dubiouslog

Notice anything new? :D It was time to upgrade that logo. This one spawned from a talk I had with VG in which I asked him whether I was needing a catchphrase, and he came out with this streak of genius. Then I accidentally doodled a cute fennec. There.

Even though the logo change is actually related to those projects I was talking about earlier, I’m still not ready to write about them in detail. So, the rest of this entry is RANDOM

Current obsession: fennec foxes are too cute for words. When I finish with the university I want to move with VG and live with a fennec. I’m dead serious. I’ve never had the chance to live with an animal, but if I think about which one I’d choose, I wouldn’t take a dog because I’m just not a dog person, but I wouldn’t take a cat either because even though I like cats I don’t think a cat could ever tolerate being with me. If you think about it it makes a lot of sense. I’d never take any animal that must be kept in a cage because in my opinion that’s just sad, it’s about keeping a living thing like a possession, it’s not like actually sharing your time with another creature. Then I’ve read that fennecs are domesticable :O they say they are bright, playful and affectionate with people. They are the kind of animal that will cheer you up if they see you’re feeling down :3 and they’re quite intelligent too. I’ve read that a downside may be that they are nocturnal but haha, so am I. They’re perfect for me. I just have to wait a few years.

Silly professional deformation: you know you’ve spent too much time working with newfangled technologies when you are surprised by the lack of a text box in your suitcase to find your underpants without having to look for them manually. Even though it would be awesome.

Sudden Internet pet peeve: why is everyone using birds for logos? Birds are the image of freedom in its purest meaning. It breaks my heart to see them bastardized into a symbol of social network slavery.

then after all the rage I come to learn Sugimori’s got a blog in which he posted the concept artworks for the Pokémon movies 10 and 11 characters and I must say that they really are gorgeous. Why won’t he use that lineart style with all of his other work I will never know, but by now you’ll all know I’m a sucker for sketchy linearts so my opinion may be somehow biased. Oh Sugimori why you do this to me, I loved you and hated you and loved you again. :(

Anyway, have a drawing of me in a cyber armor. The finished work and the base sketch are actually the same thing in this case, as I only had to work on top of the sketch and add details and shading without ever erasing it - I only cleaned up some areas in the end, like the leg on the left and so. It was inked with a Japanese brush pen I bought a few months ago but never quite figured out how to put to good use. Guess I’ll have to explore this technique more then.

On another news, guess who’s been playing Oblivion instead of doing something productive for a change? Next post will have pictures of the two characters I’ve been playing as and maybe some drawings too, who knows.

I played The Sims 3 too, and uninstalled it after a day. What a waste of my time. It’s almost impossible to make a sim who’s at least decent looking and doesn’t have that soulless doll face. The body type sliders are stupid and a thin woman will also be as flat as a sheet, which is just wrong. Men tend to look like they’re sixteen unless they have a beard, case in which they look like they’re sixteen and have a fake beard. Making a house is a pain in the ass, too. The Sims for me has always been about making a beautiful house with beautiful characters, I’ve been doing that since forever, why does it have to be that frustrating now?

I really miss the magic of the original The Sims. Anyone who played that will remember the dauntingly beautiful building mode soundtracks, like this one. Because of these pieces now I can’t help but feel there’s something grave and solemn about building a house. Like dreams are taking a shape and ceasing to be dreams.
It’s incredible to think that such quality came from a game which gained so much popularity that “true gamers” labelled it as marketed to casuals and not worth their time. Sure, The Sims brought many casual gamers to gaming, but it was no Wii Sports. It was fun, but it was also inspired and, ultimately, a work of art. It earned its place in history.

That’s how I see it at least.

About a month ago, I had a talk with VG about these alleged “western mangaka”, which are people from America or Europe who want to become manga artists even if they’re not Japanese. Now, this could seem like a choice of life like any other, and I’d like to make clear that I’m not saying they shouldn’t be allowed to become mangaka if they want to; what I’m questioning is the whole line of thought behind this choice.

As one might expect, most of these people have been reading manga since their childhood or youth, liked a few select series and then wanted to emulate their favorite authors by drawing with their style. This clearly explains why these “artists” seldom to never come to develop their own style.
One could say it’s just their way to give credit to that particular artist, much like fan art, but fan artists are not going to get a living from their creations as long as they keep working on derivative art. These other ones have as their greatest aspiration to get paid for their work, and when they do they’re stealing someone else’s talent.

