How to Make Manga Secret #1 – Read comics

And not just manga either!

Fun homework

Dropped by the library today and found a bunch of comics that caught my eye so I just had to nab them!

In his memoir on writing, Stephen King said there were two things you needed to do as a writer: read a lot and write a lot. Now, I’m liberally applying this philosophy to making comics. I just don’t think it’s possible to create art without being able to appreciate or learn from what’s already out there. Besides, if you want to be a part of the industry, shouldn’t you actually like the stuff?

The way I see it, reading comics and letting it move you (whether a particular piece of work inspires you, pisses you off, or disappoints you) helps you grow as an artist. If you see a panel with gorgeous perspective in it, maybe let it push you to work on your perspective skills. Or if a comic artist uses a much different inking style from yours, why not try it and see if it’s something you can incorporate into your own work? This kind of creative stealing is helpful because it pushes a fairly generic style (something most manga artists begin with) to something that is more personal, and unique: a blended product of influences

Consequently, if you’re frustrated by the story for instance (thank goodness for libraries’ try-before-you-buy perks), you can analyze what isn’t working and make sure you avoid them for your own stories.

Looking forward to reading this haul over the weekend in the Bay Area. Hope everyone has a happy holiday, travel safe and read comics!
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Here’s another batch with more of a manga flavor from May I forgot to upload.

Polterguys: An Original Online Manga Series

Color & Marker Test

Yey! I’m pretty excited to share the first promo image related to my new project, Polterguys. I’ve been working on the comic pages since the first of this month to give myself a buffer so I should be able to start publishing pages around mid-July.

Polterguys is the story which I based from to create my Yen Press Talent Search entry, Final Track. It’ll have comedy and drama elements (just the way I like ‘em!) so I hope you stick around for it!

Contest Results + New Project

Thanks to everyone who commented over the weekend! You can view the winner’s commissions, plus a few more drawings here on tumblr. I was hoping to livestream while I worked on the commissions but it seems to make Photoshop super laggy. Can anybody recommend what I should do? I checked my internet speed which seems to be more than capable and I was using the normal setting. I can try testing it again later since I have one more commission to finish.

My sister Kay stayed over last week and is helping me with preliminary work for my new project.  Together with my youngest sister, we’re working out all the tedious mediocrity in my character designs and preliminary thumbnails.  While my love to tell a good story is incredible and vast, my ability to convey exciting visuals is still lacking in some areas. Glad to have an animation student and a fashion-conscious teen go over my designs and push them to the best it can get.

Meanwhile, I also introduced Kay to Baccano while she made me watch Paranoia Agent.

Rewatching Baccano for the first time in English is a delight! Firo and Luck’s voice actors are so dreamy.  I’m particularly susceptible to accents so I really recommend Funimation’s dubs. Paranoia Agent, on the other hand, may be unsettling but the animation quality is so rich – it really is a must see for fans any animation buff.

Expect another update this week. I’ll be showing previews of my new project! I’m pretty excited to share them.

Site relaunch! Contest time!

I decided to start my wordpress site from scratch and streamline a lot of the areas to “read better.”  Ofcourse, what followed was an intense two-week struggle against the nearly alien language of php and css. Crazy times, but I did learn much!

I’m happy to announce I’ve uploaded several comics which have previously only been available through Deviantart in “vertical stacks.” It took a while and I’m very grateful the Webcomic plug-in for wordpress took care of all the navigation and archive coding for me. While there is a learning curve to customizing your pages, I do recommend it for people interested in making webcomics with wordpress. Unfortunately, comicpress refused to place nice with my local files so I can’t make valid comparisons.

Breathe is now available to read in its entirety and while it looks fairly dated now, like perhaps some of the other comics here, I like to think of each one as stepping stones toward improvement. Each of these short stories really helped me improve my craft. I still hope you derive some enjoyment from reading them here.

Subscribe to my blog feed, or follow me on DA, Tumblr or Twitter for updates on my next project. I’m pretty excited to be finally working on it after working on it off and on for three years.

CONTEST TIME!!!

Have a look around! Let me know if links are broken or some weird stuff is happening and just comment on this blog. You can also just let me know what you think about the site or comics. Any suggestions or recommendations for improvements? Which comic did you enjoy most and why? Comments that aren’t just one-word entries will be automatically entered into my little raffle. : )

PRIZES

I’ll be raffling off a full color commission for a random commenter and  come up with special prizes for those who provide feedback I’ll be adapting.

DEADLINE

Sunday midnight (That’s Sunday 11:59PM Pacific Standard time.)

Thanks for looking around!