Hobby Deflections

So it was another slow Monday at work.  Well, not as slow as I’d have hoped, since despite the fact that we had a complete four-person attendance for the closing shift, we experienced odd spikes in the call queue.  Not only that, the avail times didn’t really become as long as I used to remember Monday avails to be until well after noontime, which is far too little too late in my opinion.

Since I still don’t have money, and payday is still about four days away, I had to walk to the MRT station after my shift ended instead of catching a jeepney ride.  Unlike the previous days, there was barely a cloud in the sky, so even with my hat it was freaking hot.  Needless to say I was very sweaty by the time I got to Alphaland, which is why it was a real relief to enter its A/C’d confines, even for a short bit until I got to into the MRT station.  I was actually tempted to turn on my own room’s A/C once I got home, but decided against it this time around.

There was always later in the evening, yes?

I went to the gym as always, though it was pretty dark by the time I got there, and not because of the hour.  Lots of dark clouds around our area, and it’s no surprise that it eventually started raining, which means it was a good thing that I got to the gym when I did.  It continued through my session, but thankfully it had stopped almost completely by the time I started home.

I’m still a bit stumped on what to do about that line of trees in the long-term Madoka-related project, so to shift gears a bit, I decided to do something else… Unfortunately it’s still Madoka-related, but hey, no trees and colors to worry about for now!

Going to focus on drawing the figures first, then I’ll worry about giving everything a carved-out texture.  It’s been a year after all!

Partial To Completion

It’s kind of unexpected how I actually woke early for once, and without help from my phone’s alarm.  Around seven-thirty in fact, whereas my alarm for the weekend is nominally set for nine-thirty.  It was definitely a nice feeling, though I won’t claim to actually being able to use those extra morning hours well — indeed, I immediately found myself distracted by browsing 2ch for Rebuild of Evangelion 3.0 details, and trying to sift the truth from the made-up stuff (which was pretty hard).  A booklet given during the overnight screening eventually surfaced, confirming which detail really was in the movie, but that came sometime during the afternoon.  The hours leading to that however… ah, it was an exercise in patience, particularly when you get whining and raging on the massive changes the movie brought to the EVA canon in-between.

 I can’t believe these “fans” are as old as I am… Was I the only one that aged gracefully?  Or are the whiny and bitter grognards the most noisy at it?

Aside from that, I was able to do something productive, or rather build upon what I was doing yesterday.  The result is what you can see below: the sort-of completed solo of Shiina Remi, ready to be slotted in with the rest of the stampede.  I didn’t go with a bare outline this time around, and opted for including the base colors. It was the only way to showcase how… green, her general color scheme is.  Hey, I didn’t choose it!

Green and yellow… Mmm, I’m reminded of lemons for some reason.

With this, I guess I’m a little bit closer to what I want.  Now I just need to work on general composition and, who knows?  I might just be able to post SOMETHING finished before New Years, yes?

Little Steps, Again

It’s kind of embarrassing how I wasn’t able to put in a journal entry last night. I intended to — in fact, I even set my phone’s alarm for nine-thirty in the evening just so I can wake up for it — but I think my usual reaction to getting woken by an alarm kicked in before anything else.  That is to say, I grumpily turned it off, and went back to bed.  The next thing I new, it was already well past midnight, so I didn’t bother again.  I set downloads, then tried my best to go to sleep again.

Needless to say, it wasn’t quite successful. Between Twitter, XCOM 2012, and going through my backlog of anime, I was pretty much up until around five in the morning.  It was only then that I finally felt the pull of slumber again… so I jumped into bed without hesitation.

I woke up, obviously, at around eleven in the morning.

Despite the late start, at least this time I had a set goal in mind for today: drawing.  Specifically, adding another Magical Girl to the burgeoning ranks of my long-term art project.  Damnit Himado, don’t make this any more harder than it already is!  Oh well, Remi Shiina is underway, though I’m not really sure if I can finish her lineart tonight.  At least it’s something creative though…

Hopefully I can get the lineart and flats done by tomorrow morning.  That is, unless I can get a second wind somehow tonight.  I’ll just have to see

P.S. For some reason the gym was only going to be open until five in the afternoon, so rather than the full hour of exercise I was expecting, I had to make due with around forty-odd minutes minus warm-up (I got there around ten minutes past four).  I wonder why though.  Maintenance?  Christmas decorating?

