Hi all, I’ve been flat out busy working on the tail end of Small Shen… so much that I feel I’m going a little crazy. Luckily I only have 1 more week of inks to go, before I plow into the tones and then FINITO!! Wow, it’s been a sprint – doing 2 books back-to-back without a break. I need a 3-week holiday after this, and I don’t care what’s a-happening!!
I also set up a Tumblr account, just to see what the fuss was about. It seems an easy place to upload pictures, so that’s what I’ve done a few pics of (in whatever spare time I have), mostly for the next series I want to work on. I can’t reveal anything right now because (a) I need to finish Small Shen, and (b) I need a holiday, but I’m thinking of giving this site a bit of a facelift soon. We shall see.
Anyway, today I’ve got Yunyu’s Sydney concert to promote, which is happening 30th June! It’s the last leg of the tour, and here’s the tour poster I made for her. The Brisbane show at the Powerhouse was a big success (full house), so here’s hoping the Sydney one sells out too.
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.
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!
I’ve talked about Twisted Tales before, a collaboration between my musician friend Yunyu and myself. After a long wait, the first single to “Twisted Tales“, will be released in February 2012.
Ah… here we be.
So I proudly present to you the trailer for the first single off the new album project Twisted Tales… Dorothy. It’s a subversive take on the tale of Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy discovers that her magic shoes will no longer return her home, as she is a cosmonaut lost in space in this story.
Twisted Tales is an international collaboration between Yunyu, myself ( flying my New York Times #1 bestseller Manga Artist flag) and awesome animation collective The Commonist.
It is an exciting Music, Manga and Animation album that asks the question of what happens when Fairy Tales come to live in our modern universe.
The music video for Dorothy will be released at the end of this month. My own art contribution to the single will also be online in a few week’s time. Meanwhile, enjoy the Dorothy Teaser Trailer!
