Category: Manga-Comics

The Dreaming: The Final Cover!

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I just heard back from my editor – this amazing thing happened at TokyoPop. My cover got approved by the CEO without needing any changes, even after the logo and assorted stuff has been added. Apparently this has NEVER happened before, and I am in AWE that there were no changes required. WOAH! But that just leaves me more time to do work, yeah! And it seems that I’ll have to add the page numbers into the book myself, which is actually a good thing since I have time, and it’s more trustworthy than asking someone else to add it in and hope it’ll be there when the book comes out. And there *TADA* will be a table of contents.

Anyway, here’s the cover with logo. Personally I was hoping the logo would look more “elegant”, but then if Stu Levy (with his high standards) approved this, then it MUST be okay. I wonder whether additional art can be added on the back though… since it’s a repeat of the cover image, but for now it looks fine.

 

Cover for The Dreaming - vol1

 

I did a calculation of how long the book took me. When I start doing something – pencilling, inking, toning – I tend to make the starting and ending dates. There may be some breaks/pauses in between, but I still count those days in. So far, I’ve calculated I’ve done 71 days of pencilling, 93 days of inking, and 57 days for toning. Since the whole thing is 171 pages, it’s down to an average of 2.41 pages/day for pencilling, 1.84 pages/day for inking, and 3 pages/day for toning. Not bad, really.

 

Art Exhibition: I’ve been blabbering about this for a while, and details still haven’t been finalised, but I’ll post it up anyway. There’s going to be large arts festival in Newcastle in September-October, called the “This Is Not Art Festival”, which is actually a whole bunch of festivals clustered together, concentrating on New Media. MY part in it is in the “Otakulture” festival, a part of the Electrofringe festival.

I’ll be participating in a panel discussion, and also showing 6 pieces of art in the exhibit. Four of these would be pages from “The Dreaming”, while the other two would be my Chinese Opera Singer pictures. They’ll be A3 size so I need to go to a printer, but that’s plenty of work for me to do so far.

The Dreaming: The REAL cover!!

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This is (going) to be final cover – definately more manga-looking than the first draft – if it’s approved by the powers-that-be at TokyoPop. It’s probably going to require some changes (hopefully not too much), so I’m not too worried about what it looks like now. I only got news that it was needed on Saturday, and had to be finished by Monday. So I only had 2 days to do this, so maybe I should amazed it turned out well. *phew* Now I absolutely MUST get started on Chapter 7. Last time I had trouble whipping myself into action, but now I’m raring to go!!! The busier I get, the more likely I am to FEEL like working. Strange… at least Chapter 7’s not official due until 15th August. HUZZAH!!

 

The Dreaming cover

 

The colours for this turned out a bit odd in Photoshop, but luckily that sort of thing can very easily be fixed with changing the Hue/Saturation. Anyway, I’ll leave that to the art department people, who is also designing the logo. I’m so grateful I don’t have to do the logo, because if I did it would turn out to be an illegibal mess. But seeing it’s in good hands I can just kick back and get Chapter 7 done!

 

The Dreaming: Chapters 1-6 all done…

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I’ve been bumming around for the past 4 days, largely because I only have 1 chapter left to do and about 5 weeks to do it, which is more than enough. I tell myself, I MUST get started on Chapter 7 inks tomorrow… get it over and done with. Come on!! *tries to whip self up into a frenzy*. I’ve heard through the grapevine that I seem to be the only TokyoPop creator who is actually ahead of schedule. Well, what an honour, not that it matters at the end of the day. Anyway, here are 2 sample pages from chapters 5 and 6.

 

Page 111 of "The Dreaming"

 

Page 144 of "The Dreaming"

 

Sprites!: That’s not saying I haven’t been doing anything – look at this! I’ve always been a great admirer of sprite artists (the ones that don’t rip sprites from other games, that is). I love how the way they’re able to inject personality into a smattering of otherwise insignificant pixels. I’ve always been interested in graphical story-telling, regardless of the kind it is, so I have more than a passing interest in animation of all sorts. Oddly enough, I think that sprite story-telling can be extremely effective if one uses it well. *Gets all sorts of ideas in head*. Being someone with an agenda at all times, it’s actually a more efficient and less time-consuming form of telling a story. Definately less dramatic, but hey, I need to get these stories outta my head (and I’m only talking about the good stories) and I ain’t cranking manga pages out fast enough.

 

Link and Epona animated sprite

Link and Epona!

 

This took me a fair number of hours to animate smoothly. Damn horse tail…it’s only 11 frames, and each frame is running at 0.04s …I should be working on Chapter 7, really.

 

Block 6: Another new page at Wirepop.com! Now that “The Dreaming” is wrapping up, hopefully I’ll be getting back into Block 6 and all the other “left hanging” manga at my site. I’m planning for volume 2 work to start in January 2006, so hopefully I can use the time from August to November to fix up any manga I have left in the frozen food section. That would mean finishing off “Keeper of the Soul”, who is a mere 3 pages from end of the prelude, and “Blood of Snow”, which is about 24 pages from the end. Not to mention I have to start promoting “The Dreaming”… and the art exhibition coming up too… ARRRGH!!