I decided to make a Dribbble account a while ago, but heard horror stories about waiting for a long time to receive an invite, so I didn’t upload anything. If you’re not familiar with Dribbble, anyone can create an account, but your posts and other functionality will be hidden from general view until you get invited to join the… normal users? It’s a weird system. In hindsight, waiting to upload oesn’t really make sense. If it takes so long, the sooner the better. Well, whatever.
I decided to upload my first image (as seen above), and then set up camp and sit by the fire until I got an invite from some kind soul. A few hours later, I got an invite from Galina Aviltseva which was a really nice surprise. Thanks, Galina!
Well, it’s almost time for Inktober 2019, and despite my lack of enthusiasm at the end of last year’s, I’ve decided to engage in another round of stress and depression. As deftly observed by a bunch of musical artists who are mostly a mystery to me (yes, I’m old), I’m a sucker for pain (yes, I’m an idiot) (and yes, I liked Suicide Squad).
Mind you, I’ve decided to try and alleviate some of the former by doing some prep work for October, since the prompt list was released a while back, which allowed me to at least do some thumbnails and work out ideas. Last year, it was a last minute decision, so everything was done on the fly, more-or-less. I was happy with a few of the pieces, but they were mostly pretty mediocre to downright bad. One of the pieces I liked was for the prompt spell, but I thought I could do better, so I recently did a re-draw. Not sure if it’s better or not. Oh well.
Not to be confused with Nice Boobs Day, Boobs Day rolls around every August 1st in Japan, in celebration of, what else, boobs. Pretty much based on the same pun as the former, it’s just an excuse for people to post photo of boobs and artists to draw boobs. Mind you, this is the internet – people don’t really need any encouragement to do either of those things on a regular basis.
This year, I decided Red Monika from Battle Chasers would be appropriate. Now, I’ve never read Battle Chasers, but I was aware of it when it was published. Mostly I was aware of Red Monika for… two reasons.
New Year is a much bigger deal in Japan than Canada, although it doesn’t affect me as I have the same response to it no matter where I am: a noncommital shrug and ignoring in favour of whatever I am doing at the time. This year it was playing Diablo 3 on the Swtich. Or rather it didn’t affect me until I got married and suddenly I was responsible for making the nengajo. 2018’s card was solid, but I like this year’s a lot better, but…
The final art work included a subtle paper pattern in the background which I really like. However, when we printed out the card, things did not turn out well. Aside from the weird colour shift (which is not totally explained by the RGB to CMYK shift), the background texture is completely gone. Yuck. However, it was too late to do anything about it, so they were sent out as it. Last year’s nengajo printed much nicer, but also were on much better quality paper, which I strongly suspect is large part of the culprit.
The other issue is the fault of my crappy memory: for some reason, despite A6 being an international standard paper size (100mm x 148mm), Japan occasionally adds five millimeters to the shorter side – I’ve encountered commercial printers who differ on their sizes for A6, and only A6, which if doublely weird. Nengajo all seem to use the smaller A6, which is a bit of trivia I had forgotten. Ugh. This wasn’t too big of a deal, but still annoying.
It could also be my printer, but it’s always done a pretty solid job. Well, in any case, my main takeaways here are:
Never assume paper size in Japan, no matter how sure you are, and
