Just thought I'd share a panel that I've been working on. Can you guess what Terra is doing?
... she looks like an angry Christmas tree.

An email conversation with a reader (FantasyAlert) made me remember a couple of ideas I had scribbled down regarding the Opera scene. Yes, this scene is years away, but this past summer I came up with the idea of further developing the conversation between Locke and Celes in the dressing room. I thought it would be funny if Celes reveals that she doesn't know how to apply makeup, and (unsurprisingly?) Locke is strangely versed in such knowledge.

In page two I decided to include a line from Lina Darkstar's fan translation (on IcyBrian Forums- Google it). In an aside, Locke marvels at Celes' beauty. Aww.


I never finished the idea; so all that's left is three finished pages and the first panels of page four. I don't even get to the "that ribbon suits you" part! The art is wonky, too, but that's just 'cause I never really meant to share this with people. But what the hell.

( See the pages... )

Oh, Youtube! Following those "Related Videos" links really eats up one's time. I thought I'd share a Locke tribute someone posted (which was apparently taken from another website). Its animated, and has a song that won't leave my head. I like especially that Locke has the crazy-eye in most of the frames.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HcytTTFqis

And here is my own dramatic Locke, from next week's page.

Sometimes I don't like sound effects and swishy lines in a page because they can hide parts of the drawings I worked hard to get right. So here is a close up of panel one, whose sketch I shared in the previous post, and panel three, featuring Edgar getting his ass handed to him. Ka-doosh!





Also, in keeping with my love of nitpicky details, I am attempting to give a distinct eye and nose shape to each character. I notice that a lot of artists (in particular I'm thinking of manga here) draw their characters with the same face and body type, making hair and clothing the main distinguishing features. I've kind of gotten into that habit, and I'm trying to break it here.



You can see Edgar has more of a square shaped eye, with a long straight nose. Locke's eyes sort of lift up at the outer edge, and his nose is more pointy, though it still has a bridge. Terra spends most of the comic innocent and afraid, so I chose a rounded eye for her, along with a cute little nose.

Am working on page 109, and though I'd share the sketch for the first panel. I got this pose from Google images. If you can't tell, he is preparing to throw a spear/javelin.

Does Edgar look too pretty boy here?




And I'd like to share a Japanese fan site with some lovely pieces illustrating scenes from the game. Say hello to Celestial Inferno.

As I mentioned in the website, the reader TLU provided some very well planned "storyboards" for the coming fight scene with the Magitek. They were so good that I decided to, well, steal them. With his permission.

I post only one of his pages here, under a cut. If its okay with him, I'll post the rest, this time in a size big enough so you can read his writing.

( Here )

Months and months ago, there was someone (I forget who is was) that asked if I would draw a Sabin/Terra picture. Last night at 1:00 am seemed the right time to do it. It's not necessarily a "couple" picture; two people smiling at one another can be interpreted any which way, really.


I just scribbled it out and threw some color onto it; you know how I do.

An hour of my life wasted on Locke's page of the FF Wiki (THANKYOU very much, LockeZ, for the link) revealed a fantasy novel featuring the main character as a thief named Locke. The author is a big FF6 fan. This fills me with delight. Though I don't think I could read The Lies of Locke Lamora with a straight face. I'll tell you if he wears a bandana.

That is all.

....but last night I thought it would be fun to draw the three of them with their hair down. I can't help but look back on my late night drawings and think them completely ridiculous, but at the time, they made perfect sense.



Terra
Sooner or later, everyone will ask a curly haired woman if she has ever straightened her hair. Without fail, they'll get this question and it will fuel a whole little exchange that will end with the age-old observation that straight haired women always want curls and curly haired women want it straight. If Terra had had normal social interactions, she'd know this. Her hair is both very thick and very curly- the sort that would still hold its form after taking out the hair tie. If made perfectly straight, it would reach a bit past her shoulders. I still don't know whether her green hair is unusual in the human color range or not.

Edgar
Someone, somewhere (I believe it was in the Caves of Narshe Forums) described Edgar as having "honey blonde" hair. I wanted a shade that would contrast quite a bit with his super tanned skin, yet not look out of place with his natural (paler) skin tone. Reaching to mid-back, its supposed to be of medium thickness and pretty straight and elegant, using those long, elegant lines like with manga characters. Unfortunately for him, I can't seem to stop drawing it with too much volume and a semi wave. With more practice, I guess.

Locke
When Locke was first introduced in the comic, people were saying how he should have gray or blonde hair. Though I swear I saw brown hair on that sprite. At any rate, he wasn't about to be blonde in the comic since too many characters already were blonde. It was only with hearing my boyfriend's (now fiance's) opinion that I accepted that maybe he's got gray hair. So here's the deal- in my comic, Kohlingen people, as an ethnic group, are born with gray hair and slightly darker skin. So to avoid sticking out as a foreigner (or maybe just as a fashion statement), Locke dyes his hair brown. Later on in the comic, you'll see his silver roots showing, and eventually he'll cut off those brown tips and be all gray. Maybe at the request of Celes. That would be sweet.

