Monster Hunter

Lazy 4koma...

I was coereced into introduced to Monster Hunter Freedom 2 by Isaque. Its a good game, especially the feeling that you're in a real "world", hunting monsters which live there, rather than just existing as enemies. I'm not so fond of the initial experience though... you're dropped into your village, and told to go do the tutorials before you start for real. It has several hours of tutorials, introducing everything in the game. I got bored halfway through and decided to go play some real missions, so I went to the village chief, who told me there were single-player missions in the guild hall.

It was true. There were missions marked "single player" in the guild hall. All of which were impossible.

Turns out that the guild's single player levels are just the multiplayer levels without a lobby. The old lady has the real singleplayer levels. Bitch.

Touhou 4koma - Touhou UFO Spotter's Guide

Geez, you go away for a month and the place dies.

The motivation for this came from "8" being marked as "drunkard" in "Uwabami Breakers" (leading on from "9" being "idiot" in "PoFV"), so I thought I'd see if I could invent a series of them. I tried not to list the usual jokes and references, but I'm not sure how well I did that way... Drawing silhouettes is kinda fun though.

Touhou 4koma - "You Reap What You Sow"

Just realised I can use the comic title as my post title to save thinking one up each time!...

Someone spotted a nikoniko video with some of my art in it (at 3:33).

Translating some of the comments:
"Haven't we gotten to the [named artists] yet?"
"SO TALL"
"Nice China"
"More guns than a Zoid lol" (?)
"ear transplant lol"
Along with a bunch of "WTF"s and "awesome"s.

Anonymous Japanese internet people are so civilised!... Although, I guess Youtube comments are much the same, so maybe it's just message boards that have all the manners of a chimpanzee tea party.

Touhou 4koma - Cirno

The beloved tomboyish girl. I guess people coming here won't recognise it, but this is taken from Cirno's profile story about her being eaten by a giant frog and then freezing it from the inside to escape. Not sure the joke works in 4koma format...

Did this with a timer running to make myself go quickly, ended up pretty much as I said yesterday. 1 hour for sketching, 90 min for lineart (panel 3 was the only complex thing anyway) and under 1 hour for tones. The big difference was that there was only 30 minutes of timewasting in there. This is the first comic I finished in one night~

Touhou 4koma - PCB #1

Something (probably Photoshop) came very close to deleting this just as soon as I'd finished... I wound up spending all evening undeleting a 99% done version. Doggedness triumphs over poor technology once again~

Tried laying out the text before the art, but it doesn't seem to work too well. Quite like the joke though. Took too long, again... I was hoping to produce one of these a day, but 6 in 3 weeks is a joke.

If I add up the time, its something like:
1 hour sketching
2+ hours for lineart (expanded to 4 or 5 due to MSN and web browsing)
1 hour for tone

Not impossible in an evening.

Touhou 4koma - Marisa+Nitori

So, the Touhou 11, "Subterranean Animism" demo is out. It has Marisa + Nitori, giving Marisa the power of SUPER SCIENCE. This is awesome.

The other 5 partnership options in the game are pretty much the standard obvious fandom ones, which kind of leaves me wondering if ZUN had thought of them originally or wound up adopting them as fanservice? I don't really care about that (beyond Nitori), but what is good is that the mechanics they have attached to them are fun (as opposed to balanced - it kind of feels like 6 different gameplay modes, it changes so much. Personally I prefer it this way). I should play 10 sometime, which I skipped over out of apathy...

Er, comic-wise - I actually like this for once. Probably because it has robots. I like robots. It took a bit longer than normal, but considering that its fairly detailed, and I just made up the designs and poses on the spot, it was pretty quick.

Touhou 4koma - China #4

Whoops, finished this one a while back and kept leaving it too late at night to be able to post it.

More China antics... pretty simple joke. Grabbing a prop from the BG is kinda cheap (especially when I've stopped drawing BGs). I think I'm getting the hang of the art, although I realised when I was toning it that I positioned it badly for a lot of the main colour areas (like Sakuya's blue frock).

2 more to go, although I still don't know what to do for the next one...

Touhou 4koma - China #3

Continued~

This was technically done yesterday, but today's isn't finished (thanks to a jerk powercut reminding me that I should save more often), so it's not a double post, boo.

Touhou 4koma - China #2

Another one~

I'm dropping the backgrounds... they're more work, and they look worse than not having one at all. Also, sepia-colour~

Also, much thanks to Icey for making me rewrite it into something that makes sense without mindreading.

Touhou 4koma - China #1

I finally did a 4koma~

It took much longer than I thought~

That's even ignoring the rejected ones that didn't make sense... hopefully this one manages that at least (assuming you know China). I've been writing down a load of 4koma ideas for a while now, but somehow it was easier to get rolling with a multipart one than a single one - there should be 6 or so in the series. I'm hoping to get over a dozen done for the end of the month (Reitaisai) as an arbitrary goal... wish me luck lol.

Also, blog post 100 woo~ I'll start on my speech.

Lol Comic ver. Touhou

I don't seem to be able to produce anything worth finishing recently...

So for a change, one more practice comic. I was trying to get black not-thick lines here, plus trying out "tone"-ish shading. Verdict: maybe a bit too thick, and the shading is actually decent (aside from BGs... need to look at other comics more closely I think). Need to do something about the speech bubbles too, doing them myself looks pretty terrible... and definitely need to be less slow, as ever.

No meaning to the contents again, if you want a generic Touhou situation then you can't go wrong with "Marisa + mushrooms"... also if you so much as recognise the first panel then you're spending way too much time on the internet.

Lol Comic

Lol comic.

Same as before, no real story, I just drew a typical everyday situation so that I could test some stuff. Need to work out something for speech bubbles, the ovals are easy but seems like anything hand-drawn is going to look odd. Not sure about the fonts I chose too...

Seems I'm really not good at a) guys, b) hands, c) speech bubbles, so from now on my comics will be about mute girls wearing mittens. Really though, even just from these 2 tests, while I can make it look passable it feels like I have a ways to go to have the artistic range to do a comic...