telophase | Any Japanese-reading people...

Entry tags:

markers,
saiyuki

Any Japanese-reading people...

...who are fluent enough to translate out there?

I keep forgetting about this. I've got a book on how to use markers that's written in Japanese. There's a certain amount I can puzzle out from the pictures, but I'd like to know what the text says. While it's ridiculous to ask someone to translate the entire book, there's one particular section I'm just dying to get translated because it features Kazuya Minekura markering in one of her Saiyuki pictures. (zip file, 10 megs)

So: if someone out there is willing to take it and translate it, I will trade you art for it! Although said art will need to wait until after Project Blue Rose is finished, otherwise

rachelmanija will have a heart attack. :D

I've got a bunch more of the book scanned as well, in case anyone feels like taking a crack at other parts of it.

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Those pictures were amazing....I'd love to see a drawer of manga in action and see how images take form. It impresses me a lot because I still think that to draw a panel will take days, and considering all the panels a manga book has, I think that's a months worth of work. I have always admired people with that abilities to draw. XD

Translator (of a sort) Notes (of a sort):

This is pretty literal, and I mean regarding both the Japanese and the artist-specific terms you've provided for me. As such, there's every chance that I'm referring to something incorrectly, so point these things out to me and I'll edit the original post to not sound like I have no idea what I'm talking about.
The few times I have taken liberties are where I either know the Japanese well enough to do so or can't find the meaning anywhere else so have made as educated a guess as possible. I'm expecting the latter to happen far more than the former, and mostly with kanji compounds that don't show up in dictionaries but appear to make sense if you look at the individual meanings. As before though, if I'm wrong and you know I'm wrong, please tell me and I'll fix it.
Finally, the most important catch-all: I'm just a second-year Japanese student, which means I have a grand total of eighteen months learning behind me. An intensive eighteen months, for sure, but I know nothing about art and have never even been to Japan, so I'm expecting to make some errors at some point. Bottom line is that if you (or anyone passing through, for that matter) think something's not quite right, then bring it to my attention; even though I missed it the first time around, if I know it's wrong then I can check it in the dictionaries at university, or run it by a Japanese friend or teacher.

Now I've made the coming translation sufficiently anticlimactic, I'll post the first paragraph, and add to it each time I do something new. It might take me a little while, but I should be able to work through all the text accompanying pictures at the very least. That said, poke me if I get too slow!

Page 2 top left hand box

POSE YOUR CHARACTERS BY TRIAL AND ERROR

First of all, get your 0.05 and 0.1mm Pigma pens. I use BB Kent paper. Put your pencil draft under your BB Kent, switch on your lightbox and copy it through. When it comes to colouring we'll use Pigma for the linework, but for a manga pencil sketch we draw with one G pen.

That clears up one mystery for me already, as to how she can marker over the lines without smearing them: she does the primary linework with the G pen with some sort of permanent, non-smearing ink that the alcohol-based maerkers do not act as a solvent on, and then I can tell from the picture later on of Goku's eye that she reinforces lines after markering with the Microns - and I think it happens before the marker quite dries, so that the pen's ink spreads a little. Sweet! I must now quest for a good black ink that doesn't smear. XD

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DRAW EYES WITH THE GRADATION OF A THIN COLOUR TO A THIN COLOUR

I start colouring from the eyes. For Goku's eyes I use Y21 as a base, then on top of that use YR23, E29 and E49,gradually making it thicker to produce gradation. As well, I make layers with a thinner* Y32, YR24 and YR23 using bokashi, and if you lastly draw in the eyeball's shadow with a Pigma then the transparent feel of an eye will be beautifully expressed.

* Literally: "a little bit thin". I leave that to you to figure out.

Hm. It might be 'lighter' vs 'heavier' - markers leave layers of ink on the paper and the paper soaks it up, so the color gets more saturated with each successive stroke of the marker. It might also be lighter/darker - I'd have to go look at my marker color chart at home to see if that works, or it might mean the two different tips of the marker - there's two tips per marker, one on each end, and one is broad and one comes to a point - or it might be talking about different sizes of marker. I guess I'll go home and see. :D

(I'm stuck at work tonight while a program analyzes the logfiles from a full year of stats because the assistant dean needs the data TOMORROW...arg. But I'll come in late however many hours I have to stay here tonight, so I can sleep in, at least)

"a little bit thin"
"partially thin"
"somewhat thin"

These are the literal translations available, if that makes things any clearer. Also, apologies for the title - that should be "A THIN COLOUR TO A THICK COLOUR" though I imagine you worked that one out without too much trouble! :)

I'm guessing that it refers to the heaviness of the layers of ink, then. She means to lay it on lightly and not to soak it deeply into the paper. Which makes sense if you're layering different colors - once the paper hits its saturation point, the ink just sits on top of the paper and smears everywhere.

Also, much job-related sympathy! But still, there's a lot to be said for not wading through a Classical Japanese text about wild ducks and samurai. ~_~ On the bright ~~shining, golden, glowing~~ side, we're reading some Genji next week. I thought immediately of you and

rachelmanija.

:D Well the program just finished running - let's see if the results actually contain any useful information!

