DaCeronNine - Art School Journey

daceronine 2024-08-23 06:08:43 UTC #781

Thanks for the kind words everyone!!! Thanks @patrycja.lerch @uggievang @Kaz_0 @mitsuki-youko @gregorya !!

Oh, thanks for noting that, tried to adjust it by moving the bear a bit farther from the frame.

Yep, Dai no Daibouken is probably one of my favorite manga and anime series ever, though it has a lot to do with the nostalgia. It was one of the first long anime series I ever watched.

Aye, wish I could also upload files here, but not sure how. I guess I could upload to a third party serivce and generate download links from there, but discord seems to work well.

Term 4

Putting progress on pause until I finish and upload chatper 31. It was supposed to be a free week anyway, but I guess it'll be two weeks.

Manga

Cover art done! Trying to apply the rendering lessons so far was much harder than just copying them. I still see some areas for improvement but overall I'm very happy with how it turned out!

Overall it's similar to some specific covers done before, which helps see how far we've come. Below are the previous ones.

Also did a little Omake (Bonus) while I worked in other things in between.

Got a lot of good feedback in general on regards of this chapter. One of the points was that some people who jumped into this chapter will little context got a bit lost with who was who and some of the relationships (some thought Iris and Sari where sisters). Based on that, I did a little relationship diagram focused on the characters for this chapter. I tried to keep it simple as I'm well aware these can get pretty complex the more you add to it. I'll probably add these moving forward for future chapters, though I might not need it as much as I move to stand alone series/ one shots.

I did, however had to revise most of the eye line flows based on notes I recieved. It's quite a lot to fit in here, and I adjusted almost every page, some much more, some a lot less or not at all, but I tried to explain and put some examples of the lessons learned in this discord post:

https://discord.com/channels/371283268215242784/1245965680168140821/1276390278907035690

Editing is finally complete though. I need to stop at some point, so I think I'll wrap up the chapter there. Still need to work on the spanish translation, but we're almost there. Webtoon already sent me a few notices that I'm way behind my chapters schedule haha. Oh well, it's almost complete.

Final version of Chapter 31 (english) can be found here:

https://discord.com/channels/371283268215242784/1245965680168140821/1276392231330250775

In the meantime, I wanted to also put into writing many of the story elements of Nozomu, and might eventually simply write the whole thing as a light novel for feedback, reference, and perhaps to publish as a more simplified way of sharing the story. It also helps level up those writing skills. I'll be doing a little test as a small side short story I've had in mind for a while simply titled "Hero". I already wrote 4 of the 5 chapters (it's fairly small), but I'll probably still edit it further and I do want to add illustrations to give it a more visual feel. Character designs, drawings to accentuate story points, or outright comic pages for some key points. It's a simpler project, but it should still take a bit of time to develop properly.

Granted I still plan to continue doing the manga, as far as I can take it, but committing the story to writing is also a good way to share the overall vision.

Finally, though I plan to continue posting weekly, I also keep a blog with daily updates in discord as well. It’s usually just a quick update on what is going on with progress on different fronts. If you want to stop by at some point to say hi, you can find the space here:

https://discord.com/channels/371283268215242784/1194773553225150494

That’s all for now, hope you all have a great weekend! Cheers!

patrycja.lerch 2024-08-23 13:30:56 UTC #782

Cover looks great! I love these colors

That's amazing progress!

I love bonus comic! Poor bear

I will have to make relationship diagram as well. It can get confusing as more characters are added.

Good luck with writing!

Kaz_0 2024-08-23 20:37:02 UTC #783

Ooo that's a lot of good work! Love seeing the progress. I like the color combination in the cover. Sari pops into view even when she in the back.

uggievang 2024-08-23 22:31:52 UTC #784

I really love the color choices on the cover art I do have a few critiques to give. I really like the dynamic lighting of the piece overall but I think you can really push the values more.

here is the original (top) and the edit (below). In the original the values are a bit too close together making the overall drawing feel flat. You really want to push the values especially near areas that almost get no light like under her neck or where she makes contact to the bed or even in some of the folds in her hair. You could even push some of the values in the darker areas (for example her breast) and push them into the lighter values making them feel more 3D. to edit it you don't even have to change too much you could just lasso tool the area and use a soft round brush and add in the darker values on a filter layer using darken color burn.

