Fun_ChristmasCards_ZN

Continuing our Christmas sketch card series from last time, now we have Zero, but dressed as Ebenezer Scrooge, expanding on the hat theme.

Since he's our main dude, I wanted to make his portrait a little more special so I gave him a full costume, but also a little wreath noose.

I chose Scrooge because Z's a bitter, bitter dude befitting a "bah humbug" vibe, though ultimately, it does irk a little that he's the only one in full costume and portrait.

I wasn't sure what costume would best complement Z's for Nyao, but I didn't want to draw her as Tiny Tim or a ghost or something so I just went with the only thematically-appropriate "hat" that I could think of: reindeer antlers, which felt apt because it's animal-themed.

Hmm, maybe Z could have just gone with a top hat and pipe, so he's like a snowman? Anyway, Nyao's outfit was inspired by the Oakland A's...I've always loved how yellow and green look together.

Since Nyao is super strong, I gave her the bag of presents, plus she gets a cookie because I imagine she's eager to take the spoils of doing the work of distributing joy.

Not normal,

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Fun_ChristmasCards_VF

I decided to draw some Christmas-themed Copic portraits of my main characters in my little 100yen pocket sketchbook, first up Vicky Vasquez.

This came out a little more somber than I was envisioning, but, as I'm discovering, they kind of tell me what's going on as I draw them...she's a workaholic so she doesn't like being forced to take time off in December.

So she's kinda in shellshock mode without the constant buzzing and bustle of her regular work "life" to fall back on.

Next was Fred, which is a revamp of his first color scheme, based on a sketch from a random session.

This piece determined what I wanted to do with this little series: corresponding, minimally busy backgrounds using red or green, with a Christmas-themed hat.

Usually the guy of the pair is Santa and the girl is the elf, so I thought it'd be funny to switch it around since Vicky's the boss anyway. So, having done these relatively more straightforward shots, I knew I wanted to do the ZLM duo with a little more care next.

Not normal,

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Fun_Snowmz

Here's another Christmas card I made for a jKid who mailed me a Christmas card of her own. I didn't know what to draw so I went with a US-style snowman. In Japan snowmen are only made of two snowballs, two buttons for eyes and a bucket for a hat. They get a thrill out of how we deck ours out.

Speaking of decking things out for Christmas but not really but kinda anyway...

It's our Christmas Special for youchoob. It's only about a third Duel Masters-related, but there's plenty of other content including some looks at obscure manga. A lot of art in this video, too, including stuff we hadn't even debuted on this site yet.

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Fun_GuyWhoseNameIsDaniel

This is a sequel Christmas present I drew for my pizza man. I was floored he still has last year's card!

Still waiting for Japan to get that stuffed-crust technology, tho, son!

But it's all good.

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AV_anp.MySpanta_MO

Here's the Making Of that one piece we did a while ago. Dang I love coloring snowmens.

Here's the pencils if you're into that kind of thing.

Statistically you are not.

By the way, this piece is called MySpanta because of this. Boy, that link was worth clicking, wasn't it? Are you proud of yourself?

Ugh.

That last "ugh" wasn't directed at you.

I just can't get the taste of stealthed wasabi out of my mouth. Why don't they ever warn you?

Ugh.

That one was for you. My disdain for your disinterest in just exactly the things I'm interested in.

Speaking of feeling special for clicking things, if you click anything in this post, make it this picture. It'll zoom in so you can see our coloring proh-sess. We're using Copic Ciaos of course, and this time I got a bit more daring and used purple to bitter up the eye sockets. This is terribly exciting to me and only me. But now you know that.

That's it.

Ugh.

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Fun_Presents

Drawing Christmas cards and such for people. This is a riff on a card I received in the mail.

Actual mail.

Gosh, I'm lonely.

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AV_anp.MySpanta

Here's our proper December ALT poster, fresh in oh-twelve, right? Right.  We've got a special section on Christmas rock tunes including selections from My Chemical Romance, and The Matches, Something Corporate, Fall Out Boy, and Those Guys.  This one was kind of a rusher towards the end, but pretty happy with that Santa!

This is a close up of the reindeer I have named Doofy.

Trying desperately to draw a cute reindeer that doesn't look like a Chopper rip-off is not easy. But fortunately I failed miserably. I am the fool. Pity me.

I've started using my lightest skin tones for wood and stuff so I tried it out on the antlers and was pleasantly surpised with how it turned out.  Neat, said nobody but me.

