telophase | Randomness: markers, eyeball-licking, and dull Catholic priests

Because I know more people read LJ on Monday morning than the weekend, I'm just going to renew my plea for anyone around here who reads Japanese well enough to translate it who'd be willing to get art in exchange for translating a few pages from a book on marker techniques - the bonus being that it's about Kazuya Minekura.

That out of the way,

yhlee mentioned a bit about pacing in TV shows, and this is from my comment to her reprinted here because I'm not sure I know if anyone on the friendslist has seen Boogiepop Phantom, and I highly recommend it.

Not the same as hour-long episodes, but the anime of Boogiepop Phantom plays long and hard with pacing and revelation. It starts with an episode focused on one character, then spirals out and out, looking at other characters in this area, sometimes a little backwards in time, somtimes a little forwards in time, sometimes jumping madly around. You'll often see the events of previous or future episodes playing out in the background, and sometimes you'll get the punchline of a scene in one episode and two episodes later, get the lead-in to it. You have to watch carefully and piece together not only the story, but the chronology.

I've just read the translation of the novel it was based on, Boogiepop and Others, which does this a bit, but not as much: it's easier to follow.

The novel is interesting, but the anime's better. I've seen the live-action movie, too, which is a low-budget affair whose most memorable point can be summed up in three words: eyeball-licking scene.

And in other news from the literary world: is there out there an action/suspense novel starring a Catholic priest that does not, in fact, involve him breaking his vows of chastity at any point? Not that I've read many action/suspense novels starring Catholic priests over the course of my life, but it seems that it's never a question if if he's going to do it, but when. This weekend I finished Steve Berry's The Third Secret, which according to its press is an amazing tour-de-force of suspense and Vatican insider knowledge. What it really is, is dull. And involves a priest who breaks his vows of chastity, but that's OK because the Virgin Mary says it's OK. No, really. The plot revolves around the death of a pope and the behind-the-scenes scheming of a cookie-cutter sociopath to get elected pope, while Our Hero, suffering the ubiquitous crisis of faith, is sent on mysterious errands that are involved with the Third Secret of Fatima. Which was released in 2000, by the way and you can read it online, but that's not a problem, because there was really a third page to the text that contains an earth-shattering revelation. Which is that priests don't have to be celibate, that women should be allowed into the priesthood, that gay marriage is OK, and that women are in control of their own bodies and reproductive issues.

I was really hoping for something more exciting, involving, perhaps, hellfire and brimstone, or the end of the world, or Armageddon, at the very least. Especially after a red herring being set up about the prophecies of Malachy and how the last pope before the end of the world would call himself Peter, once our dull sociopath achieved the papacy and named himself Peter II.

I only kept reading to find out what the rest of the Third Secret of Fatima was, and once I found out I felt seriously cheated, after having slogged my way through the rest of the thing to get there. This book can just bite Mello's fabulous ass.

Is anyone else as tickled as I am that you can access many texts in the Vatican Secret Archives on CD?

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(I found the marker book on the shelf next to me - I'll try to scan tomorrow. Some of the more complicated kanji are pretty hard to make out even in the original, but hopefully you'll be able to make educated guesses. :D)

The thing about kanji is that after about five-hundred or so it becomes really easy to see how to break them down and to guess how to draw them, with correct stroke count and everything. The radical is usually the clearest part, and, nine times out of ten, once you've got that and have a vague idea of how many strokes it takes to make the rest of the kanji, you can work it out pretty easily with the kanji dictionary we're all rightly advised to buy in the first year.

...Which is the long way of saying "Don't worry, complicated kanji shouldn't be a problem."

First paragraph up, and I should be able to get the second one (Goku's eye) up before I go back to sleep, but first a couple of things. One, I forgot to mention that I have as yet no idea whether it's supposed to be a peek at Minekura's own personal style or if it's more of a tutorial, so my use of pronouns is pretty liberal, and, as with everything, correct me at will. Two, more strange katakana. Any ideas for BOKASHI? If I know that, I really can get paragraph two up tonight, but will wait for confirmation because I can't even guess what that might be.

