New Colorwork: Saeko [08]
I’ve been doing some color studies as well as re-design work on many of the Warmth characters, this is just one of them - the colors are kinda bland, but the real excersize here was the hair - there are about 5 or 6 colors in there. Not final colors, but adding colors to some of these sketches has had the feel of adding some life to them.
I cringe all the more when i look at the artwork i did the first time i worked seriously on this series. Yeeks.
Tags: colorworks, COPIC, new
April 12th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
wow i think they are very good and i hope you get warmth together for a webcomic
April 12th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Nice. I’m looking forward to Warmth. Best of luck on the Warmth project. I wish you the best and I hope it surpasses all your expectations.
April 12th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
looks great, and its good to see your getting better with color, i have only just began to start coloring my art on a digital level. i cant affor copics sadly and fear messing up food drawings
April 13th, 2008 at 4:57 am
This is a lay-person’s view who has been reading mt since late 01 (I think i started reading near the end of the yuki/piro thing shortly after she picks up his sketchbook) so this is not a “professional opinion” by any means.
You have definitely improved, though I would not bash the old one as bad as you are. (at least not the drawing [though you have also radically improved there, but the old ones were still good enough most people would still enjoy it] - your skill with color is definitely has improved). One of my favorite things about following mt for so long is having watched your improvement.
I am GREATLY looking forward to Warmth - have been for years. I am kinda…well…not kinda, I am picky when it comes to manga/comics. I love the art style (particularly of manga) but I normally can’t get past the poor writing =(. Not that my approval is worth even the 2cents it is referred to, but you have me hanging on my seat as for Warmth because only 5 other manga/comics have held my attention like mt has and 3 of them were by the same creators. As hard as I am to please and how much I am looking forward to it, I sure others are as well! Best of luck to you!
April 13th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
thanks for the supportive words - and i very much agree with you on the poor writing thing - There are a lot of titles i simply have not been able to get through because the quality of the writing or the story just left me feeling ‘bleah’. It doesn’t happen with every creator, but there are many who did something that was very enjoyable to read, then… everything they did after was no where near as good. I really REALLY don’t want to be like that - warmth has to be BETTER than anything i’ve done before.
Not that Megatokyo has been particularly good - to be frank, the writing is strong in some places but very weak in others. What i see in what i’ve done with MT so far is that my ideas and my ability to get them into a form people can enjoy shows some actual potential. One of the reasons i never did much more with warmth was that the story itself was kinda weak - i developed the idea before MT, and as it stood it really did not look like it would live up to people’s expectations. So much so that for a long time i planned to abanon it and work on something else. Yet when i looked everything over, there were some strong ideas there that, with some work, could be made quite interesting… so that’s what i did. There were no guarentees that the ideas would work, or that the story would develop into something good (for a while, i had moved the story to the states) but a few ideas started to creep in suddenly took off…
Hopefully it’ll be worth the wait. I never should have even mentioned the thing years ago, and it’s current incarnation is vastly different and more interesting than the original idea, so… hopefully when pages start going before people’s eyes, they will prove to have been worth the wait.
Now if Jack could just settle down so daddy could actually get some work done. We’re going through a *horrible* few weeks of him not sleeping as much as he should. He’s wearing his parents out, he really is. It’ll pass
April 13th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Saeko is really nice, i wish you could do a color work for saeko like the one you did for kimiko back in a while:
http://www.fredart.com/fredart/artpage.php3?src=&ft=co&fn=38
It’s great for all kinds of wallpapers from desktop to mobile, and it just gives you the kind of warm fuzzy feeling you are used to when you’ve been reading megatokyo for a long long long long while now
April 14th, 2008 at 1:30 am
It looks very good. I hope that the comic will come out to your expectation.
April 14th, 2008 at 2:49 am
Frankly as a silent fan of Saeko’s design, I couldn’t help but notice this iteration seems to be closer to Erika in terms of facial expressions. I always liked the wide-eyed innocent fluster Saeko seemed to have in the preview… I’m hoping she won’t turn out as another Erika clone and will retain that character sense she had before.
Still, as always the style is inspiring and I look forward to the world after MT.
April 14th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
If he’s having trouble sleeping due to colic, the best remedy we came up with was letting ours sleep on top of dad (me). That seemed to seriously calm the colic. You have to be careful about tossing and turning of course.
mmmmmmmmmm, Warmth! Even if you’ve vastly changed the story, looking forward to it.
April 15th, 2008 at 9:09 am
I really like your updated version of Saeko, Fred. The color choice is turning out really nicely, and I can’t wait to see her in that sweater that you drew her originally. I don’t know if you intended for this, but she has an “Erika”-feel to her and yet she stands alone as an original character.
I’ve been wanting “Warmth” since I first decided to stick with MT back in 2005, but knowing that MT could end within a year for all I know is saddening also. You’ve had such a great run with this story, and despite the weak points in writing and in the midst of many of your life transitions, you have done really well for yourself. I do hope I can one day publish my own OEL manga like you have, but I don’t give myself that much credit.
Keep up the production work on “Warmth!” I’ll be waiting for it! ^^
April 17th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Very good. Loving MT, gonna love Warmth. Two questions, though. Will Jack make it into MT as a character? And, when do we get to see a family portrait? Keep up the good word!!!
April 18th, 2008 at 10:17 am
Not to sound like I’m splitting hairs, but I have a small suggestion to make. I have copic markers myself, and while I’m nowhere near as good at blending my colours together as you are, I thought I might throw this out there. When colouring the eyes, instead of leaving the space around the coloured pupil of the eye, try adding a cool grey colour, perhaps even brick white from the copic sketch set. It adds a bit more dimention to the eye than just plain white, and it makes the white highlight of the eye stand out a bit more.
April 18th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
I really like your drawing of Saeko but i think that (despite what you think of it.) your previous drawings were very good also. I hope that warmth gets started soon Cause ever sence i’ve heard of it i’ve been wanting to see it get on its feet.
Good wishes and best of luck.
April 20th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
I enjoy all the art that you show us, and I’m sure, most of what you don’t want to put up. Wish you’d meet us at the Motorcity Comicon. I’m shooting interviews for the show there on friday.
May 3rd, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Yes, fred gallagher is cool, he’s american. i’m glad he’s illustrator, right? Hahaha!