Saturday, February 07, 2009

Manga boy


A while ago I found the first 2 volumes of the manga series Loveless by Yun Kouga on sale at my local comics shop. Outside of Planetes by Makoto Yukimura, Dragon Head, the works of Erica Sakurazawa and the works of Ai Yazawa I haven't really read too much manga. I tend to just sample stuff when I can find it on sale. I really liked Loveless. It had the typical fight manga set ups but the intrigue of the mysterious death of the main character's brother and his weird relationship with his brother's friend make it very interesting. I liked the art most of all. Like a lot of manga the storytelling is right in the moment and the emotion, the line is very fresh and lively and the characters are distinct and drawn with an understanding of body language and gesture.

As I was reading the volume I found myself doodling a lot of his compositions and character. This is one sample that I decided to color. It wasn't doing much for me until I decided to duplicate the flattened image layer, lay down a Gaussian Blur and then Unsharpen Mask it really hard. It added a nice roundness and warmth that wasn't there before and the image came to life a bit more since I was going to color this one using very flat color shapes. Most of my colored stuff lately has ended up way over-done with textures and brushes, probably because I'm just scanning character sketches and trying to convince you they're fully developed drawings by adding some flash to it.

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