Now, did you all notice I posted two pages on the FF6c website today? One is still unfinished, but I'll get around to it eventually.

Just thought I'd dump the finished page 104 over here. Will put this page on the FF6c website proper once page 103 is done, so we don't get things out of order.
( Click Over Here )

Well, it looks like the heart of my unable-to-post-page problem was the file size and my saving the image as a CMYK instead of as the usual RGB. I think, I think the problem is fixed now. Thanks entirely to my brother, who pointed out the problem and suggested the solution very quickly after I spoke to him about it. I wonder if my inability to get the image to post here was also related to that? Well... all the same, sorry to have caused all the confusion and long wait.

I'm posting the sketch of page 103, which TLU is working on. Figure I'd put it under a LJ cut in case you didn't want to ruin the surprise of seeing the finished page.
( Click here )

I can't say why, but the new page isn't showing up on my Firefox, and readers are reporting that they can't see it on IE. So for now, I'm posting the newest page here.

There was a little mixup in the making of page 99. A few evenings ago, TLU had sent me an "in-progress" version of the page he was drawing/coloring. A few figures (mostly the chocobos in the bottom few panels) weren't colored. I thought he was through with it and proceeded to color in the missing spots, add the backgrounds, and finish the page.

Poor guy then spent several hours finishing the colors, only to find that I had already finished and posted the page. In recognition of his efforts, I'm posting his colored version here:

( Click here to see TLU's version )

TLU also sent me a picture with two versions of Kefka from page 99, as shown below:


And finally, a sketch that had been in my mind for a while now. I work at a store that sells grills, and seeing as how the FF6c is currently in that part of the game, I thought...

I just discovered the secret to that delicious hot chocolate they serve at my local cafe. It's actually nothing more than microwaved chocolate milk with a shot of french vanilla flavoring. It's so simple, yet they charge kind of a lot for it. Hm.

The action of this week's page, if you need reminding, is taking place at night/early dawn. I am still using my old method of creating the night effect, but this week I took the advice that reader fleetingsight gave in a comment months ago:

( Fleetingsight said... )

I played around with layers with their settings for a while and came up with a night effect that looks bluer and paler than my usual method. Below you can see the two effects side by side. (The top one is the effect that's used in this week's page; the bottom is that alternative method)



It took me a long time to design the chocobo's bridle/saddle/etc. because I had really no idea what those things looked like. Big thanks to Google image search for reference images. I like the result, too. I probably don't need to tell you I am trying to keep with the whole Moroccan/Andalusian/fantasy design theme. And speaking of that, this is the first page with a full body shot of Edgar's traveling clothes! I make no attempt to hide that his pants are modeled after Rudolph Valentino in the 1922 feature "Blood and Sand". ( Pants please! )

I think it was reader and co-artist TLU who mentioned wanting to show a step-by-step demonstration of how these new compilation pages are being made. So I pasted all the stages into two long thin .jpg images. Keep in mind that this isn't a tutorial since I don't offer any real in depth explanation- it's just meant to show the progression of a page.

( Part One )

( Part Two )

That's it for now. Hope you liked.

... I'm sorry, what? LiveJournal? Oh, yes, I have one of those...

Suffice to say that a lot's been going on between now and when I last posted. I promised I'd talk a little about the stuff I got at Acen and the people I met there. Here's a very truncated list:

Bead Sprites
http://www.beadsprites.com/
These guys take those little plastic "Perler beads" from kid's craft kits and arrange them on a pegboard into video game sprites. The beads are then ironed so they melt and fuse together. I bought $30 in sprites from these guys and have them on my fridge. I am very pleased and wish I had bought more. The bead sprite guys were just a few booths away from me in Artist's Alley. The awkward part was that I gushed over their sprites and invited them to visit my table, but when one of the guys stopped by the next day, I had no idea who he was. It was- just a blank. That's short term memory for you.

Carmel Pixie
http://carmelpixie.deviantart.com/
These guys were selling (among other things) tiny decorated glass jars with either feathers in them, to make "Phoenix Down"s, or colored water, to make "Elixir"s and "Hi-potion"s. I was so enchanted with the Phoenix Down I bought on Friday that I woke up early Saturday morning just to admire it. I then got the Elixir. It's good to know that I have that security if I should get into a fight. Sadly, they don't seem to have any pictures of their decorated jars in their DeviantArt. I also got a Locke bookmark, which I use in my perennial book.

... and I don't even remember the other things I bought in Artist's Alley. Not at this moment, anyway.

On Saturday I met up with one of the readers, TLUniverse, who gave me some nicely done concept FF6c pages. Guy does detail way better than I do. I proceeded to draw him something ugly, then later we walked around. We both bought FF6 Super Famicom cartridges, which I believe are truly from 1994 because of their musty smell. Like they've been sitting in a basement or warehouse for 15 years. Mine is still in the box and sitting atop my telly at home.

TLUniverse and I also got some manner of potion soda with Terra and Kefka on the can. It tasted like Sprite with grapefruit flavoring, and was not as carbonated. I was tired from the day, and it healed me right up. I later went and bought the soda cans with FF4 and FF5 characters on them (at $7 each, no less!).

