Sketch Blog #1 – Taking Requests!

Merry Leap Year, everybody!

I don’t know why, but I love the number 4, and things being split into quarters. So I love how every four years we account for the fact the earth completes an orbit around the sun in 365.25 days by creating an extra little pocket of time. Well, not CREATING time, but taking four quarters and joining them together into a secret little time nugget.

I like to imagine a future when humans have spread out among the stars and started forming intergalactic relations, possibly with aliens, possibly our descendants who migrated to other planets. Well anyway, I like to imagine them taking a tour trip to Earth, and having the ‘leap year’ explained to them as part of ‘Earth culture’. Or ‘Earth geography’, whatever. Then they’d explain old rituals and customs and how time was measured thousands of years ago, and  celebrating Equinox and the Solstice and the like (splitting the year into four equal parts, thank you Pagans).

I also like the number 21. It’s my age, and it’s also the date when Winter/Summer Solstice and Spring/Autumn Equinox are celebrated. It’s also half of the number 42, which we all know is the answer to life, the universe and everything.

The number 4 is unlucky in Chinese and Japanese culture, though. It’s read like ‘shi’, which sounds similar to the pronunciation of ‘death’.

ANYWAY. I didn’t come here to talk about Pagans and the number 4.

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I’ve started drawing again. Just as a hobby, and to experiment with new techniques, and to kind of keep the creative juices flowing. So I’m going to start posting a monthly sketch blog on here (maybe even bimonthly, if I draw a lot), of all the little doodles, sketches and drawings I compile over time.

Don’t expect anything of amazingly high quality, because as I say, these are just sketches. Mainly done on MS Paint (boy, that takes me back). Basically I don’t have very good drawing software (I use Adobe Flash and it can be a pain in the arse) and MS Paint simply feels the closest to doodling in pencil/biro like I would on my school notebooks. Maybe I’ll post some of those doodles too, hehe.

Because my imagination feels so dead these days I’ve decided to take requests too, or even just idea suggestions.

If you want me to sketch you something, leave a comment on this blog, tweet me (@naiveinnippon), or a message me on Facebook (Naïve In Nippon).

And without further ado, here are this month’s sketches (posted in no particular order):

Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire, A Series of Unfortunate Events, sans faces for added mystery >:3

A little boy looking over the edge of a ship/tall building as his parents fight in the background.

Request for CS: ‘Draw me’. So I did. 🙂 Another possible request was to draw the MHS gang updated but I’m getting a haircut in a few days so at that point it wouldn’t look very updated anymore, ahaha.

A little tribute to CL in her ‘Baddest Female’ (나쁜 기집애) music video. She is a queen and I worship her. 

Rena and Czarina. Two original characters from this idea I had for a manga a few years ago, and might still one day draw. 

Request for RM: ‘What about something Star Wars? Or Harry Potter, lol’. So I combined the two. I hope you like it, haha. xD

A woman in the shower. I, um, don’t really know why I drew this. I think it was to practice drawing the female form in a flattering manner and also to practice drawing wet hair. Yeah, that sounds about right. Did I succeed? Probably not.

A girl crouching. A little CL-inspired with the spiky eyeliner and urban attire.

A kiss. It’s really hard to draw people kissing but this one turned out okay I think.

Some dude. I’m pretty bad at drawing guys. I need more practice.

A lil non-starter of a cute little superhero type. Looks a bit like Hit Girl, doesn’t she?

Another little abandoned doodle of a girl in a cap.

The beginning sketch of an original character I created when I was 15, called ‘Mono’, drawn in Flash. Since then I layered it up and it became my cover photo on Facebook.

The above sketch, layered up and completed. Still looks kinda shit, though I can’t entirely blame Flash, I think it’s mainly because I’m lazy.

This came outta nowhere. She’s a cutie. Any ideas for names? So far all I can think of is ‘Anna’, because she reminds me a bit of the Japanese singer Anna Tsuchiya. 

Moody lil cutie.

‘Queen Qwerty’, a character I came up with on the spot. This was an attempt to come away from manga style and create something more simple. Looks a bit like a cross between The Powerpuff Girls and South Park.

A cute little princess character I came up with, originally based on a genderbent drawing of a friend. 

