Inspiration!

Up at 12:15pm again today. I did get some good sleep so this is becoming inexcusable.

Because I just wasn't sure which direction to take my design for myself as a character, some obvious Anime Design 101 was essential. I love Mamoru Hosoda's design work so I punched a few of his films into Google image search to find various screenshots. I sketched/traced a number of screenshots involving Makoto from The Girl Who Leapt Through Time - as well as any other characters of the film that were included in various shots of her.

To try and understand that Hosoda magic of the designs, I copied various emotions of Makoto (and I believe it's a principle in design work to draw different emotions) and I was sort of beginning to pick it up. When it came to drawing the leading male characters, it struck me how dimensional the sides of the face are - it's not simply a case of "Well here is where the ear would be when the face wraps around...", there is some bizarre feeling of depth to the face.

Before moving onto some more of Hosoda's filmography, I whipped out Tadashi Ozawa's 'How to Draw Anime & Game Characters' Vol. 1. Whilst flicking through the earlier pages...I was shocked. The basic face structures, including eyes, nose and dimensions were pretty much line for line to Hosoda's  designs - granted, his designs are fairly generic in terms of anime but I had always thought there was more to it. Well, his mouth shapes and opal eyes are fairly distinctive; but the fundamental to drawing things in 3D lead to exactly the same results.

I carried on further with drawing some of the characters from Summer Wars - the leading male character in particular. When drawing him in various shots where his head is faced oblique to the left or right it surprised me how much difficulty I was having getting the distance of the ears to the eyes correct - as well as how far apart the eyes had to be from one another. After too many occasions of rubbing out and rectifying, I finally got it right.

My mistake? It's my old nemesis. I draw the back of the head too small.

Last year I toppled the issue by learning to draw the outline of the face much smaller to the initial circle but often still run into issues where I just cannot correctly 'hinge' the ears to the jawline. Often, the ears end up being too far back and the balance of the face is resultantly thrown off. I'd have to practically scratch in some extra skull with the pencil! Now I am getting a little bit better at maintaining a sense of balance to the head of the character.

John and Nikki wants our family - the Siresu-Mani-Jajopi family - to do something together before we break up for the Christmas. When John requested for some ideas on a date and what to do, I suggested that on Saturday we go ice skating or eat out. Sinoun jumped out to the idea of ice skating, loving that kind of activity. Eventually, Nikki came along and decided on plan of eating over at someone's place, and then playing pool down at one of the pubs (Forgot the name - I played there with Luko. William Cobbet?). Everyone decided it was the best, most suiting plan for the day. I agree.

Later shot to the Waitrose before it closed. I brought a pizza, and back home whipped it into the oven. Yannis and Georgia also were having pizza - but theirs was from Dominos. Unfortunetly, Georgia's was cold, they didn't have any dips and the side-dishes were also lukewarm. It's just as well I got mine from Waitrose of all the times. On the flip side, Georgia and Yannis did get a free drink.