An Afternoon’s Worth of Pastels

So, last day off before it’s back to work tomorrow.  I woke up late again as usual, though I do think I more than made up for it during the afternoon… and most of the evening.  What was I doing?  Well, working on the skyline of course, though I have to say it’s turned out much more colorful than you’d expect your usual city skyline to be.

I think I’ve going to have to tone down the saturation eventually, but that’s still in the future.  Still have to fill in the windows and whatever spaces needs doing, put it in the background of those  hedges I did before, THEN see if I need to adjust things.

All in all though, it’s kind of fun to be able to do something other than play videogames or review during my day off again.

Of Hedgerows and Skylines

It’s funny how, despite not really planning to do so, I woke up pretty early today, even before my phone’s alarm went off at its scheduled time.  I could have sworn that I heard my sister talking (about how I was supposed to have classes today), but regardless of the reason I was out of bed, and very wide awake.  Needless to say I took advantage of the fact that I was up and about, fired up SAI, and went to “work” on the other pieces of my art project.  Which is to say adding a skyline and treeline as background to my mob of magical girls.

After several hours of squinting, the result is what is displayed on the picture above. The greens are a little too bright for comfort (at least the front row), but given the fact that they’re going to be (mostly) obscured by the running girls I think I can get away with some minor adjustments to the overall brightness later on.  That said, boy this was tiring, and the effort pretty much took the entirety of my day, which just shows my rather amateurish level of skill. Egh.

Anyway, hopefully I’ll be done with the trees by tomorrow, so I can finally focus on a much harder task; that is, coloring (and shading!) all those buildings in the background.

Half-Done

 

Just a few words to what I’ve been messing around with since I woke up today, and of which I’m nowhere even finished… See those buildings in the background?  Yeah, those that are just outlines right now?  They take anywhere from an hour to two hours or more of work.  I know, I know, I’m putting too much focus on something that’s just going to serve as background, but it’s really hard putting in all those little details that make a building something that doesn’t look merely like a tall block.

Yeah, I can obsess about the strangest of things sometimes when I’m doing fanwork.  What else is new?

Suffice to say that trying to do each building in the skyline one at a time has been… time-consuming to say the least.  Oh well, I don’t have classes tomorrow, so maybe I can get more things done.

Like the trees.  Because they’re going to be added eventually, right?  Right?

On other news… So it’s my payday today.  With my rate increase, I was expecting a bigger payoff when I went to the bank teller around lunchtime today.  Sadly, that wasn’t to be, as out of the eight thousand-and-one-hundred (without taxes and contributions deducted yet) I was expecting, I was only able to get five thousand six-hundred.  Given that I haven’t been late or absent during the cutoff period, that means that that’s a lot of deductions from both taxes as well as for Pag-Ibig, SSS, and God-knows what other stuff.  Bummer.

Oh well, the deductions were expected (since they usually do come at the end of the month), it’s just that I didn’t think that they’d be this big this quick.  Mmph.  With the end-of-the-month bills coming in, it’s going to be tight until the next payday, for sure.

Week-Start Lethargy

Nothing really much to say about my day.  It was slow at work, but I wasn’t really in the mood for anything other than sleeping this afternoon, so that’s what I did.  When I woke up from my siesta, I worked on the stampede again, this time focusing on the Pleiades, especially now that, with Volume 3 of Kazumi Magica out, I finally have official color schemes to work with.  It took a bit of work, but I was able to get it done somehow. 

Funny how my guess of Mirai’s scheme was spot on (without the polka-dots though, which by the way I’m keeping), and I was this close to Satomi’s as well (the shade for her official scheme was a little lighter though).  Saki and Nico’s themes were misses though, but one out of four is something I guess.

And that’s pretty much it. I’m still feeling kind of tired for some reason, so it’s off to bed again.

Relocation

Today was my first day at work at our new location, three floors down from where I’d been working in for more than a year. There’s really not that much of a difference, except for the fact that apparently we (me and the hold-overs from yesterday) weren’t assigned any stations.  As a result, we’re going have to literally fight for free stations until the allocation issue is fixed.  It’s not much of a problem yet, since today was the Monday shift, meaning few people were on duty, but I foresee trouble tomorrow at this rate.

