My Work :: Part 9: AngstyBishy Touya

I apologize for ignoring this blog lately, and not posting info on insirational design or manga into like I used to. I will remedy that ASAP. But for now, here is my next in the AB series, Touya!

This is what I wrote at my DA link, that basically sums up how I feel about tha Touya angst:

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Ah, Touya. A simple, levelheaded Go prodigy until he meets Hikaru, who unwittingly unleashes in Touya his dark, competitive, obsessive Go side. In other words, his inner angst, which is vast and glorious. Besides L, probably one of my fave manga chars ever. (Though I do wish he would stop letting his mother dress him and get a wardrobe that reflects the true bishy that he is. Oh well.)

As always, for more info on this fanart check out my art blog. And as always, done in pencil (but not mech this time, ooh I'm shaking things up), scanned, and then traced with the pen tool in Illustrator. Pencil comp can be found in my scraps section.

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Touya was stress to sketch but cake to Illustrator. I kept obsessing I got his hair wrong (I'm still not sure it's perfect but it's basically correct), but once I scanned him in he came together speedily. Which is good, because I couldn't find the Wolverine pics I needed for his AB icon, so I bumped Touya up to the front of the list this week to compensate. (I now know my friend wants the X-Men Ultimate costume, so I can finally get proper pics of Wolverine and hopefully have him done for next week.)

With Touya, I simply stole lots of already-made lines from other AB's (Ed's coatsleeves, etc.) and arranged them on top of the Touya sketch; the only original parts of this AB are the hair and the hem of his uniform's jacket. That's all, I'm not kidding you.

I obsessed over his hair, but since I made it solid black I didn't have to obsess as much as usual. Why the obsession in the first place? Because Touya's hair is strange yet fun: very Heian pageboy, with bangs that are boring from the front but nicely break the monotony from the sides. So I had to make artistic decisions on how to break up his hair and keep it from looking helmetish. And yes, for all Touya fans, I did contemplate making his hair olive like it is in the anime. But at the end of the day, his hair is really black, as Obata has made clear in the manga, and I'm not going to argue with follicular canon, espcially when Obata's decisions make my work a heck of a lot easier. If you go to the scraps section of my DeviantArt account, you can see the original sketch and the lines I did make in his hair, but thankfully did not have to draw.

Funnily enough, it wasn't until I added the crease on his school unform pants that he truly came together as Touya; funn how little details work like that. I was afraid I might need to add a travel Go board or something, but hopefully those who have read or seen Hikaru no Go will be able to tell instantly who he is. I wasn't sure originally which costume to put him in, since he does multiple clothing changes, but I noticed in my Google search that a lot of the jpegs of the manga had a specific collar style. I found out from cosplay photos that the collar was from none other than his school uniform, so Tada! Costume choice finalized. I hate that the AB pose doesn't allow you to see the collar, but trust me that it makes the jacket look truly awesome.

(As a side note, Elicia didn't like the cosplay costumes of Touya's uniforms that I used as references, but personally I found most of them to be awesome. But why would you pick a fabric for a school uniform jacket that wrinkles? Silly cosplayers. Elicia is very snobby when it comes to fabric choices for cosplay; she plans to post about the subject soon, and when she does I will post a link to that discussion here, so that she may properly educate us all. =) Don't be offended if you use incorrect fabric choices; she is majoring in costume design, so it is vital in her work to be picky like that. But trust me when I say that, as her sis, it gets extremely tiring sometimes.)

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Happy upcoming Memorial Day everyone! I am heading into the mountains for the weekend, to swim, relax, and hopefully corner Elicia to get a diathesis of our untitled monster manga written up. We shall see.