This is a close up of our section on how to Secret Santa. Because that's a verb. Sentence fragment.

I would tell you more, but it's a secret.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH get it?

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AV_SnakeOne

I had to make some Holiday cards for the jKids. I normally loathe the term "Holiday" since that usually is just code for Christmas, but we were in actuality covering multiple holidays, so it was a tolerable usage this time around. The two holidays here are Christmas and New Years' (the year of the snake). I wanted to try going inkless, just pencils and Copics, but I still don't know how I feel about noinks. But I do know I love the word "noinks."

Gonna give this away to someone...but who?

Noinks. Away,

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AV_anp.HAWsanta

Here's a QUICK poster I did for an elemenary visit. They popped this request on me the day of (I'm beginning to suspect a doggone pattern). But I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out. I even finished BEFORE (just before, let's be honest) closing time! Really happy with how the early reviews went from the jCrew, but woulda loved to see the little jDudes lose their little jMinds!

Here's the process shots. Not as detailed as usual since time is terribly precious on these one-dayers.

Anyway, I got the common mark of success--people wanted to rub the drawing...guys, you gotta stop doing that...especially on the pencils(!).

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Fun_SamuraiPizzaMan

This was a Christmas gift for a Japanese sir who makes me pizza, happy.

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AV_anp.StrongerSantaPt.2

This is our secondary poster for December's ALT "News." They call it news, but it's not really "news," however I try to include things that might actually be news to Japanese people, such as paper snowflakes and mistletoe. More on that later, though. Today we're making-of our second "Stronger" Santa piece.

These are the pencils. I forgot to snap a photo before I started markering the face with that peachy color, but this is close enough. I also messed up and forgot to glove his left hand. When you draw you have to really work from internal to external, so you have to essentially draw people and things as unclothed mannequins before dressing them in costume, so you can see his left hand is still pre-costume, while his right hand is post costume, in that it's wearing a glove.

This is a breakdown of how I color everything. First plan where you want your light source to be. Mine is typically in the upper left corner, so since the beard and head are obscuring the arm a bit, that means heavy light will break through more on the right than the left. Next I go over in our core color (red) where I want the darkest area to be. This makes future coats necessarily darker in these areas since it'll be a single coat everywhere else, but doubled down in this shadow area.

Next I go over everywhere else I want red to be, all the way up to the highlight, which is usually negative white space for me (the places you never color are called "negative space"). After that, I go in on the darker areas again with the same core color (red) and just use a bit more pressure on the pen. After that, I go in for the absolute darkest areas using a second, shadow color (golden yellow) and color in those areas of the shadow that I want to go really dark on.

This is the arm process brought to the body. Left is the basic red coloring, center is darker red and golden yellow, and right is all that and a black belt.

And this is what it looks like going to "print." The "culture" typography is based on the Cheers logo but the "merry" design is mine. I challenged myself to add some Christmas iconography to this using simple single-color designs.

Here are some detailed shots of the piece. The markers I used are all those pictured plus an orange and a gray from a different set, plus my set's two green tones (not pictured). I have since picked up a bunch of new markers and am absolutely pumped to give them a work out. I've got a couple new Zebra brand markers (my main set, pictured) including gray, but I've added some of those legendary Copics as well as this interesting soft-color brand called Mildliner. Excited to see what I can do with these.

Merry Christmas,

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Fun_hws.SantaDancePants

Scoff at squares in sweaters,
Oh ho ho, we're so much better.
A special full-page Homework Sketch for a kid who finished his/her notebook full of monotonous, Bart-Simpson-on-a-blackboard-esque English word-writing homework. I know it's tedious work, kid but by writing random English words ad nauseum, you're bound to have written random English words ad nauseum, which is vitally important if you ever want to have written random English words ad nauseum. Trust me, it's important work that you do.

I could [sic] care less.
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AV_anp.StrongerSantaPt.1

My second ALT News Poster for December, this one featuring what has been called by one Japanese citizen a "Stronger Santa." That nomenclature sings so that's what I'm calling it, too. The full thing will debut next Friday, but for now, since I decided to capture the making-of a bit more in depth, we'll start with the most important part: the mug.

In the marker set I bought for myself, I have a peachy colored marker that I brush in quickly for the skin, then for the finer points and the bits where we seep into negative space, I flip the marker around and uncap the "fine point" end to hatch my way into white. Most markers in Japan seem to be double-sided for thick and thin lines, so USers might have to be a little more nimble or careful with their pressure, although I still have to monitor my pen pressure anyway of course.

