[658] really soft

console

< Piro >

"finding kimiko"

Thursday - January 6, 2005

I actually posted this over on my fredart blog yesterday, but i think MT readers might find it an interesting insight into the wednesday DPD of kimiko, and a little bit about how i feel about my drawings and the some of the challenges of 'finding' a character. I'll edit out the whining and paste the important bits here for your amusement :

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After about four hours of struggling and getting absolutely nowhere, i decided that the writing was on the wall, and i needed to do a DPD in service day. Luckily, my drawing ability was at least reasonable yesterday. Unfortunately, i also wanted to do a drawing of Kimiko.

I should never draw Kimiko, i haven't been able to draw her in over a year. I'm embarrassed by the poster i made of her (i admit, the entire project was an attempt to 'find' kimiko again, and it was a failure) and alas, todays drawing is also a disaster. I'm not just talking about how off everything is, from her right arm to her chest seemingly being off (after a dozen comments to that effect, i felt i had to do something to fix it, so i tried to add some more shading... it sorta works... the poor thing, no one ever notices her chest unless things are unbalanced :)

What bugs me most is that i can't find Kimiko in anything i draw anymore. I have one little pen sketch i did a few weeks ago, and its as close as i've been able to capture her recently (i scanned it as my rant image above) Maybe it's much like the indeterminate nature of what we really know about Kimiko. All of the other girls in megatokyo are loosely tied to various stereotypes (tough girl, spooky girl, etc) that help define the characters and give visual clues as to how to put them together. Kimiko has no such stereotype by design, and this elusiveness of her nature, and the complexity of her inner workings leaves me as flummoxed as piro himself when it comes to putting her together and understanding her.

As we get closer to the parts of the story where focus involves Kimiko more and more, maybe i'll start to find her. Maybe i never will. Kimiko is the one who will have to tell me, too, at some point, were the story goes. I'm not gonna force her to talk to me, she may pass both piro and me buy, i really don't know yet.

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Working on fridays comic right now, as well as a rant about goals for Megatokyo and myself for 2005. Kind of a rough start for the year, but there's been a lot going on... at least i didnt disappear like i did this time last year :P.

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< Dom >

"California's version of cold"

Tuesday - January 11, 2005

[Dom] - 23:59:59 - [link here]

There are plenty of amusing little witticisms about the weather in the San Francisco Bay Area, from the all-too-true "California, where summer means your lawn is dead and winter means it's growing too fast" to the misattributed witticism "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco."

I can't remember where I heard my favorite one, but I repeat it often--"I can't live anywhere else, they have SEASONS there." Working in San Francisco in the summer, you get used to 60 degree days, even as the sun happily shines down on you. Ocean air and an insulating layer of fog will do that, as San Diego residents will also tell you (I know some people whose least favorite phrase is "sunny San Diego", which is precisely why I use it).

What does this have to do with anything? Well, when I was in sunny San Diego a few months back for Comic Con, Fred gave me a Megadustrial hat as a joke, since the weather in the Bay rarely gets cold enough for me to wear the thing without getting seriously uncomfortable.

But now I'm going up to Lake Tahoe, where they actually have winter, and thanks to a few recent storm fronts, have several feet of winter lying around, trapping motorists and delighting snow bunnies.

First time in years that I'm going up to the snow (okay, last year's jaunt in Shimane counts, but I had a hat, at least) and I don't have the damn hat, because I wore it at a New Year's party to deal with 3 AM, one of the few times the Bay ever dips below the freezing point. And I left it there, like a chump.

That's just my luck. Oh well. I still expect to have a lot of fun up in the mountains, but I expect that my ears will fall off at some point, hopefully making me a little less goofy-looking.

Well, I dunno if anything will ever make me look less goofy-looking, so scratch that thought.