The long process of learning to draw
Eyes were first...
Little did I know that the first thing I obsessively practiced drawing would turn out to be really important. Starting in 8th grade, I'd draw eyes constantly. It took so long until I was happy with them, I thought that I'd never actually get to where I could draw a whole person. However, later I found a hack: I could position 3D physical "mannequins", photograph them, and upload them into Photoshop as an opaque layer for reference. Then, I could actually draw the one thing I was good at, and it worked pretty well!
I drew the eyes of each character from my favorite manga "Black Butler"
screenplay for "The Silent War - 2086"
It started in high school...
In 2019, I was super excited to win the Sweepstakes award at the LA County Fair for my 80-page screenplay for "The Silent War - 2086." I had put my heart and soul into the characters and story and dreamt one day of publishing it as a graphic novel.
next up: finalize the look of my characters
Introducing Hisao
Okay, maybe I got a LITTLE carried away, drawing Hisao hundreds of times, but my goal was to have consistency. I never wanted my characters to look different each time I drew them, and I couldn't think of any shortcut to learn how to do that. I just had to draw them again and again and again until I could recognize them each and every time.
first hand-drawn version of the main characters
The Digital Art Project of a Lifetime
I started officially working on the art for "The Silent War - 2086" in a high school class called Media Art. I had an amazing teacher who taught me how to use the latest digital art technology, but it took a whole year just to draw a few pages of the graphic novel. My friends joked that by the time I finished it, it would be take place in the present day, and at my rate, they weren't wrong!
I needed more technological hacks. I found that a trick for drawing perspective in complicated buildings (e.g. ones with curved surfaces) is creating a model of the building in Tinkercad, a program that allows users to easily form shapes together to make 3D models in the computer. The viewpoint can be set from within the building at any height, and this can be screenshotted and put into Photoshop. Most art skills can be replicated with technology and the right mindset. I always enjoy looking for creative solutions to "impossible" problems!
In college, I spent a summer taking zoom classes from a fantastic art teacher who encouraged me to continue using technology to improve the quality of my work and helped me plan out all of the panels and ensure character consistency. Unfortunately, I realized that the time it would take to actually start publishing chapters was intimidating, so as much as I needed to share my story and characters, I eventually put the project on the back burner. A couple years passed.
Then A.I. was invented.
My original Art Before A.I.
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My Art AFTER A.I. "gloss" (pre-photoshop)
Despite A.I. sometimes having its own ideas about how things should look...
I could keep prompting it in different ways until it was close enough to my vision that I could fix the rest in Photoshop. My style falls somewhere between traditional manga and comic book art. Many times, the A.I. image would be too "anime" (like above) or too photo-realistic. Fortunately, since I had such a strong idea about what the characters should look like from years of drawing them, it was just a matter of time before the A.I. model would finally generate an image that would make me say "that's Mei."
This was a clear improvement over what I could draw on my own and it took about a tenth as long (and would be in color!) The realization that I could finally get my story out in the world (before 2086) hit me like a truck and I immediately started working on it full-time.
