Various Art
Neverwinter Nights
Megatokyo
Kamishibai
Old writings
Early art - 1999-2001
In summer 1999 I got my first modem (a 14400) and soon discovered Otakuworld and its great Kamishibai program. A community was starting to form around it, and I jumped in on the bandwagon pretty early.It was in the Kami community that I first started to share my drawings with the world. I didn't have a scanner at first, and had to rely on one belonging to a casual friend of mine.
Here is the first picture I've ever posted online. It's a fanart of Kazeno Kita, one of the main characters from the long- running series Questors, which stopped at episode 19 just short of the ending.
The process I used was pretty time-consuming. I drew the picture in pencil, outlined it with a black ballpoint gelpen and then erased the crayon marks. I then had to wait for a week or two for an opportunity to use my friend's scanner.
The only paint program I knew was MSPaint. I scanned the picture in black and white, then shrunk it to half the original size. Then began a long, time-consuming process of cleaning up the picture pixel by pixel. finally, I could color the picture using a reference and the fill tool, and add my signature. (That is a SD version of Suzume Kagayaki, another main character in Questors.)
I did several pieces of fanart in this gruelling way. Another picture of Kita, an SD version (which along with the SD Suzume was supposed to be part of a series of miniatures of the whole cast... it never happened), and finally my masterpiece, a 680 x 480 wallpaper featuring all the main cast. (Left to right: Suzume, Tohru, Kita, and Emi.)
I soon got my own scanner, and began to experiment with other techniques. For a while I colored my gelpen drawings with crayons, in the manner of a coloring book. But most important of all, I started using Paint Shop Pro for editing. Here's a scene from a Kamishibai I never finished. The little SD me was colored before scanning, and the scenery and confetti were done with PSP. Sadly, I can't find any more examples - I may dig up a few of my old pictures and scan them in.
I soon got into the habit of scanning in my pictures in grayscale, fiddling with the brightness/contrast to get good lineart, then coloring using the magic wand and air brush. I didn't do much shading - usually only the face and hair. At the end the picture was shrunk to hide imperfections (sometimes additional blurring or retouching was applied) and posted.
Most of the Codename:SailorM! Kamishibai series was drawn in this way. Other pieces include a picture of the cast of Wishing Star episode 1 (a Kami by the author or Questors, inspired by Card Captor Sakura), Sparkle Star's "Sparkling stars" attack (a magical girl story by Chibi Alex-chan), and a layout for my fanfic site featuring my original Sailor Senshi, Sailor Andromeda.
Though I soon abandonned the "lineart with crayons" technique when it came to scanned art, I continued to use it in paper-only works. At one point, while drawing a portrait of Makoto Kino, I decided to skip the gelpen phase and go straight to coloring. The result was very good, and I decided to explore this technique a little more.
I was still a novice at PSP, so it took a very long time fiddling with various tools to get the colors to look right on crayon scans without distoring the picture too much. Still, the results were worth it. I should mention that my old monitor was half-way burned out by then, so the pictures are often very bright.
This picture of Carni and Djasmi, original characters of mine, was made that way. I like it to this day, despite its rather obvious flaws.
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