Update: Another Airbrushed Picture

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I was meaning to try out the watercolour function in Corel Painter 9, but I can’t understand how it worked (am I the only one with these sort of problems?). I was trying to imitate the style of another artist I found online, and was using their picture for reference, but I couldn’t figure out how they did their colouring. I LOOKED sorta like watercolour, but it probably wasn’t… anyway, I couldn’t get the watercolour working, so I tried to imitate the effect with airbrushing instead. And the result, the girl below with the rent-a-frame, looks NOTHING like what I want it to be. But at least it’s a different colouring method to the first airbrushed picture I did. Definately less “cute”. I could probably use this colouring style for “The Dreaming” pin-ups. Discovering new colouring styles are fun (even if that wasn’t my intention in the first place).

 

Painter Girl

 

The original picture was a lot lighter than this one – I played around with the Gamma in Corel Photo-paint, and decided it looked much better with darker colours. I discovered the “sponge” tool and the “Airbrush – FineSpray” functions today. 🙂

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Update: I got Corel Painter 9

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I finally got my hands on Corel Painter 9! And guess what, I don’t know what most of the functions do. I spent at least 4 hours yesterday attempting to try airbrushing for the first time, and it turned out surprisingly well for a first attempt. I was expecting pure garbage to result so I scanned some crappy sketch in and just coloured it – this is a grown-up Tilis from Keeper of the Soul. The background is pretty forgettable – I didn’t have a background in mind when I scanned in the crappy sketch and so had a rent-a-moon and rent-a-starry sky taken straight from Amber’s “The Dreaming” pic further down this page (Amber: you biatch!).

 

Tilia

 

I had to port the background into Corel Photopaint and add it in there. I have no idea how to add glows to the characters in Painter – or perhaps you can’t do it at all?! I tried to look through the “help” part but no luck. If anyone knows, please tell me, it would be greatly appreciated. And I don’t understand why the “select” function is such a pain in the butt. At least you can actually PAINT in this program.

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Funny Examination Answers

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This post is courtesy of the Stories section of the British Counsel, and more hilarious write-ups can be found on their site. It’s a collection of amusing answers written by high school students in reply to history questions. I’m unsure whether these answers were written by ESL students, but judging from the average joe’s knowledge of history, I wouldn’t be surprised if these were native English speakers.

 

Funny Examination Answers

“Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere.”

“Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread which is bread made without any ingredients.Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. He died before he ever reached Canada.”

“The Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks also had myths. A myth is a female moth.”

“Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.”

“Another story was William Tell, who shot an arrow through an apple while standing on his son’s head.”

“Queen Elizabeth was the “Virgin Queen.” As a queen she was a success. When she exposed herself before her troops they all shouted “hurrah.”

“It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented removable type and the Bible. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes and started smoking. And Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100 foot clipper.”

“Writing at the same time as Shakespeare was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey Hote. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.”

“One of the causes of the Revolutionary War was the English put tacks in their tea. Also, the colonists would send their parcels through the post without stamps. Finally the colonists won the War and no longer had to pay for taxis. Delegates from the original 13 states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin discovered electricity by rubbing two cats backwards and declared, “A horse divided against itself cannot stand.” Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.”

“Gravity was invented by Issac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in the autumn when the apples are falling off the trees.”

 

My personal favourite:
“During the Renaissance America began. Christopher Columbus was a great navigator who discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic. His ships were called the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Fe.”
(The idea of an entire landmass appearing because some guy was cursing around the Atlantic Ocean had me laughing for a full 5 minutes)

Recommendation: Slam Dunk

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It’s been a while since my last manga recommendation, so here is an all-time favourite: Slam Dunk. Yes, believe it or not, I’m actually recommending a sports manga.

 

Slam DunkSlam Dunk (Takehiko Inoue)
31 Volumes

Slam Dunk is available in English, but only in very limited numbers. Sports manga seems to be fairly popular in the English; just not this one. Why is a complete mystery to me – I normally hate sports manga, but I loved Slam Dunk, and so do millions of people who has read it.

 

Plot
The hero of the story, Sakuragi Hanamichi, is your typical rough-edged delinquent with a heart of gold and a core of inner strength. His greatest goal in life is to find a girlfriend, and to walk her home every day. However, he is constantly rebuffed by every girl he encounters, until he becomes smitten with the younger sister of the captain of the school basketball team. This girl is a basketball fan, and when she tells him she adores basketball, he decides to take on the sport to get the girl. What he didn’t expect was for him to fall in love with the game and discover a talent for the sport he never knew he had.

 

Why I recommend this
Darn it, I just made it sound like the 100 million other sports manga out there. I’ve never liked sports manga largely because of the formula plots and the whole Japanese “sports philosophy”, which dictates that your sport of choice must be your whole life and you must take your rivalries and failures very, very personally. Not a healthy frame of mind, and if you’re not interested in sports in the first place, forget it. It may then come as a surprise to readers that Slam Dunk falls squarely into this category.

I was biased against this manga when I first saw it. It’s fantastically well-drawn with clear and dynamic basketball scenes, but it was still a sports manga, and that turned me off. However, when I started reading it, I discovered that it was genuinely different to other sports manga I’ve encountered. First of all, it was actually funny. Thank god this manga doesn’t take everything seriously. Sakuragi is one of my favourite characters because while he is genuinely talented, he does a vast number of stupid and goofy things while on his way to becoming a true sportsman. This comedy aspect is what makes Slam Dunk easy to pick up, as well as the good characterisation and excellent character designs. Most of the characters are archetypal types, but personalities are sharply drawn and immediately engaging. They also grow and change during the course of the story, especially Sakuragi. In terms of craftsmanship, Slam Dunk is the tops. I can’t think of any aspect of it which can be improved in terms of story-telling, characterisation and art.

Which brings me to why I recommend this manga in the first place. When I read Slam Dunk, I had no criticisms of it because for the Sports genre, it does everything you’ll expect from that genre prefectly. In essence, Slam Dunk is a mastery of the sports genre. If you’re out there looking for the perfectly-balanced sports manga which combines comedy, drama, romance, good characters, good sports action and interesting sporting strategy, then look no further than Slam Dunk. Heck, if you’re out looking for a good story, you can also checkout Slam Dunk as it isn’t anywhere near as single-minded as other sports manga. It is a perfect example how something that sits squarely in a certain genre can have appeal to everyone.