I don't have any soft gray or blue in my set, so I had to go with the lightest blue I had for the fluff and white-shadow portions of the piece, accented with fine black marker from my marker set. The beard is colored with a gray marker from outside of my own set, and it's kind of dying so it gives a nice brush effect. I also had an orange marker from that gray-marker's set that I went over the shadows of the skin with.

For the red parts, which I'll go more in depth on next week, I went with a coat of red followed by a heavier-pressured red for shadows and then a light brown for the ultimate shadow. The green glove was a combo of my own set's two greens with much fine tip hashing over the darker green to blend them. Was that exciting? No.

Aight, mo neks wee', ya herr'?

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AV_anp.HolidayCheers

I think I'm finally over my cold or at least the worst of it. But here's this month's main poster for December. After last month's poster came out pretty nicely, I wanted to see how far I could push myself with markers. I even bought a set of relatively basic markers and I'm finding that they're working pretty decently. Really considering going all in and getting some Copics.

These are the lines to our anchor piece, an exaggerated Santa and an anxious Rudolf. The jKids call him something else--they even sing Rudolf's song, but the words aren't a translation, but a completely different thing altogether. So I had to explain to them who Rudolf is, even though they all know his (Japanese) song by heart.

These are some WIP shots of Santa. I used three different marker sets for this: one was really old and the pens were dying out, which made for a cool brush texture and softer colors (like the skin and beard); one was great for enhancing our main colors, like for the glove and the more vibrant red overlay color; and the third was the workhorse for the main colors, the pen set I recently picked up (you can see the golden brown and red pens from that set in the photos). I'm new to markers (and non-digital colors in general), so it's a fun exploratory time for me.

And this is what our dudes looked like after it's all said and/or done. The text and title were done with a fourth set of markers that are really thick and easily tear into the paper if you don't move quickly. The "Culture" part of the title was modeled after the Cheers logo, a show I never really watched but loathed for its theme song and logo, which were evocative to me of the most boring imaginings of what that show could possibly be about. We had to watch an episode or two in one of my comedy classes at Yale, and it wasn't bad. But still. That theme song and logo are gross.

And we close with some details of the supplementary stuff. We've got a close up of Rudolf and the month's activity, making paper snowflakes (I don't know if jKids know about paper snowflakes, but I'm pretty sure I've seen them amongst the various origami I see hanging around school). And finally a quick little illustration about mistletoe. Pretty sure they haven't heard of mistletoe before. Plus I just wanted to draw something that was line-centric.

All right, pretty good score of artistic experience points, I'd say. They say snow's a-comin' this weekend, so I'm pumped not to appear crazy for once for staying in on a weekend to draw.

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Fun_MyPropeller

Long story short, I redrew a panel from this comic for someone as a gift, and thought it might be a fitting post today.

Merry Christmas to my ZeroFriends,

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YDN_zlm.Pretty

What kind of emotionally insecure idiot can't even stay serious for one minute when talking about his feelings?

Zero Like Me #96:
Fools March In Pt.3: Pretty
<- Previous Comic...Next Comic->
-First Comic-
Easter Eggs: "Yale" in panel 4. My main man, Harkeness Tower in the beegee.

Fun Facts: Thus concludes this year's YDN Comics April Fools' Week special--"Christmas in March." I hope you enjoyed everyone's Christmas-themed comics! And I hope YDN comicsers continue the tradition after I leave for a worse place. In case you missed the Yalebration, here is Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four, and Day Five.

Baa: Did I ever tell you about my first kiss? Course I did...Hum...Oh, here's a story: In elementary school, I found out a couple girls liked me. They were the two most annoying girls in the class. Does that count as a story? Oh! Hey, there was this one time in like fourth grade when my school had its annual trip to CalSkate, the local rollerskating rink in my NorCal hometown, and a certain girl asked me to coupleskate with her, but I was too embarrassed, so I ran away...err, skated away.

You've Got Mail is so my favorite romantic comedy that it inspired my first proper Herald series, Darling Find. That series haunted me for a while because I thought I'd be a one hit wonder (it was received pretty well--I was working in Swing Space at like 3am when I first read that thread and I literally started jumping and shouting for joy--but nothing seemed to match its success). Fortunately ZLM (and SLS)'s doing pretty well--I went to a psych study the other day and it turned out the guy running it's a big fan! Hilarious!

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YDN_zlm.BustACap

Yale life. Thug life. Is there really a difference?

