Feel that funk!

Stressful times, these. Here’s something I submitted to a friend of mine. :p Not a commission but I like it a lot.

More updates later this week. Need to get life in order first. Ciao!

Hand Cramps exist!

Taking a break from drawing to update this blog, now to be dubbed as the excuse for procrastination.

So I’ve been taking this comic and graphic novel creation class. For our midterms we’re supposed to make a comic about anything, the only requirement of which is for it to be 8 pages. Excited, I took to the task, remembering all those “happy” days when I’d stay at home just to make comics about whatever. Of course I took it upon myself to not only ink the thing but to color it manually and in WATERCOLOR, because I thought it would be fun to do so. HAHAHAHAHA.

Well I managed to finish drawing the pencils in around a week, thinking that inking and coloring would only take me the weekend, just give me a day to ink and a day to color. Take note that as I write this, I admit that I have seriously overestimated my own skills and the challenge that is watercolor paper. Trying it out, I took friday to ink and color page one. It took me 6 hours.

6 hours. 6 freaking hours. 6 HOURS.

Not to be undone, I woke up early saturday morning to ink, thinking that I’d be done by around 6, or at the very least midnight, if I manage to distract myself enough. By 1am Sunday (today) I had only finished inking 3 and a half pages. My hand hurt and I was tired, so I went straight to sleep (lies, I stayed up until 2am reading shojou manga).

Woke up early this morning and went straight to work, and I just managed to finish inking the last page at 4pm. It is now 5:19, I’m giving myself up to 5:30 to rest up my cramped hand. I never even knew hand cramps existed! Such a phenomenon, I tried looking up hand exercises online to see if I can loosen it up to ink some more. Luckily I’m done now, and painting doesn’t require long hours of pressing a pen onto paper.

So yeah. Thanks for reading my rant, and up there are some of my sample pages. :D I’ll scan them once I’m through with them, the darned things.

Sad Realities: 2007 (I think), Photoshop CS3

I believe that there are three sources of heartbreak/ romantic-inducers for the female gender. The first are TV dramas, the likes of Princess Hours and Gossip Girl. Second are the literary sort; romance novels, short stories on love and heartbreak, maybe the occasional blog and/or site you can go to (Postsecret.com, anyone?). The Third and only one reserved for the shameless Otaku would be definitely Shoujo manga.

To give a bit of definition, Shoujo manga is manga read by teen girls or young adult girls. The theme is, without fail, generally love and how it goes/ how to get there. Now how to get there is supposedly the interesting part, since it goes to say that in almost every shoujo manga I’ve seen so far there will be a happy ending.

I’ve been taking to reading a few Shoujo manga every night to cap off stressful/ non-stressful days, and I’ve been noticing a few things. First off; that the usual shoujo manga is pretty formulaic. These are the scenarios and outcomes I have observed:

1. Girl likes guy. Guy likes girl back. After a few awkward moments, they get together.
2. Girl likes guy. Guy does not like girl back. Girl displays her cuteness and redeeming qualities. They get together.
3. Girl 1 likes guy 1. Guy 2 likes girl 1. Girl 1 goes out with guy 1. Guy 1 turns out to be a pervert. Guy 2 enters in the nick of time to save her. They get together.
4. Girl 1 likes guy 1. Guy 1 likes girl 2. Guy 2 likes girl 1. Girl 1 and Guy 2 end up together.
5. Girl hates guy. Guy secretly likes girl. They get together.
6. Girl likes guy and vice-versa but it is taboo. After the younger party graduates high school/ college/ any educational institution, they get together.
7. Girl likes guy. Guy doesn’t really like girl. They get together.

Either way, it’s all very predictable, and save for the few that actually get me feeling anything these days, I often find myself deleting a whole lot of really bad manga from my desktop.

