This week, I am blazing through the pencils for the last 3rd of Small Shen. I also went to Free Graphic Novel Day at Kinokuniya, which was a lot of fun. I signed some books and did some sketches for them, and here I show you a bunch of sketches I did for a series of signed (by me and Dean Kootz) books that I get to send back to someone who’s been doing this since the very first Odd Thomas graphic novel. This book is the last Odd Thomas book I’ll be doing, so I look back with some fondness.
And here’s a picture of Dean’s autograph! With mine below…
This week I was interviewed by Eastyn from PanelBound.com – thanks to Eastyn, an the interview is here. I’m also toning Small Shen at the speed of light, and it looks to be that chapters 3-4 will be done by the end of April *pumps first*. Meanwhile, I get to show you some Xtreme Photoshopping I did a while ago, for my musician friend Yunyu, who released a single called Dorothy which I did some art for. Chief among the art was a picture of her I photoshopped. Here, I get to show you how I did it, and what the original looked like.
The original: This was a studio-taken picture Yunyu, which is fantastically done and needs no retouching. The backgorund was a picture of the nightsky a friend took, slapped together in a composite picture.
Step 2: One of the problems with the original pic is that the picture isn't composed well. Yunyu is too small, and while the background is meant to emphasise the milky way, Yunyu is standing directly infront of it. So I cropped the picture properly, to show the foreground and background elements properly
Step 3: The milkyway looks kinda plain, so I flipped the picture around, and added a bunch of glow effects of it to make it pop out more. I also changed the hue to a bluish glow, to even out the diffferences in colour. A nightsky should be bluish...
Step 4: With the milky way now so bright, obviously I need to get the lighting references right. It doesn't make sense to be standing to the left of the lightsource when you can clearly see that Yunyu's lit from the left, so I swapped the picture element around so the light-source makes sense.
Final Step: Since the blue and the red contrast is so strong, I changed the hue of Yunyu's skin and hair to match the bluish glow. I left the red jacket mostly untouched, so that the red will pop out, whereas her skin tone will match the blue glow. And Viola! Click on the picture to see a larger version.
So, Adelaide Comic-Con has come and gone, and I spent the whole two days sitting at my booth and talking to people. Thanks to all the people who came by to talk to me, and especially a big thanks to people who brought books for me to sign. I managed to sign more than a few copies of each of my books, so that was really nice. Apart from that, I just mostly sat and did sketches I then sold, in-between talking to people (since I don’t go to conventions much, nor really sell art prints or anything there). This was the first convention where I’ve had a table to myself (previously I shared all my tables), so it’s also the first time I sketched much of anything in such an environment.
I took pictures of some of the art I did, thanks to the new iPhone I have. Since the convention went on for 2 days and was pretty tiring, you can kinda see the quality of the art (and the photography) dribble down through the sketches. Conventions are strange places to be drawing in… some people seem to do well in those kind of environments, whereas I found it overwhelming. There’s alwas people coming and going to talk to you, and generally it’s quite loud and noisy. Either way, I decided that drawing characters from The Legend of Zelda will make it easier for me, and so it was. Drawing Link always calms me down.
Doodled this pic of Link on the back of one of those hotel writing pads...
Zelda was also doodled on the back of a hotel pad... random pieces of paper, teehee.
A fan of "The Dreaming" asked me to draw Mary Spector! Now that was someone I haven't drawn for years!
I was asked to draw two pokemon eating a mountain of food. Pokenmon experts should know who the stars of this picture is...
People bought Link so I had to draw another Link.
Zelda was bought up too, so I drew another Zelda.
A french-themed Pikachu for someone's sketchbook
Let me just say that Link was uber-popular... I had to finish this one quick because someone wanted it when they saw me drawing it.
I think one of these guys is called the "Blue Beetle"? This was something about April Fool's Day?
I drew this pic of a cute little blonde boy. I was so tired by then I could barely photograph this one properly.
It’s an early post this week, and I have some really exciting news! No, it’s not House of Odd coming out in 2 week’s time, though that is plenty exciting in itself. It’s the first, full-length music video of Dorothy, the first single of Yunyu‘s Music-Manga-Animation collaboration: Twisted Tales. I previously wrote about the trailer here, but now I can show you the full video, beautifully animated by the talented Thai animators The Commonists!
Twisted Tales is the name of Yunyu’s music album, but it’s not that simple. The story is about what happens when fairy tales come to live in our world (along with the various issues that living in our world has), but it’s not just a music album. Below, Yunyu and I talk about Twisted Tales in our introduction video:
As a manga artist (and a long-time friend of Yunyu), I had the biggest hand in shaping the visual side of Twisted Tales – it’s quite unlike any other project I’ve worked on, and I had some great fun with the material, some of which was quite unexpected. For example, I didn’t expect to do any photo-shopping of Yunyu’s photos for this album, but in terms of publicity shots, it kinda fell within the territory. Below is a shot I photoshopped for the release of Dorothy. I discovered a previously unknown talent for this sort of thing! It was fun to indulge too!
Click to enlarge. I will be posting a step-by-step tutorial for how I photoshopped this picture later on.
The Art of Twisted Tales
I designed the character of Dorothy, which the animators The Commonists then brought to life. Apart from that, my job was to design the covers for the CDs and DVDs, which unfortunately is only available as part of a press kit. The idea is that people are no longer buying CDs, so at least for a while, you won’t be able to buy the CD covers and CD I designed for Dorothy. But that doesn’t mean I won’t show you all that nice art! Here’s a pic of it below:
As for the actual art style, I settled on it a long time ago. It’s rather bright and colourful, but I feel that for a story about twisted fairy tales, that cheeriness works fine as a counterpoint to the dark subject matter. I would cite South Park as inspiration – childlike-graphics, but with mature content. It’s incongruous, like a subversion of childhood imagery, which I liked very much. Dorothy itself is a rather dark song, and the sequence of events that happen in this 6-panel story of Dorothy’s journey through space reflects that. The cutesy art brings that out even more so.
Since the theme of both Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz was travel, I decided to use airmail letters/parcels/stamps as part of the jacket design. The 5 stamps show Dorothy travelling along the yellow star road, meeting the scarecrow (Planet Brain), the tin man (a spaceship), and the lion (constellation of Leo) before she meets the giant blue star – aka the Wizard of Oz. The wizard turned out to be a disappointment, as he was in the original – in this case, the wizard is Death itself. You find out Dorothy’s fate in the final panel, which not coincidently is also the CD itself.
Click to enlarge.
I created a separate cover for the DVD version. Originally this wasn’t meant to exist since the discs were meant to be 2-in-1 or something, but people got confused. So this was whipped up at the last minute, so people can see they’re a DVD and a song on a CD.
Click to enlarge.
That’s it from me, for Dorothy. The next song in the album will be coming down the pike in a few month’s time, so stay tuned!
