My characters drawn by other artists: [link]

Update time!

And I am going to inaugurate this new journal with my brand new...picture?



Yes, you've seen that right. Thy-Robocop has taken up drawing sketches of his characters now!

*LE GASP!*

Yeah, I know, I'm kind of half-shocked myself about my sudden desire to draw stuff. I mean, last time I've drawn anything in my life was, like, 8 years ago. And that was Technical Drawing, the kind of stuff that architects usually do. And the last time I did any actual Creative drawing was probably during Elementary School. Usually, my marks in both subjects weren't terribly good, and criticism wasn't too good either, and it may be that I convinced myself that I could never really live up to the impossibly high standards that the teachers demanded for marking the artwork. In any case, ever since I have stopped drawing, I always said that I would not attempt any drawing because it would suck.

So how come only a week ago I changed my mind and decided it a go?

Well, I'd say that I've had this desire to draw scenes and characters from my story since I learned about light novels¹ and started writing magical girl stories. I particularly liked how the images present in light novels would enhance the reading by providing a visual image to the scene, which I find helps me immerse myself into the story more. So I thought that adding pictures for my stories would be a really good idea as well. Particularly because I like writing magical girl stories, and magical girls are well known for their ridiculously flamboyant magical outfits that defy many things, including words². Having pictures in my story would aid me quite a lot to reduce descriptions to a reasonable size that does not interrupt the flow of the story. And as a bonus, pictures of my characters do help improve my morale and drive to get stuff finished, as much as stories where my characters are present³.

Now, having said that I (believed I) sucked at drawing, you can see the catch-22 dilemma that presents itself: my drawings suck, so I'd have to ask an artist to draw the pictures for me, which would require me to describe in words what I want. But what I want often defies words, and only a drawing can really capture what I immagine. And I suck at drawing, so... You can see where this is going, right?

And then, a few weeks ago, I start reading the In Which I Watch Sailor Moon thread, where a guy called Shadowjack writes very hilarious Abridge Scripts/review of Sailor Moon episodes, which often diverge into a continuity on their own⁴. But the thing that captured my interest was the illustrated recaps and comics Shadowjack would often draw. Here's a few examples of it (scroll down to see some of them) [link] [link] [link]

Now, as you may see, the drawings are pretty much sketches. Most other drawings I see here on DA would easily trump his drawings in a contest. And yet I find that somehow, it works, and it's still awesome. I can easily identify the characters as Sailor Moon, Mars, Mercury, Tuxedo Kamen, etc. and i can easily immagine the characters in the situations he shows. In short, the comics he does are awesome, and add to the awesomeness of his reviews. And if Shadowjack can do that with sketches, then, I though, why can't I?

Cue me buying a pencil and a rubber, and drawing Alyssa Gillespine in her magical girl outfit, as shown above.

I'll put drawing specific comments in the picture itself. Suffice to say, considering I haven't been drawing for 8 years or so, I think I did pretty well there. And I find that I really enjoyed drawing her, and definitely want to sketch again in the near future. So yeah, there's definetely going to be more sketches coming soon. Perhaps even a comic or two, to accompany the stories I write who knows?

And speaking of snippets... They're still coming, don't worry about it. It's just university assignments and my part time job hare really been taking up a lot of my spare time lately⁵. Fortunately, I've finished lectures and he more urgent assignments today, so I'll definetely have the time to write stuff in the next few weeks. Keep an eye out for that!

That's all for now. Catch you later!


1: Light novels [link] are a type of short novel inter spaced with drawings that's quite popular in Japan (anime such as Haruhi Suzumiya [link] and Spice and Wolf [link] originally come from light novels, for example). A western example of this would be the Leviathan series [link](Westerfeld_novel) by Scott Westerfeld, who you may know more for the Uglies series. [link]

2:Seriously, some of the clothes do require a large amount of purple prose to describe [link], and some of the words needed to describe them, such as mullet dress, didn't even exist until a few years ago!

3:Which is why I like OCT tournaments and collaborative projects, even though I can't seem to find the time to join the former, and doing the latter is proving to be quite a laborious task to get everyone organised.

4:As with magical girl costumes, words cannot really describe the awesomeness that his recaps provide. If you loved the Sailor Moon anime, then I'd advise you to go and check his stuff out yourself [link] . And while I'm at it, if you are a fan of My Little Pony and the latest Friendship is Magic reboot, I also recommend Sun Tzu's Where I Watch My Little Pony series, which is equally awesome and hilarious [link]. He's even present on DA, under , if you want to say hello.

5: Seems like my constant referencing stuff in my assignments has led me to use footnotes now. Should I worry?