Hee - I went to bed right after that, so I just got this this morning. :D

I hadn't heard of bokashi, but I did some poking about art stuff online, and it seems to refer to a type of shading that leaves gradations of color.

Defeinitions:

-- A technique employed by the printed to provide shading or gradation in the areas printed in color.

-- Fuki-bokashi is a Japanese woodblock printing technique which creates a gradation of colors by wiping off some pigments from the printing block.

Generally the printer would do a number of sheets with one color, and once the ink had dried, the process would be repeated with the next color. In general, a fixed sequence of colors was always followed, with light colors first, then dark colors, then finally dense blacks (which often needed several printings). Note that the keyblock was often not printed first; any dark colors can obliterate the thin black lines, and it is not uncommon to find prints in which it has been printed after the dark colors were.

The shading (called bokashi) is produced by a number of different techniques, such as:

* wiping the blocks with a cotton cloth or pad after the application of the ink;
* using brushes with varying color intensity and moisture level;
* rubbing the block with a damp cloth before applying the ink.

One thing to note is that the printer will often vary the amount of bokashi in a single run - it is not at all uncommon to find two impression of a print which are completely different, so different is the amount and location of the shading.

So I guess it refers to producing gradations in color by laying down a series of colors on top of each other from the lightest to the darkest, which makes sense in terms of what I can see in the pictures and from what I know about watercolors and markers.

I expect it's more of a peek at Minekura's personal style than a basic how-to - there's probably some section near the beginning of the book that gives some how-tos. There's 4 or 5 different artist sections like the Minekura one, and then some Q&A type pages and some pages that seems to be telling you all about the different types of Copic marker products you can get. And a really random manga section, probably designed to put humor into the process.

Then I shall treat the pronouns as such from now on. ^___^ Thank you for the bokashi run-through; translation aside, this is Japanese culture stuff that I find thoroughly fascinating, so your time taken to put up such a clear and detailed explanation is very much appreciated!

Next paragraph is up, though I have absolutely no idea what it says... Let me know if anything is expressed really badly, okay? Often it's the connecting stuff that throws me (do you gradate or create gradation? Is is gradation, a gradation or the gradation? etc. etc. etc.) but on the plus side, that's the stuff you'll automatically translate yourself anyway when you read my art version of Engrish.

I'm just looking at the lines underneath the other eye pictures, and is it me or is the top one about Gojyo and the one below about Hakkai? I don't know the Saiyuki name-kanji yet (though I'm sure I will do soon enough!) but from what I can see they aren't under the pictures they actually correspond with. Does that seem about right to you, or am I completely off base here?

I'd never heard of bokashi before, so I get to learn stuff, too. :D

I would normally say that you gradate the colors or you gradate the inks, but you can make a gradation (or 'the gradation' if you're acting directly on this specific gradation).

I don't know the name-kanji, either (the only thing I know is that the 'go' in 'Goku' can be translated as 'satori' and that's from

rachelmanija's recent post on Goku and Zen). She knows some kanji and is a Saiyuki fan, so she might know their names if you need confirmation.

In the pictures, Hakkai's on top, Gojyo's in the middle and Goku's on the bottom. It's entirely possible that whoever did the layout on the book didn't know the series and got it wrong, too. Or that the pictures don't really correspond to the text - I've seen that happen in art books, when the art director's power goes to his or her head and they choose good pictures instead of the correct pictures. LD

In that case, I think it's just mixed up, and have translated as such. Well, I've only translated one so far (Gojyo's eye line is up) because I really can't make out enough kanji for the other two. :( I'm sorry about that, I'll make a start on the boxes on page 3 so I can ask questions and get translations ready while waiting for sharper images.

Here ya go (http://www.sfolse.net/random/Comickers-Marker-book-smaller-captions.zip). About 5 or 6 megs. I scanned them at 300ppi and kept them there - they zoom in pretty good in Photoshop; I can see the kanji much more clearly than I can in real life. XD

The kanji for Sanzo starts with "three" and Hakkai starts with "eight." I think the "Go" in both Goku and Gojyo are the one for "satori."

Randomness: markers, eyeball-licking, and dull Catholic priests

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