I wasn't too sure where the light source was coming from but I assume from behind so I adjusted the lighting. Don't forget even tho your art is stylized it is important to shade the planes of the face correctly. I also noticed that your shadows seem to be a bit de saturated which muddies the colors when shading you want to push the color closer to the saturation and vice versa for when your making something lighter. This leads me to the hair. now if you don't want to change this its fine but in my opinion I think there might be too many details especially the bangs around her face it distracts the eye a bit. If your light source is coming from behind you don't have to add so many highlights. You can keep the original large ones and change them to the color of the light source. Also I would make it to where the hair is the same shade otherwise it seems to get lost with her gown, and if you do want to add some flair to the hair Just add in a couple strands of hair poking out from the main clumps.

I mostly worked on Iris and just added in more value to sari but those are my main point outs from your drawing. I hope this wasn't too long of a read lol

daceronine 2024-08-23 22:50:15 UTC #785

Oooh, these are all good points, I'll see what I can adjust based on these notes. Thanks!!!
I'll go back and try to do a few adjustments. Not sure how far I'll get for now, but some of these seem like simple adjustments to do.

It's also a good note that I didn't really do a value check, I need to remember to do that more when working on these. I keep forgetting to do that.

mitsuki-youko 2024-08-24 02:27:26 UTC #786

The omake is hilarious XD

On the cover, the Bear and Iris's leg kinda form a tangent:

Otherwise looks great! love how you color!

daceronine 2024-08-25 23:36:36 UTC #787

First of all, thanks for all the great feedback! I didn't get a chance to correct or work on all of it, but I did do several adjustments based on all the notes.

1) Aaaah, saw the bear note too late (I thought I addressed it but didn't notice the one @mitsuki-youko noted . I’ll have to live with it for now. Gota be careful with those tangents.
2) Adjusted most values by doing a map at grayscale and then doing several adjustments as suggested. It’s really noticeable when placed side by side!
3) Tried to implement the shading on the face as suggested. I did add a bit, but to be honest, even though it IS logical due to angle and lighting… I kinda prefer it without the shade at the side of the nose. I’ll churn it to personal preference in this specific case, but I’ll try to be more careful with volume and casted shadows.
4) Added a few shadows here and there as suggested, adjusted a few other things (like the boob light, under the neck, etc, some lights from hair). Added some more hard light.
5) Adjusted Iris hair color so it pops more and doesn’t fade as much with the nightgown.
6) Added a few hair strands.

I feel like I could keep tweaking it more and more, but I have to force me to do a hard stop to keep working on other tasks in the queue.

I don’t want it to seem like I dismissed some points though, I’m really reading and taking all this to heart. Can’t express how thankful I am for all the notes you guys shared. This is probably one of the cover pieces and chapters where I got the most feedback on, and consequently learned a lot more. Lessons which I’ll take to the following chapters and artworks.

Before:

After:

And FINALLY got to upload the chapter to webtoon, which basically means I can wrap up this phase and continue to the next work on the queue. Granted I’m still waiting for some Spanish grammar reviews from a friend, but I can always correct any grammar notes and re-upload corrections.

English version: https://www.webtoons.com/en/canvas/nozomu-english/maidens-night/viewer?title_no=800887&episode_no=31&serviceZone=GLOBAL

Spanish version: https://www.webtoons.com/es/canvas/nozomu-espa%C3%B1ol/noche-de-las-doncellas/viewer?title_no=800872&episode_no=31

Term 4

Haven’t completely forgotten about the artshcool progress! As I mentioned before, just wanted to pause until I finished and uploaded this chapter, which I did now, so now we’ll see what’s next on the course.

In the meantime, I have been doing a bit of practice. Not much, but it’s something to keep learnings going.

I like this one, I think observation, shading and anatomy copy seems to be doing well.

This one is not that great, but it was still good practie. Need to practice more envs.

Wew, that's all for now. Still got so much to do, on to the next item in the queue.

The grind just never stops.

mitsuki-youko 2024-08-26 06:45:07 UTC #788

Awee yea coming along great!

patrycja.lerch 2024-08-26 15:10:30 UTC #789

Great work on all these! I think you did nice on enviro

uggievang 2024-08-26 21:25:35 UTC #790

I really love the edit you don't have to take everything that I critique and apply it after all it is your art and some thing that I point out are just personal preference but you can really see how much more it pops with the color and the lighting. glad to see I could provide some different perspective.