On this same line, I think that the whole western mangaka business is about stealing Japanese culture. In Japan, manga is not a recent fad; the first examples of manga can be traced back to the 19th century with Hokusai. As of now, manga is an essential part of their culture; think that the first examples of pizza are almost contemporary to Hokusai’s manga to get an idea of how important can 150 years be. But while pizza began spreading worldwide in the late 19th century, modern manga began to be translated and sold outside of Japan only about thirty years ago. Not only that, but manga is also strictly tied to Japanese culture and traditions, thus making impossible for westerners to make “real” manga as they lack the necessary references to appeal to the public in the first place. Then, if they only want to use a manga-like drawing style to make comics to be sold in America and Europe, they should reflect more about their choice.

For example, some weeks ago I saw the first number of this new comic drew by an Italian girl. It had this manga-like style with dull lineart and ugly drawings, and this cover which was made of a badly digital-colored picture with the title in Monotype Corsiva. As you can imagine, the fact someone actually thought of publishing her work felt like an insultment to me. Not only it had as much quality as a thirteen-years-old’s first attempt with comics, it was almost as if she was using a random manga style to be as hip and trendy as possible.

What I’m saying could work with anything, of course. If some Russian wrote a great comic and everybody started to emulate him it would really be the same, but since here we’re talking about manga, here’s it.
The worst thing is that these western mangaka could actually be decent comic artists if they bothered to think about their work and developed their own style, but no, they want to live in someone else’s shadow and in another culture’s shadow, unable to understand that what they’re actually doing is nothing short of insulting their pet authors.

Will post new artworks later.

Service information: Majo, I’ve added your blog down here. :) Remember that though I don’t comment that much (if at all), I always read what you write. Go you!

Also, as for Blind Dreaming I just added a joined fanlistings directory. Now every time I spot a new fanlisting I won’t have to wait until I’ve finished working with the whole site (which by the way will take a lot longer than previously though, but meh).

But this wasn’t what I wanted to talk about. See the pencil submit button? While I was developing it I did a thorough search in the web for tutorials, just to see how other people dealed with the issue of working with 3D in a mainly 2D editor. I didn’t find anything especially useful for my case and I ended up developing my own technique from scratch, but I can’t pass on this great tutorial about how to create a mechanical pencil with Photoshop. It’s impressive to see how the pencil comes to life in a very plastic way; it can really be seen taking shape as more effects are added. Also read the ending comments, they summarize in a few words a very important idea in graphic designing.

Now my main idea was to end my post here but another issue came up while writing. It’s been less than a week since I’ve started working with Wordpress and I’m liking it as a publishing platform, it has everything for my needs, a neat coding and a neat concept, but let me say one thing.

Categories and tags. Aren’t they quite the same?
From what I’ve learned, categories should be used for filing the posts, while tags should be used to make a visual map of what your weblog is about increasing in size as you have more posts under a specific tag. Still, if you set the category list to display the number of posts each category has, they both give the exact same information - except categories can have a hierarchy and tags can’t. And while I’m at it, I wonder if someone has thought of an interlinked hierarchy system.
For example, let’s say I want to post about the making of a certain video game: I’d want to file it under “development”, and have the “development” category have a sub-category called “videogames” with another sub-category with the name of said game, so that if I later want to write about the making of another video game I can just add a new sub-category under “videogames”. This works with the current hierarchy model, but let’s say that some months have passed, the video game has been released and I want to review it. Where should I put the “review” category? Under “videogames”? Under the name of the game? They both have as parent “development”, but I’m not talking about development! If I reverse the structure and have “videogames” at the top, the name of the game as a sub-category and then “development” and “review” as third-level sub-categories? Yeah, and then if I want to review more than one game? Do I have to create as many “review” sub-categories as games I want to review? that’s just plain insane.
The only way this would work would be to have every game category linked both to “development” and “review”, which are single categories and not duplicates like in the last case. The whole system wouldn’t work like a tree spreading into branches, but more like a city plan where roads cross each other and all that matters is the distance from one place to another. This also leads to another issue, the idea of having a distance between categories that can show the relation between the subjects. In this example, “development” and “review” could have a medium distance from the name of the game, but two games from the same producer could be very near the one to the other.

Really, I’ll have to see if someone has already thought of all of that and how to put this into code.