in non-photo blue and then going over it with pen for the final lines - no erasing necessary, then! Even though scanners do pick up some traces of non-photo blue, it's easy enough to remove when necessary.

What do you suppose the odds of finding a non-photo blue pencil in this arts-deprived corner of backwoods Wisconsin is? If you guessed "NOT GONNA HAPPEN," you get an Internet cookie. >_< I finally decided to just use a regular turquoise colored pencil for now. It works similarly, and even though more blue shows up than would normally, it's still not that big of a deal. My sketches have been cleaner and I haven't wasted time with erasing since.

The first one to get the blue-and-pen treatment: Haruka Tenoh, AKA Sailor Uranus:




Ha ha! Sneaky!Fail - Haruka's replacing herself in the layout! I can't wait to see if anyone who doesn't read these blog posts notices. XD This is also one of the fastest sketches I did. I was super-stoked to discover that my hands' muscle memory still remembers how to draw Sailor Senshi all these years later. It's been a long time since I've drawn anything Sailor Moon related, but I found myself just going, "Woop, bows, woop, gloves, woop skirt, woop stars..." The only oops was having to correct myself when I started to write "Tenoh Haruka" instead of "Haruka Tenoh" for her name - consistency, people! If you're going to do some characters' names American-style, keep all of them that way! (The name usage is also nearly a muscle memory thing for me; I still sometimes slip and introduce Sailor Moon as "Tsukino Usagi-chan" to people who aren't familiar with the series, and then have to explain that Usagi is her given name and that -chan is an honorific. ^^;)

There are already a number of differences between my version of Haruka and the original version, but I can't wait to see it colored to see just how different they end up being.




Enomoto-san from the manga series Ghost Only is replacing Endymion in the layout. This is that problematic composition/character treatment I was bitching about early on in this project - there's really no reason for Endymion to be crammed haphazardly like that into the corner - it would have taken all of two minutes more worth of work to draw a better pose and give some degree of respect to the character. IF I had to hazard a guess, he was probably an afterthought in the image.

I've remedied that with Enomoto-san. One of the things I love about Enomoto-san in the manga is the wide range of expressions that a skull and skeletal hands can achieve simply through considerate composition. This particular pose is from a panel where Enomoto-san is waxing poetic about a male TV personality. The angle of the head and direction of gaze helps round out that top corner of the layout and will give me a good lead for creating a sweeping half-arch over Ranko-chan.

Just a side-note on my particular treatment of the character: I find myself in the precarious position of having to walk around using pronouns when I'm talking about Enomoto-san. In the manga, Enomoto-san's gender is not made explicitly clear. Obviously, it's next to impossible to tell just by a skull and hands, which are the only areas of Enomoto-san's body that aren't covered by clothing. In the translation I'm reading, Enomoto-san is refered to as "he" both in a general sense and by the other characters. However, this is complicated by a few factors:

• I've never seen the original Japanese version, so I don't know if the intent is actually to use "he" or if the pronouns/words being used in Japanese are gender-neutral and are being translated into masculine forms by the scanlators.
  
• Enomoto-san's clothing appears to belong to a male waitstaff member.
  
• Enomoto-san's antagonistic co-worker Misa-san always says things like, "Shut up, you transvestite," when the two of them are arguing. I've seen "transvestite" used in Japanese manga for both transvestites and those who are trangendered - "transgender" is a term that just really is not used in Japanese media very often.
  
• When Misa-san called Enomoto-san "ugly," Enomoto-san replied with, "What did you just say? I might look like this now, but I was once called a handsome young boy!"
  
• A little girl called Enomoto-san "oneechan," and Enomoto-san seemed pleased by it, commenting, "Did you hear it? She called me oneechan!"
  
• Enomoto-san's behaviors in the manga are stereotypically "feminine" by both American and Japanese standards, including spending a great deal of concern on appearance, enjoying cute things like kittens, butterflies, small children and toys, and criticizing Misa-san's use of heavy makeup.
  
• In a segment of character profiles, the author opened Enomoto-san's profile with the statement, "Out of the 5 people in the staff, many people say they like him the most. The model I based this character on is usually a very nice person, but once you get in a fight with her, she totally turns into a man. Unfair."
  

I would love to be able to use gender-neutral pronouns in cases like this, but I have not been able to determine which of the currently tossed about pronoun sets are most accepted. I'm leaning toward "sie/hir/hir/hirs/hirself" for two reasons - I see it used on fandom comms most often, and it's easier to pronounce in my accent. However, since there isn't currently an official standard for English gender-neutral pronouns, I'm stuck with it possibly causing confusion among readers. (Also, "sie" apparently means "she" in German in certain instances, which could potentially complicate things for German readers reading in English.)

If/when Enomoto-san ever states a preference for pronouns in the manga (unlikely, because it's been on hiatus for quite a long time now), I'll definitely follow through with that. In the meantime, I'm stuck, because I like to give characters the same respect I would give real people when it comes to their identities (even if the original authors sometimes don't).

Well that was a long divergence. XD It'll come up again later, so it's worth having the thoughts down, at least.




Jessie and James (Pokemon) couldn't be left out of the fun! I couldn't bring myself to separate the two when I was sketching them, but I'm probably going to separate them digitally and move them closer together - that's why I didn't bother to finish drawing James in the negative space between Jessie's hair and her body. They're replacing Deimos and Phobos in the layout, and they're nearly as inseparable.

I may also have to make Jessie's butt and leg bigger. The reference images I pulled varied in size, but she is curvy, and I like some back on my babes. B)




Arisada from Princess*Princess and Princess*Princess+ is replacing Juno/JunJun. I loved that Juno's expression is nearly identical to one Arisada wears most of the time. Arisada's princess smile seems to have evolved into a pseudo-viper queen smile, which works perfectly with his personality. XD There was much complaining about boys' school uniforms while I was drawing this one. XD


That's it for today! For those of you who haven't realized/aren't Dreamwidth members, I'm also now crossposting these entries to my DW journal. I really didn't use it before - I mostly had it so that I could reply to DW posts without being Anon, because OpenID hates me. However, I decided it was a good place for me to post my grad work posts for people who want to follow only that and not the various memes, wangst and other things I post in my LJ.