....aaand that's all about Acen that I recall at this point.

May as well mention here that I've got page 97 finished- it will be posted this coming Monday (July 5).

It's a bit overdue, but I wanted to talk a bit about my time at Anime Central. It was my first time having a table at Artist's Alley, and I would very much call this the "learning year".

I was one of the first artist's to show up on Thursday afternoon to set up the table and go through registration and all that. The notoriously long lines that Acen is known for were nonexistent on that day. I was able to get the badges for everyone in my studio in one fell swoop. The area was also roughly twice as large as last year. Coming early gave me the chance to chat with other early artists, like Miss Julia, who in fact bought my first chocobo plushie, a red one (By the way, today is St. Julia's Day). I also found Jessica who does NeonDragon and (most exciting to me) Rebecca who does the stump chibi stickers.

I spent the evening in the hotel room with my tablemates, known to the internet as Kiralachan and Minagi. A fourth member, who I don't think has a website, rounded out our party. Kiralachan has one of those button makers, which are actually very simple and fun to use. I also had prepared three different chicken-related prints for sale, which you can see in my DA gallery.


I started with a flock of 34 chocobo plushies to be sold at $18 each. Turns out that piling the birds into a big pyramid makes them a lot more eye-catching and helped pick up sales that first day (see above). I spent most of the day holding out chocobos to passers-by and encouraging them to "give 'em a big hug!" and going on to explain that they were all "very well behaved, bilingual, and house broken". It cracked me up how so many people would approach cautiously, and give the bird a very gentle, tender squeeze. Some people never let go. Case in point- see Cloud here:


By Friday's end, I had sold ten birds. On Saturday, things got hoppin'. Students and working people had the day off and the AA section was visibly more crowded. I had also prepared mini comics using pages from the FF6c to pass out. The idea was to bring more traffic to my site. So far, it hasn't helped (haha). But hey, at least people had a free little comic booklet they could read over their dinner or whatever.

One of my readers, who posts in the Shoutbox as TLUniverse, stopped by as well. To him went the second and final red chocobo, named Redbert. We had a good time talking and even got to walk around the vendor's area. In the near future, he'll be helping with the FF6c by adding detail on some pages, or even drawing some pages entirely. In the LJ cut is some concept art he's already done.

( Here )

On Saturday, sixteen birds were sold. By noon on Sunday, all of the flock had flown away. My buttons and chicken prints, not so much. People seemed more confused about them than anything. Still, I was surprised to find that Sunday was also a busy day. Turns out that people tend to just window shop on Friday and Saturday, in order to decide for sure what they want to spend their money on. Sadly, I was giving bad news to a lot of people who had come with their money ready for the chocobos.

A few lessons I'd like to pass on to anyone thinking of doing Artist's Alley at Acen or any other convention (put into an LJ cut for space):

( Here )

Next time I post I'd like to talk more about the people I met and- how exciting!- the treasures I brought home.

Well, I am back from the con, safe and sound. It was a fast paced weekend that seemed to last ages, if that makes any sense. I'll give more details later.

Not like it helps anyone anywhere, but I was working on the next page the other night and here is Edgar sleeping in his bed. The pose is from a live model that I drew a few months ago. It's good to be able to use the drawing I made in the comic.



Acen is this Friday! It'll be my first convention selling things. I'll let you know how it goes.

Due to the Easter holiday, my time this weekend was spent with family and not comic. Click below to see the page's half-finished lineart.

( Page 91 progress )

This week was also spent making chocobos! When I went home, Mom helped me a lot with the sewing.


Cute closeup of two birds.


Birds in various stages of completion.

Less than a month to Anime Central! I think I'll sell them for $15.

So this week is the last page of that scene with Kefka. He was only around for- what- four pages, but already I'm glad to see him go. Bitch is fun to write, but tedious to color. Plus I get all weirded out when I see how his hairstyle and color is so close to Edgar's.

Am still getting ready for Anime Central, which is coming up this May. Earlier this week I finished proto-chocobo doll number 3. He is made from yellow fleece and has a floppy tail which caused me much grief. I have christened him "Tailbert". The dolls will be about a foot long maybe, and will have cute button eyes. I'm thinking maybe $20 is a good price for them. Let's hope people will actually want to buy them, right? But who doesn't want their very own chocobo?

Yesterday was another one of those days where I couldn't stop drawing the comic (I love those days!). That means that page 89 is done. I am getting tired of the way I shade the comics; it never looks right to me and it takes a lot of time. So I'm going for cell shading now. I think it looks better, and the job gets done twice as fast.

This is my favorite panel- can you guess what's going on?
(And yes, new clothes for Locke)

In a moment of weakness and late night stupor, I thought it reasonable to make a sweet Locke/Celes image. I never do this sort of thing, so it's kind of weird to be posting this. But all the same, I thought I'd share. It's kind of sweet.

( Locke falls asleep on Celes's shoulder )

I also have new LJ icons that I made in the same late night stupor.







Maybe next time I'll post something really masculine. :D