Zero Like Me #95:
Fools March In Pt.2: Bust A Cap
<- Previous Comic...Next Comic->
-First Comic-
Easter Eggs: "Yale" in panel 4. Nyao's costume inspired by Winsor McCay's character Icicle from Little Nemo.

Fun Facts: Today's setting is a house on Whitney Avenue, en route to the elementary school I teach comics at. This comic was originally just a heist, but then this happened, and I realized it fit pretty nicely with the thievery theme.

Also, tune in to YDN comics all week so as to get your ho ho ho on!

Baa: As an opponent of frivolity and waste, I am not actually sure that a prize cap is a bad thing, but I do disagree with any sort of everybody's-equal treatment. If someone's outstanding at something, and they win a prize, it should not be a crime that they get something greater than runners-up. If a cap should exist, I would make it no less than $5k; 1k is kind of insulting in the big picture of grand prizes. Sure, five digits to one person is a bit excessive, but I can see how some people might actually need that money. But whatever, 1k is dinky. If you smoked everyone, you shouldn't be ripped off of presumably hard-earned money AND you most certainly shouldn't get fed a line by Yale.

As the resident not-rich person at Yale, I actually do have a healthy reverence for money. So if my reward is a net of zero, as it just gets swapped out for financial aid that would have been coming my way anyway, that is the insult to the injury--that's getting socks at Christmas--the point is to get something extraordinary, not something that was due you anyway.

The 1k cap is a rip off if your prize would have been even a cent greater. Yeah it's nice to get free stuff, but let's be honest, you just won a vacuum cleaner on the Price is Right when you could see the House/Car/Vacation package five steps away. You're this guy if he got paid in McDonalds coupons.

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YDN_zlm.Booty

Zero Like Me #94:
Fools March In Pt.1: Booty
<- Previous Comic...Next Comic->
-First Comic-
Easter Eggs: "Yale" in panel 1. Iron Giant and Magic card in panel 4.

Fun Facts: TUNE IN TO YDN COMICS ALL THIS WEEK!

Baa: I'm writing this at 4:23am Monday--just got back from my 8pm Sunday night heeling at the YDN. And in one night the YDN butchered anything the Herald has ever done as far as team building. Funnily, earlier Sunday at the Herald eboard meeting they used the word "cliquish" to sheepishly describe themselves as everyone bashfully chuckled in agreement, and, well, this night at the YDN sort of made everything really click.

After all these years, the Herald really does feel kinda like a certain group of people doing their own certain thing, but the YDN feels a bit more...I don't want to say "open," but less like a core clique, you know? Like, the Herald is what it would be like if Scene ran the YDN. That sounds idiotic I'm sure, because the two papers are basically the same thing with different skin, right? I dunno, I see the good and the bad about both set ups--vibes, let's say--depending on where you are in the arrangement or what you want out of it, but for my taste, I've never liked the feeling of "the cool kids"--that group that just outnumbers and outvotes anyone outside of the group--I've had to deal with that sort of set up since elementary school, so if I ever perceive hints of it, I get really disenchanted about whatever I'm lumped into with them. That's kinda the vibe I get from the Herald, not that I feel antagonistic about the paper, I just feel a resistance to get jazzed up about it because I sense that (negative-flavored) exclusive feeling. The Record is a good model of a happy medium (with positive-flavored exclusion)--it feels cliquish, but they put serious effort into making the clique be everyone at the Record, not just the gang running it. Am I making any sense? I don't have anything against the Herald, but it does indeed feel cliquish and Sunday's meeting clarified that, like finally hearing a song you've had stuck in your head after having forgotten the words. So I'm not bashing the Herald or anything, I'm just feeling reflective, as seniors should.

So take it from someone who swings both ways, the YDN is like me-and-my-team-are-doing-something-neat, but the Herald's more me-and-my-friends-are-doing-something-neat. For team building, the Herald just shoves booze in your face--I don't drink, so perhaps if I did I'd feel more gung-ho about more than just the comics section? Then again, if I drank, I'd prolly stop drawing cuz you get chummy when you drink, and that's not how you do comics. So...yeah. I have a new respect for the YDN people: I could not pretend to give a poop long enough every day about so many things I would find not poop-giveable. And yet they do. Troopers, dude. Pooper troopers.

Anyway, I got a comic out of the heeling experience, so I hope I can run it next week (hopes are not high it will survive the pitch...haha). Also, I am apparently an excellent hat maker. Take that, MacGyver.

Ok, tune in to YDN comics everyday this week!

Final art coming soon...

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