What surprises me the most is the predictableness of it all, and, OMIGOD, the mary-sue-ness of the characters! Sure, the girl is clumsy or eats too much or has a bad face or whatever, but there really is no real dimension to these characters. There are only two types of guys: the one who looks like the bad boy and the one who looks like a good boy. There is only one type of heroine, and she has to meet the following criteria: skinny and pretty, even if the manga dictates otherwise. And she will ALWAYS be pretty, mind you, no matter how plain the characters in the manga says she is.

It just goes to show you the type of delusion we girl otakus get ourselves into. In reality we are not all skinny little things with cute celphone accessories and short skirt uniforms; but reading these things we long for the type of lambing that these girls eventually earn themselves. It doesn’t matter whether they have aspirations for the future or not, whether the conversations they’re having are real conversations, all that matters is that these girls are cute. Maybe if we’re cute we’ll find love, or at least have some semblance of it. Which goes to show you that we’re all pretty delusional when it comes to Shoujo manga.

But then, that’s not to say we should stop reading it. For one thing, we read them precisely because we lack this sort of drama in our lives. I, for one, enjoy reading the occasional (and rare, nowadays) well thought-out, well-drawn, stereotypical shoujo manga. It’s always refreshing to see new twists to the old formulas, or to simply see a lot of heartbreak in the pursuit of love. Somehow good Shoujo manga can induce feelings of completeness in you; a virtual heartbreak that is painful but welcomed; a purging, the birth of a futile (yet wonderful) hope. And well— you can’t get that by just watching Gossip Girl.

My life as a Harry Potter addict

There are very few things in life I’m addicted to.

Well, that was a pretty blatant lie.

Anyone who knows me knows how I get into things. I’ve been known to get into the strangest things, and once I do I’ll probably know things about it that most people don’t know. These include videogames (particularly FF-series, Breath of Fire series, Kingdom Hearts, PC games, blah blah) cartoons, movie series, etc. etc, but probably my biggest fandom would be Harry Potter. Ah, my biggest fandom WAS Harry Potter.

I started reading Harry Potter when my cousin gave us the first two books. I was enthralled by this familiar yet new world of magic, very well-written by the way. My mom wanted to read us one chapter every night, but, being the impatient reader that I am, I ruined it for the rest of my family by reading the entire thing secretly, by myself. I became the family’s resident Potterfan, and, proving my obsession, I’d secretly draw myself as a student in Hogwarts.

I read each book twice. The first book more than 5 times, ask me anything about the books and I’ll answer (though the movies are a completely different story). I remember beating everyone at this Harry Potter trivia board game, and participating on Harry Potter debates in forums and websites. But knowledge wasn’t the extent of my fandom.

For one thing, you KNOW you’re a die-hard fan once you start pairing up non-canon characters with each other. In my case, I used to make doujinshis (fan comics) of Harry and Draco. I made around 4 18-page comics, all pencil, featuring Harry and Draco’s budding relationship through the years, all through the narratives of the Hogwart’s girls.

The point was to portray these girls not only as mary-sues, or as passive characters to fandom, but rather as conscious individuals who have a serious case of fan-girlism. Backstory was that Hermione, Myrtle, Cho Chang and Ginny decided to start shipping Harry and Draco as well after catching the couples’ romantic moments, so much that they started a club. It was an interesting series of doujinshis, the last of which was an unfinished story of Ginny catching Harry and Draco playing around in Hogsmeade during winter break.

Sometimes I have the urge to continue these comics, or at least ink them in to share to the world, but most times I think my fandom is a wee bit too disturbing for public consumption, so we’ll probably never know.

By the way; here are my Hogwarts stats:

• Name: Meggy Kawsek
• House: Ravenclaw
• Pet: White cat
• Wand: 10” willow, veela hair core
• If you played quidditch, what would you be: Chaser
• Favorite subject: Charms
• Pureblood, halfblood or muggle-born: Pureblood
• Patronus: Black labrador
• If you were an animagus: Maya bird or sparrow

Hmm. Maybe I should start a Hogwarts geek meme. :p

Mother Nature laughs at my stubbornness

I really suck at coloring.