Genji, huh? In the original or modernized? I hear it's written in a very different form of Japanese that's sort of like trying to read Chaucer is to a modern-English-reading person. I encourage you to post anything you find interesting about the parts you read or the language or whatever to

reading_genji - everyone would be interested. :)

I'm studying Classical Japanese this semester, so Genji and The Pillow Book in all their original glory are both musts. :D Classical Japanese - once you get past the extremely early period when they were still trying to figure out how to apply Chinese writing to a language that bears almost not resemblance to Chinese - seems to be somewhat Chauceresque, but is studied more than Chaucer, about as much as Shakespeare is over here. That's probably because Classical Japanese, though it comes from long, long before Chaucer, was used in all official written documentation until 1945.

You can still see snatches of it in road signs and such, but it seems, for the most part, to have been relegated to torture device of each and every Japanese university student I've met who had to suffer through it in order to pass the university entrance exams required to start their current degrees in economics/engineering/law. Incidentally though, I showed my boyfriend my copy of The Canterbury Tales not long ago, in order to give him some idea of what it's like to study Classical Japanese when you have the reading vocabulary of a modern Japanese elementary school child, and it took less than two lines of the prologue to make my point. I'm just glad I didn't have to drum old English into my head in order to get to university to study something completely unrelated!

I'll be sure to put up anything interesting I hear - our teacher is a walking mass of footnotes, and comes out with a flood of tidbits every lesson. Knowing a little about Genji already, I'm interested to see what he'll say (especially since he confessed today that he doesn't really like it that much!).

I dare you to yell "GENJI IS A SKANK!" in the middle of class. XD

That's cool to know about the language. I'll be interested in anything you can tell us, for sure. :D

I seemed to have bogged down on Genji, but I'm mostly through The Confessions of Lady Nijo, which was written about 200 years after Murasaki, but still reads like diaries of Murasaki's time. It's hard to figure out who people are in it, especially since they get promoted and their title changes and she uses titles instead of names and doesn't bother to say "Captain Soandso was promoted and is now Minister Thusandsuch" and so much of the really gossipy stuff is between the lines and the emotions she expresses are all stylized into acceptable Heian expressions and she jumps years without explaining what happened in between so all of a sudden there's all these new people and you don't know what's going on but by God, I know EXACTLY what everybody is wearing.

I already told my teacher I've read some of a translation (I got about a third of the way through a couple of years back) and asked him if Genji was really just a big long book about how shining and wonderful the guy is - and was so, so tempted to add "who does decidedly skanky things" but decided I'd save that gem for class.

Maybe not phrased quite as "SKAAAAAANK!", but I'd be quite keen to know what scholars think of his skankiness now so am fully intending to ask about it at some point!

Oh, please do put something up, I got bogged down and am also extremely busy, and am feeling guilty over neglecting

reading_genji.

This is probably a dumb-ass question... but where does keigo fit into that? Does it have older roots, or is it just a formal form that has the same antiquity or lack of same as regular forms?

Not that dumb-ass, considering I actually don't know. Which type of keigo do you mean specifically, or the whole kaboodle? There's one major divide, from what Japanese friends were saying, depending on whether your words raise the status of the person to whom you're speaking or lower your own, (with desu/masu, teineigo, a safe neutral right in the middle) and that covers which verbs you use, which addresses you use, and, of course, honorific suffixes. Our Classical Japanese texts haven't been much for dialogue, so the type of keigo I've seen the most relates to choice of verb, which I would imagine go right along with all the other verbs in terms of the language's evolution, although I can say for a fact that teineigo is fairly recent, and much, much simpler than the mass of verb endings they employed Back In The Day.

As for titles and honorifics... Not sure. There's every possibility they're on the newer side of things, or that their inclusion has only been solidified or standardised more recently; the meaning of certain honorifics has changed (for example, as with "omae", which used to be a perfectly standard way to address people above you in status) while others are just no longer in use, so I wouldn't be surprised at all if some of those commonly used today are relatively new.

But. The guesses of a second-year aren't really worth much (and besides, I'm curious) so I'll have a look when I'm next in the library. We've got more than a few interesting-looking books on the subject, and goodness knows I'll be pretty desperate for a break from the wild ducks while I live at the library this weekend in an attempt to get my Classical Japanese assignment done. There's only so much "And the duck flapped and was noisy, and the samurai had never seen anything sadder, and then he RECEIVED THE LIGHT OF BUDDHA, and then he woke his wife to let her know" that you can take at one time before head explosion actually seems imminent. Taking a break to check out the history of keigo will be a welcome break, I guarantee.

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For Gojyo's eyes I create the base with BV00, then layer RV34 and R59. For the pupil I use 110 (Special Black) to put on accents. Finally, I put a shadow on the white of the eye with an E41 to produce a three-dimensional feel.

Cool. I'll double-check the colors with my chart when I get home and we'll know for sure - if they're reds, it's Gojyo, if it's greens, it's Hakkai. Although I think they're reds: the RV stands for red-violet, I think, and the R for red. I wonder what BV is...?

Yup, Gojyo: BV00 is also known as Mauve Shadow, RV34 is Dark Pink, and R59 is Cardinal. E41 is Pearl White, because I know you're just so fascinated by the name sof the colors. XD

* That was supposed to be *this* icon, not SCREW YOU.

XD I highly encourage the use of comedy Saiyuki icons (there aren't words for how much I adore "wide load") whether they're being especially polite to me or not. Plus, I didn't notice.

Oh, and I like pretty name colours as much as the next person. Paint swatches intrigue me in a way they shouldn't for another twenty years or so. It helps that these particular ones could be out of a comic book (hero, rival/partner, villain and official love interest, in that order, although I think the heroes' affiliation with pink would negate the official right there for any fan of anything ever).

*uses 'wide load' out of principle*

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Any Japanese-reading people...

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