As for my scheduling problem, it’s still not resolved.  It’s going to be an awkward next few weeks at this rate, as Workforce is standing their ground, and telling me that the only way I’ll get Saturday and Friday off is that I’ll have to look for someone to swap schedules with.  HAH, as if such a thing was easy (and I know that few would let go of such a convenient set of day offs), but all I can do right now is hope that my supervisor’s entreaties would get through to the higher ups.  Until then, I’ll just have to grit my teeth, and take those LOAs.  I just hope that my paycheck at the end of the month won’t suffer as a result.

My systems still haven’t been restored, so much like the previous days I was stuck on Membership duty.  Though it suspiciously felt like I was always first on the call queue, it’s far more preferable to answering CS calls, oh yes.

Oh, it rained today, though it never got strong enough as to overwhelm the drainage systems in my area and cause flooding.  I still had to wear a windbreaker so I could go to the gym this afternoon, but otherwise it was mostly the same.  Mmm, with the lower temperatures, it’s going to be easy going to sleep after this.

Finally, I’ve done ‘restoring’ all of the characters from the Mobage and Yuma as well.  Mami is up next, then likely the rest of the girls from the Mitakihara area.  Have to watch for memory allocation problems again though.  SAI can be so unstable at times, it’s worrying.

Playing Hooky For Now

I didn’t go to the gym this afternoon.  My left knee was bugging me for most of the day at the office, and I was afraid that if I did my usual routine something would just give out.  And so I spent the rest of the afternoon at home, taking my first afternoon siesta for what seems to be a week.  Truth be known, before I finally dozed off, it didn’t really feel right. Just lying there in bed, I mean.  I suppose going to the gym every afternoon has become a habit of sorts, which is a good thing, since that means I can finally see things through to the end.  

It was a little convenient that it rained just as I was having second thoughts.  When I heard the patter of the raindrops on the roof beside my room I thought to myself, “Ah, I guess that means I won’t be able to go today.”  And with that, I was able to sleep more soundly.

I can’t say that the little siesta has fixed everything, but my knee is feeling much better now than how it was this morning.  So it’s back to the exercise routine tomorrow.  I’m not sure how I can make up for the missed day, but the goal for the week is still to lose at least a pound, so I’ll just see about that.  Less intake, and maybe a longer session at the gym perhaps?  Who knows?

Speaking of a refreshing afternoon nap, I think today was one of those days where it was really merited.  While it would be pushing it to say that my workshift was hellish, it wasn’t exactly how I wanted to end my week.  It was nearly five full hours of nonstop customer service calls, and I was this close to exploding on the callers I was talking.  In fact I think in some ways I did, as I was rude, brusque, and generally irritated.  It was like some idiot (likely in the workforce desk) gave me priority on the CS queue.  Earth to dumbarses, I’m a merchant rep first, CS rep second, not the other way around.  If I wanted to answer CS calls all day (and I don’t) I would have gone full-time.

It was a good thing my supervisor took the hint, and had me taken off the CS queue.  For all the flak the rest of my team gives her and our team coach, it’s times like these that I appreciate the efforts she does to help us out in, even if it’s something as simple as queue reassignment.

Anyway, enough for depressing work talk.  I’ve decided on the major colors for the remaining Pleiades.  Saki will get Green, Nico will get Blue, Mirai will get pink, while Satomi will get Indigo.  As for Sumire, well obviously she’d get Violet.  That, in the very least, was obvious.  I won’t be able to do the basing tonight though, but chores aside I should be able to work on them tomorrow. 

Hah, not that anyone cares about this little fan project of mine though.

P.S. For today’s reading, I finished Otaku no Musume-San.  It’s series like these (like Change! 123! and Wakusei no Samidare ,though for different reasons) that make me question the system that Japanese producers use to decide which manga get to be adapted to anime and which don’t.  Here we have nice and completed series, and yet they never get any kind of adaptation (which would lessen problems when said adaptation catches up to a source material, which is often a problem with an ongoing source).  I know I know, an anime is meant to publicize a work, and not vice versa, but it’s kind of a waste that series like these never get any exposure as a result.