I’ve been sick for the last few days, since Sunday, but I’ve been working on stuff still since it’s the last stretch before this event that I’m handling comes next tuesday. In the meantime, loads of work to do. And I’m not even counting homework. :| Oh boy.

I was caught many times in the rain without an umbrella, but given the wind and the way wonderful Philippine weather works (super crazily and unpredictable, sunny one minute hurricane the next) it looks like it wouldn’t have helped much anyway if I had one. At one point me and my friends were huddling ourselves beside a van to get that small triangle of safety beside it. In the meantime the doors to the car that we were supposed to go into were locked and wouldn’t open.

Also got caught in the rain on my way to an interview in makati. I didn’t know it would rain that bad; it was just drizzling when I dropped sister off in school, and since it was drizzling I let her have the only umbrella in the car. Big mistake.

I ended up interviewing the correspondent soaking wet and smelling like a dog that just came back from swimming. So no wonder that, a day later and in the middle of watching Harry Potter HBP (sucky movie by the way, but enjoyed it nonetheless for the incredible amount of possible shipping scenes) I started developing a fever.

Spent Sunday indoors, trying to rest but working anyway, came in to school on monday, went to the doctor after class on tuesday and was ordered to stay at home for 3-5 days, but I had a thesis presentation on Wednesday and I can’t very well miss THAT, so I came in at 3:30, presented despite the terrible mess my voice had become, and went home, but had to leave again for a very important meeting that lasted all the way until 11 in the evening.

But I’m getting better, taking the day off today (in theory), and I think that by tomorrow I’ll start to sound like an actual human being again.

Enabled comments! :) Comment away!

Stuff!

So freaking busy. It’s kind of tiring. :| Oh, here are some illustrations I did for game development class! :D Play our facebook game at http://apps.facebook.com/xmjjunivwars

Congratulations to Ateneo for winning the games! :D Fight! Fight! Blue and white!

Hmm. I really have to get back to work. Oh, still figuring this thing out, but… how do you enable comments?

The Yellow Umbrella

Okay, so this is an old desktop wallpaper digi painting that I did a couple of decades ago. The reason why I’m bringing up ghosts from the past though is mostly because I’m stuck dead on a story for this comic that I was asked to make for an anthology of high school stories. I need inspiration and this is the only image I’ve got stuck. XD

I went to an all-girls’ school, so it was pretty rare to have a member of the opposite sex engage in conversations with you outside of school, much less have someone accompany you in the rain with an umbrella. But that’s not the story I want, because its cliche’ and manga-ish and is totally overdone.

I’m thinking of maybe doing something about a student and a music teacher. When I was in high school I had the coolest music teacher ever, she was unlike any teacher I’ve ever seen. She’d dress all funky and weird to school, had the greatest temper, but was just really cool cuz’ she read Neil Gaiman comics and adored both batman and oscar the grouch. She also taught me a lot of great things; mostly about how teachers are people too. Hahahaha. But really, she was uber cool.

Sketches to follow, once I’ve gotten ahold of that scanner I’ve been talking about.

When I was in high school I made comic strips for the school newspaper. It only came out once every quarter— which meant 4 issues for every year (I think). I made a series of comic strips, early on the SoUtH sIdE, a sort of prequel to the comics that I was into drafting back then.

Anyway, eventually, like every artist, I got pretty lazy. And this is where my lovely art editor came in. KT was (still is) this bundle of energy that never gave out or gave up, so she pretty much kept me going until the end.

I remember the comics being a lot cleaner than this, but I guess it’s all due to evolution.

By the way, you can visit KT’s art blog at http://katrinateh.tumblr.com/

Now to thesis research!

Comics I did for the Ateneo Orsem Manual 2009. Don’t know if they were ever published, probably will never know. Hey, hello! Artblog! :D

I’m currently working on a couple of projects; among them a webcomic that is to be released indefinitely sometime later this year. Hopefully I’ll be able to draft some stuff up for inking before next month.

As for now, I’m on the lookout for a good-quality flatbed scanner that costs 3k or less. Can’t keep up an artblog without a scanner! :D