Mimhesis 2024-08-27 11:06:40 UTC #791

OMG,
your anatomy drawings are so good!
I love howyou gave the Individual poses even more personality by giving them faces.
I could spend hours Looking at your character on the bottom ( the on that sticking out his butt)
I laughed so hard at the first time I saw him

gregorya 2024-08-27 15:02:08 UTC #792

I like the adjustments of the cover.
The environment study looks pretty good as well as the anatomy studies.

daceronine 2024-08-27 15:13:09 UTC #793

Thanks so much @mitsuki-youko @patrycja.lerch @uggievang @Mimhesis @gregorya!!!

Haha, you're too kind. I do like how it looks, though I'm conscious enough to realize I need to practice it more xD

@uggievang indeed! I really appreciate all the notes, consider different points and see where to work. It reminds me the quote from Jeff from overwatch "You can trust on players to let you know what's wrong, but it's up to the developers (creators) to decide how to resolve" (or something like that). It's improtant to always listen, but also to follow your vision and preference. And even then you might not always get it right, but you'll be more satisfied with it.

@Mimhesis Aw thank you! I really love anatomy and these last terms have had many great lessons on it.
Straight up gestures and exercices can get a bit tiring after a while, so we try to spice things up to make it a little more fun .

daceronine 2024-09-02 07:03:15 UTC #794

It’s been one hell of a busy week. As usual, work and life, but in addition, wife had a car crash and we spent all of Friday dealing with that. Luckily no one was seriously hurt, nothing a few days of rest can’t take care of, but it was a pain to deal with transit police, insurance, car garage, hospital, postponing work and so on.

I also feel fortunate that even though there was a lot to do, we have the means to do it, so it was just matter of gritting teeth and do what had to be done.

Ended up exhausted, but adrenaline didn’t let me sleep, so instead ended up resting most of the weekend.

All that is done with though. Things are winding down and we can now get back into the rhythm of continuing were we left of.

Term 4

Next exercice is “Daily Anatomy 3 assignment 2”, which in turn is basically to draw muscles over a skeleton, full body. It’s supposed to be a daily, so I’m currently aiming to do 5 (corresponding to 5 working days, seems like the appropriate number of exercice).
Not much to show just yet, just this first one.

For some reason I feel I struggled a bit with this one. I tried to practice rendering as well. I think I can do better, so I’ll just try to improve on the next one.
Been also doing some additional practice to keep those art skills sharp.

Some gestures:

And an environment copy practice:

A fanart piece for the folks in discord, some characters cosplaying as Slayers characters:

Even did a little Discord emote based on Sari Oaks which seems to be well liked:

Still got a bit to do, I think I postponed term 4 progress a bit more than I should have, but now we’re starting to get back into the rhythm.

Manga

After wrapping up chapter 31, I took a little detour to work on a few side materials I’ve had in mind for a while.

One of these is character profiles. Since Chapter 31 focused on Iris for a bit, I figured I would expand on it with doing her full profile. The main objective is for the doc to serve as a reference point for her profile, expand on her backstory, a few fun facts, and to serve as a prologue from her point of view to the main story.

Took a bit longer than expected to do, but it was a lot of fun to do. All and any feedback appreciated! Mostly wondering if I should continue to use this format or maybe do some adjustments for future profiles.

Got the script for chapter 32 done, now just need to work on the draft and get going.

Though I feel I’ve slowed down on my mangaworks considerably, I have been enjoying all work done, so I guess that’s fine.

That’s it for now, thanks for stopping by, hope y’all have a great week! Cheers!

patrycja.lerch 2024-09-02 16:50:57 UTC #795

Oh that must have been stressful. Glad that everyone is good

You did a lot of good work! Fanart looks great! And I love Sari emote

So much info and interesting stuff. I don't know much about designing such thing. I am usually more interested in facts about characters to be picky, unless there is something that really catches attention. I do like the sketches on paper like background, feels like a tale

Maybe you could change text aligment so it is easier to read so much text. And mixing short sentences with long ones. These are all very long sentences and it can be hard to focus on it. You could break some sentences and it would be easier. But this is more about writing, a field in which I am no expert

Smol Iris is sooo cute

You did great work!

uggievang 2024-09-03 01:52:25 UTC #796

I think the main reason it looked off was because you got a little to close to the bones and with characters such as the attack titan they have quite a bit of meat on their bones. I also think that the skeleton model is a bit warped it makes placing the muscles on the body weird because the bones are bending in ways they are not supposed to. the warping is especially bad around the upper body where you seemed to have struggled a bit. there where some anatomy stuff I did notice tho ( I mainly stuck to the parts I know the most)

I noticed that in the armpit area you drew the triceps in front of the lats where the lats should go up into the armpits to connect to the bones (I dont really know how to explain it well so refer to the picture above)

I also noticed that in your drawing you didnt flex the muscles. remember muscles shorten and lengthen as you contract them so knowing which motions use which muscles will help a ton. for example the punching arm has his arm straight so in that position his triceps should contract and make a larger mass while his other arm the one that is bent is flexing the bicep so it should look wider.

