My Work :: Part 6: AngstyBishy Ed

Yay, Ed is done! As always, I was so afraid I would get bogged down in the little finite details no one else notices but that keep me up at night, so I decided to be brave, and just do a "the heck with it" and post him anyway. If those little details still bother me, I will just go and fix them later at my leisure.

I have officially decided that I will post the AngstyBishy characters every Friday, not every Wednesday as originally planned. I just felt too rushed for my taste to get Ed out this week, what with having work as well to occupy my days, so posting on Fridays will give me plenty more time to get the AB pics exactly how I want them. And it is still one pic every week, so no complaints, right? Right. So Fridays it is! Another reason for me to look forward to the weekend. =)

Anyway, on my DeviantArt account I said in Ed's description that he was much harder to do than Sasuke. That is no lie. I think it has been very good for me from a design perspective to do the AngstyBishy series, because of those very problems; they are the same probs I have dealt with in many design projects, and so they are good to work out since they keep me in shape design-wise. I am talking about having to make two very different objects have a similar feel and style. In my design classes, we began learning this by making pictographs: three separate icons that need to work in unison with each other. That was one of my very first assignments, both as a student and a teacher, and the lessons gleaned from those projects apply just as much to AngstyBishy as to any other icons I have had to make since.

It is very easy to do just one character; if I had just done Sasuke and called it quits I would have been fine. But in doing a series, I have to make sure that while each character has wildly diffferent hairstyles, clothing, and accessories, that they all still retain the same style and expression I had orginally set forth in AngstyBishy. Trust me, this is turning out to be easier said than done. That was the biggest challenge with Ed: how do I make him fit into the pantheon of the AB world and enhance it?

The biggest differences I had to address between him and Sasuke were the colored eyes and hair, the coat, and the boots. Little additions like the braid actually were less than a problem that I'd thought they'd be, and while the belt took a lot of different reference photos to get it right, it frustrated me far less than the other things.

First: the hair and eyes. I will openly admit that part of the ease of doing Sasuke was that important details like his hair and eyes turned out to be very simple: since they are already black in the character, leave them filled in and call him good. but with the Ed, of course I could not do this, and had to find another way to solve my hair and eye solutions. The lines of Ed's hair probably took the most tweaking of the entire icon, except for maybe his belt. I knew I wanted thicker lines on the outside of the entire character—this is an art style I love and which I feel unifies a character's overall look—but how thick was too thick, and what about the interior lines? (So many challenges, plus I realized halfway through that I needed to redesign Ed's bangs where they attach to his forehead, which angered me since I thought I had caught all the subtle Ed details.) The eyes, of course, have been the biggest agony. Ed's golden eys are a huge part of the series, and I really wanted to include them. But in spite of my numerous tweakings they refused to fit well with the overall design. Adding color reduced their solidness, so the eyes lost their hook as a major focal point. Nothing I did managed to remedy this, to my frustration.

But last night, as I was poring over a printout of Ed, dissatisfied for the umpteenth time, I had an epiphany: part of the point of AB is to show that while the characters are wildly different in looks and background, they all share a common angstiness. And since we are told that the eyes are supposedly the window to the soul, it would be much more important to show the collective angstiness of their souls than to fret about a minute detail like eye color. I realized that giving them all the same dark AB eyes supported that common thread I was aiming for. As an added plus, it makes the whole design stronger since it helps keep the viewer's eye on the character's face. So, with some sorrow, I put the idea of coloring their eyes to rest. I hope anyone who feels I made in a huge mistake in doing this, will at least now understand my reasoning behind such a blasphemous decision. AB is less fanart for me than anime-themed pictographs, and therefore their message is more important than any one individual detail or character. Sometimes as an artist, to quote one of my profs, you must kill your babies—your ideas or preconcieved notions—no matter how cute they are or how much you love them. That is what I have had to do—it was a tough decision to be sure, but ultimately is the correct one.

On to other problems: the overkill of black that Ed wears, while very stylish, caused a design conundrum. The great lines I made to indicate Ed's boots and pants were all destroyed when I began to add color. Coloring the lines of the boots in red just added unnecessary details and distracted from the focal point: Ed's face. So all my work studying Ed's boots was for naught—though I did get to keep their shape in the final pic. (But does the top of the boots come across as boots or simply rolled up jeans? This detail has also bothered me. Ah, the wonders and horrors of design.) And while I wanted to add grey lines indicating the shiny leathery texture of Ed's pants, alas these details were also distracting. But as Elicia kindly pointed out, I didn't add highlights to the hair, so leaving off the highlights of the pants is no loss. Stupid black! The same thing happpened with Sasuke; I drew all the lines of his hair, but just hid them by making all the hair black. Thought I do think having all of the solid shapes makes for a much stronger image, so I can live with it—for now.

The coat was easy to draft, harder to make look right. The sleeves took a while to tweak but I am happy with them. The hem was originaly much straighter in my original drawing, but once I curved the hem to match how it would drape on a real person, it looked much much better.

One last detail of Ed's I made a note to get right was the hairtie. In the FMA art book, Arakawa mentioned that Ed's hairtie is red, and that she wouold often forget to color it in, to her chagrin. So I really wanted to make sure I got that detail right. =)

The nice thing about these initial AB pics is that I will be able to take pieces of them—the coat sleeves, for instance—and use the same piece on other characters. Things like that will help the other characters get created faster. A good example of this will occur in the two AB's I plan to do next. I am switching the order—I will be doing Sanzo first, then Inuyasha—but since both have the same long kimono sleeves, I will just copy Sanzo's finished sleeves onto Inuyasha, and voila! New sleeves in a fraction of the time. Another great reason to do all the AB in a vector-based program like Illustrator. =)

I think that AB has been an excellent project for me, for both my inner graphic designer and my inner manga creator. The inner designer loves practicing her skill at pictographs and Illustrator manipulation, and the manga creator loves studying the details of beloved characters to discover what makes them so iconic. After all, God or the devil is in the details, depending on whom you ask; by studying these details I can already sense myself becoming a more astute artist. And I love it when that happens.