telophase | (no subject)

He looks good to me!

:D Thanks! I messed up when using the French curve to guide the pen when doing the sword, but fixe dmost of that in Photoshop so you cna't see how truly abad it was. And cleaned up some ink blobs that resulted when I accidentally dragged my hand trhough some wet ink.

I need to try the new pens on very small lines and shapes, hence my plea a couple of hours ago for anyone with pencils for me to ink on. If nobody gets me any here I'll plead on DeviantArt, but I'm gonna get a ton of crappy pencils that way, so I'm not exactly looking forward to it. :/

If you didn't tell, I wouldn't even notice...(about the sword) XD

I like the little lines that make up the fluff <33

Thank you! And you know that it's soft like rabbit fur and when nobody's around Sesshoumaru hugs it to go to sleep. XD

It does still look a little blobby. But aside from that it looks great!

Sadly, I have no shoujo pencils....

I think most of the blobbiness is from image compression - I might upload the pre-cleaned-up version when I get home from work so people can get a good laugh XD - although the bottom line of the sword blade is blobby due to me getting tired of doing cleanup and deciding not to do any more.

Yeah, you can see the top blobbiness is different.

It looks very nice to my untrained eye - I mean, I do see the blobby bits others have pointed out but my brain is interpreting that as the usual side effects from digitizing images.

For some reason I have this tendency to acquire inking and coloring materials even though - excepting a few random doodles I don't actually draw. If there were a niche in the world for a writer who sometimes inks and colors for her artists, I think I'd snuggle up in there very nicely, but I don't think it works that way...

There may very well be a niche like that - writing usually takes up far less time than pencilling and inking, and if you find an artist with great pencils but not-so-good inks, there's always a chance. XD

Heh. But man, "writing takes far less time" - ha! I wish. I'm kind of picky about my writing, even in comic/manga scripts where only the dialogue and occasional caption are ever seen by the reader.

I know how long it takes to write a good comic script; I've written my own, I'm collaborating with my writer, and I know that the guy in the industry who takes the longest to write his scripts (not-so-coincidentally he's also one of the best writers out there, Neil Gaiman, took a month when he was writing Sandman. Do you know how long it takes to layout, rough, pencil, ink, tone/color, and letter a good comic page? Keep in mind that at the roughs and pencilling stage, the good artist is just as picky as the good writer. Most comic pros working on a book specialize in inking or in pencilling or in coloring, and they work exclusively on that book - so there's three months' worth of work going into each month's comic. In traditional manga in Japan, as you most likely know, they work in teams, with a penciller, an inker, a background artist, a toner, and a letterer, to churn out 15-25 pages a week - that's 4 to 5 weeks' worth of work for each week of comic - and it didn't take the writer 4-5 weeks to write the script for that week's installment.

I think if your artist is pencilling, inking, coloring/toning, and lettering and then is hanging around twiddling their thumbs waiting for you to finish writing after every page they do, you don't have a good enough artist for that script.

Oh, I'm not saying that good art doesn't take lots of time! My general impression from my own fiddlings, talking to friends who are artists or writers, and just reading about what the pros say, is that most of the major steps take roughly the same time, give or take the natural variations in types of stories and individual people's workings.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but for most manga the writer and penciller are the same person, right? Even with a big team of assistants I've always wondered how mangaka manage to both script and write a twenty-odd page installment every week without, you know, imploding.

There's all sorts of various types of teams. And often the penciller isn't what we'd think of as the penciller - they just do the main figures and someone else comes in and does the backgrounds. And don't forget the influence of the editor - they do quite a bit of story and script work too, I suspect.

And I've been poking around the net looking for breakdowns of assistants, and it turns out - at least in some magazines - only about ten people have weekly stories - the rest run every other week or so, and there's a bunch that go in only once a month, so not everyone's on the same schedule, as well. I'm betting that the weekly ones may be more likely to have separate scriptwriters, although I'm just guessing.

Hmmm, interesting. Do you know what schedule, say, Naruto or RK were on?

I'm pretty sure Naruto's weekly, since the scanlations seem to come out so fast. The mangaka there certainly writes a lot, and pencils, but probably doesn't ink or tone (not that there's much tone). I assume he at least does the rough pencils of the figures and the background - there may be someone else who refines the pencils. One of the manga/anime art compilations out there has an artist who does that - he roughs out the pencils, then an assistant goes trhough and picks out the lines, someone else inks, then the colorist hits it, then the artist goes back and does any last adjustments, approves it, then it goes to the publisher. The examples were all colored pinups, though - he may not do manga, but work in doing games or something.

RK was probably weekly, too, for at least part of its run.

They also tend to work longer hours - from what I understand many mangakas' studios have cots or beds for people to grab a few hours sleep. XD

Yeah, I have to say, I've always been vaguely disturbed by the unhealthier extremes of the Japanese work ethic. Like, I'm fine with workaholicism - I tend towards it myself when I'm really interested in something - but not when it's institutionalized that much (coffin-hotels!).

Mind, I also think American society puts too much pressure on the worker. Maybe I am a lazy, unwashed European hippy, despite not being European.

I am a lazy, unwashed, European hippy *student* at heart. :)

That's part of why I like working in the nonprofit sector - they don't pay you as much, so you get better perqs, which means that I *start* at 14 hours of vacation/month, and I get a week off between Christmas and New Year's. And being salaried, they don't follow my hours too closely so I can wander in a few minutes late and stay late the next day to make it up without having to arrange for it in advance. Yay.

Um, I just picked that C&H icon randomly. It wasn't a statement or anything.

XD I didn't even notice it, to be honest.

I managed to accidentally set my fandom_wank default icon to Sanzo saying "SHUT THE FUCK UP"

* nad then accidentally psoted without finishing the sentance: and had to go around apologizing to a few people because I'd forgotten that it was my default. XD

Heh. It does amuse me that this ruffled feathers on FW of all places - I mean, I never posted there, but I used to lurk every once in a while, and some of those icons were DAMN bitchy. Not in a bad way, but still, it makes me chuckle.

Glad to know I didn't mortally wound you with accidental not-so-rapier wit, and all that.

We freely admit that we're all wanky ourselves, but the community usually confines itself to pointing and laughing. XD

I love my L "Bitch, please" icon, but off F_W it tends to require explanation.

I dunno. I definitely don't get any reference it's making, but I think it's hysterical myself.

Mmm! Lovely.