Listening To Myself Ramble

Well, that was a surprisingly frustrating few hours at work.  For a Wednesday, there were sure a lot of calls on the queue, and this time around things only started to let up sometime after ten-thirty.  I’d have relaxed, if not for the fact that customer service calls didn’t really stop coming until around eleven.  That said, it was pretty much business as usual at the office.  Hopefully tomorrow won’t be as bad, as I’d really want to end my work week without a headache.

On the hobby side of things, I won’t be doing any base-coloring on the remaining girls in the stampede tonight because, well, as I mentioned in last night’s post it’s going to be hard to do so when the subjects in question don’t even have color schemes.  Okay, that’s not exactly true: both Mirai and Satomi have set hair colors, but the thing is their costumes as puella magi don’t.  I suppose I can do things sentai-style (which makes sense, given how the magical girl subgenre has taken nods from super sentai since at least Sailor Moon), but the fact remains: who gets which color?  

The three Pleiades so far that have schema to them (Kazumi, Umika, and Kaoru) have outfits associated strongly to a particular color, in this case Black, White, and Orange.  Given the sentai example I mentioned, the obvious choices would be the remaining colors you’d expect in a rainbow, meaning Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet.  

Incidentally, in the parent series (Madoka Magica) the general scheme of the outfit usually matched the hair color of the magical girl in question: for example Sayaka’s (who had blue hair) was mostly in shades of blue, while Madoka (whose hair was pink) had a frilly number that was very very pink.  Kazumi Magica (which features all the characters left unbased incidentally) follows this somewhat, with Kaoru and Kazumi’s (whose hair colors are orange and either black or a dark navy blue, respectively) magical girl costumes featuring parts with the same hues as their hair.  

Interestingly enough, their friend Umika’s dress doesn’t seem to follow this–Umika has dark blue hair, but her dress is mostly white.  So, unless those dark parts of her costume are really blue (hard to tell in a black-and-white comic), then it means that, at least in the Kazumi spinoff, there’s no direct correlation between hair color and the major color of a girl’s outfit…  Which makes things much more difficult, I suppose.

So I’m basically back to the beginning.  Since I can’t rely on hair color as a reliable marker (again, kind of hard to do in a black-and-white comic), I’ll have to see which color matches which girl more, at least in my mind.  Other fanwork would have helped in this case as a kind of reference, but sadly there’s a dearth of fanart on Kazumi Magica, much less colored fanart, barring one or two examples.  Talk about having limited options.

Okay, let’s start first on the most obvious one: Saki.  The single colored piece of art I’ve found on her gave her a mostly red scheme, and if you think about the sentai example it makes sense at face value.  After all, of the Pleiades (at this point of the manga) Saki seems to take the ‘big sister’ role in the group, which pretty much means it’s as close to being the leader as one could get, which in a super sentai show means getting stuck with the red suit.  

However it would be wise to remember that while the color theming of outfits has it roots in sentai shows, Madoka Magica and it’s spinoffs aren’t sentai, and where role expectations don’t necessarily match up with a specific color (or else we’d have Kyouko Sakura as a leader figure, ahaha).  Looking at other examples found in-universe, there’s quite a degree of variance; for example, Mami Tomoe’s dress is predominantly orange, Oriko Mikuni’s is mostly white, and Claire’s is a combination of orange and violet.

All this means of course is that I don’t have to go with red, though it might be the most obvious fit.  Heck, given the general military-esque feel of Saki’s dress, I’m tempted to actually use shades of green or khaki, though given how dark her dress is in grayscale the latter might not be optimal.  The thing is though, green also seems to fit another of the Pleiades, Nico Kanna.  Well, a lighter shade of green or maybe blue perhaps, since her dress reminds me of something one would expect from a skydiver (whose repertoire of clothing can feature bright colors)…

For the remaining two Pleiades (Satomi and Mirai), I’m tempted to use some shade of pink on one of them.  Mirai has a heart theme going with her polka-dotted dress, so giving her the baby-pink theme would be so obvious (and it doesn’t hurt that she has been shown with cotton-candy pink hair), but Satomi’s already been shown wearing a (light, almost-white) pink blouse, and I really can’t see her in something yellow, though indigo could work… Decisions, decisions…

Yeah, selecting a color scheme is serious business.  It’s kind of depressing though how all this effort might be invalidated once a future chapter of Kazumi Magica gets another color spread.  Ah well.

Oh, and what about Sumire?  I’d say that her name alone gives enough hints to what color I’m going to use, ahaha.