Last thing to note is the sternocleidomastoid muscles I think you might have put them too far apart. They should connect to the sternum and not just the clavicle bones. I left the leg area untouched as I still dont full understand the legs myself

Thanks for taking the time to read this post and I hope I didnt come off as too rude or anything

daceronine 2024-09-03 02:10:51 UTC #797

Not rude at all my dude! I always appreciate all these detailed feedback and all the effort to provide clear instructions! You highlight very important points and reminders. I'm currently working on the next exercice, so I'll try to keep this in mind.

Keep at it, these notes really help improve!

gregorya 2024-09-03 22:42:35 UTC #798

Wow, I'm sorry to hear that. I hope everything's okay.

The muscles look pretty good The left Pectoral muscle looks slightly smaller.

The environment study looks pretty good. I almost couldn't tell the difference. But the study is on the bottom, right?

That's pretty good. Are these your characters?

The character profiles are pretty good. It's very detailed from her back story to her motivations.

daceronine 2024-09-05 16:27:16 UTC #799

Thanks @patrycja.lerch @uggievang @gregorya!

Still quite busy, but not as stressed as over the weekend. We're doing good.

Thanks! Yes, that's the idea, just to trying to spice it up a bit so the reader can have a better visual idea of her story.

Hmm yes I see what you mean. I think I could arrange it better so it's easier on the eyes to read. For now I feel I need to move to the next item on the queue, but I'll be taking this into account for other profiles and I'll try to come back to tweak this one a bit. I'll try to see how other writers setup their own paragraphs.

Aye! Glad you you liked it.

@uggievang

Already mentioned it but thanks a lot for taking the time to provide such detailed feedback. I was already forgetting how armpits and sterns worked xD

Didn't even notice that! It's so obvious on hindsight.

You honor me , yes, the lower one is the study.

Not quite, they're originals from another discord fellow. During some conversations it was mentioned they reminded me a lot of Slayers, one thing led to another, and decided to do the litlte fanart piece just for fun.

Really happy you liked it! I do want to do others as well, but it'll probably be a while, I really should start pushing to complete Term 4.

daceronine 2024-09-06 02:18:58 UTC #800

Simpler update today.

Term 4

Resuming work on these exercices, here's another muscles over skeleton exercice. I feel more confident about this one, though I had to do some "corrections" to the skeleton as it had a few wonkiness to it (mainly how the clavicles align). It’s a 3D model in CSP I tried to apply to some of the poses included, so I guess it didn’t mesh 100%, but for the most part it’s good.
I'm interested if anyone can spot anything I missed, any and all feedback is very welcome Almost done with Term 4, so I better refresh and start getting muscles properly!

Also a little random exercice.

It's ok, I can already spot a few mistakes. Just crossing the eyes made it a lot more challenging than expected.

Going at it a bit slower this week. Still got a bit to do, but at least we’re moving forward.

Manga

I took a bit of a rest after chapter 31, but it’s time to start work on chapter 32!

The current plan is to finish chapter 32, do a small epilogue, and then change things a bit.

Finished the main draft.

Hopefully it reads better. I'm open to feedback since at this stage it's easy to do changes and adjustments.

Small caveat, the first two pages (relationships and summary) ARE loaded and not really intended for mobile. Not sure if I should break them up for readability. They're mostly extras added to give more context or reminders for people who might be jumping in after a long time or haven't read previous chapters.

1) This is pretty much the last chapter of this Tiger sharks mini arc. This last scene is intended to wrap up the loose end of “how did Seki get in time to save the group?”, revealing that Shadow might have an interesting agenda of his own, and foreshadow the next arc with the introduction of Captain Kraken.

2) For this chapter, I'm placing some extra focus on keeping things in 3 tiers, increasing text font (for mobile), keeping eye flow simple, trying to give a bit more breath to images and pacing (compress pages less). Basically trying to apply most lessons learned so far.

That’s it for now! Got so much to do, so little time. Hope everyone has a great weekend! Cheers!