The next three drawings were requests, and they are somewhat, ahem, NSFW (aka a teensy bit porny), but I really like how they turned out, so I decided to post them to this blog after all. Look at them if you will, or not, up to you. The requests were of something Marvel/superhero girly/a cute butt. So in tribute to the new DP movie I draw Lady Deadpool, also Smash Girl from the YT animation ‘Power Trip’, and R.Mika and Cammy from Street Fighter.

Last but not least, I had Tchaikovsky’s ‘Waltz of the Flowers’ in my head and so came up with this while listening to it. Lovely piece of classical music.

 

So there you have it! These are all works from the past month of sketching. The simplest, most incomplete doodles maybe took 5 minutes or less, and the one that took the longest was the final NSFW pic of the SF girls, but that still only took 1.5 hours. The not-a-sketch but complete-work-of-art which was the Mono Facebook cover took forever, between 5-10 hours, I think. Though I definitely procrastinated which probably added to the total time.

That’s all, folks! If you have a request, or a suggestion on something to draw, leave a comment on this blog, my Twitter, or my Facebook page. See ya!

 

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It’s a New Year – Regrets and Resolutions

I started 2016 with a bang – meeting new people at my friend’s annual New Year’s Eve party, getting a little too excited, drinking too much, losing my gloves and my phone, going to bed with the room spinning, waking up to the sound of my mum yelling, and then (literally) picking up the pieces. Probably not that different to the average Brit’s New Year, to be honest.

January’s almost over already! Blimey, time flies by faster and faster the older you get. There was no white Christmas this year, and this winter has been pretty mild (save for ‘Storm Frank’ and the UK floods), but it FINALLY snowed a little bit over the weekend. Not a huge amount, but enough to cover the ground and look like a festive, magical blanket hiding all the ugly bits.

I had my January exams over last week. They didn’t go terribly, but they didn’t go brilliantly either. I submitted an essay on ‘women and violence’ in Le Morte D’Arthur (by Sir Thomas Malory) for one of my English modules, which was pretty substandard, I’m sad to say. But my semester of Medieval Literature and Arthurian Legends is over now. They were highly interesting, but unfortunately not subjects of English that I was particularly gifted in. Hopefully that will change when I start the new semester with Literature of the Romantic Period and Japanese Film & Literature.

As soon as my last exam was over I got on the train and went to go visit a friend down south who I hadn’t seen since before my year abroad in Japan, and we had a great time catching up, exploring the city, eating junk food and watching the new Star Wars again, this time in 4DX at Cineworld. The movie was enjoyable (obviously), the 3D was okay (I’m not crazy about it) and SOME of the 4D effects were great.

The good effects included the motion seats that would move and vibrate along with the camera pan or spaceships flying, and some strobes that lit up whenever there was an explosion, along with some wind and a bit of water splashing when in rain. The vibrations from clashing light sabers were also a pretty nice effect. Other things, like these little whooshing bursts of wind that erupted from my headrest and spurted past my ear whenever the Stormtroopers fired their blasters, were not so great. It felt like there were actual bullets whizzing past my head by a hair’s breadth and it made me want to curl up under my seat and take cover.

And now here we are, with me finally having a bit of free time after a grueling semester. It was hard work, and I got sick and stressed out a lot more than I did in Japan, but I was much more productive and efficient in my studies and entering societies than I was when I first began university over two years ago. At the same time, I seem to have turned into a bit of a social recluse. Whenever I didn’t have to go to class, I would shut myself away in my room and not leave except to eat or go to the bathroom for days on end. And by the end of my hermit retreat, I would get anxious when the time approached to leave my cave and interact with other people. I also had on-off bouts of intense nihilism and depression. But for now, mentally, I feel quite healthy and at ease.

When I visited my friend this weekend, he mentioned he hadn’t seen any artwork or internet publications by me in a long while. He’s working now, with a 9-5 job in the city, but he says he still tries to keep up with his art at least once a week, and that’s inspired me to want to produce more stuff despite all the work I have to do as well. I thought about starting drawing again, and wondering where I could publish my drawings, then remembered I could still use this blog as a place to keep it all linked. I don’t really use Tumblr, deviantART, Flickr, or any of those. And I hate starting new accounts just to let them gather dust when I lose motivation. So here we are: new cover photo, new profile picture. Feel free to follow me on Facebook and Twitter, too.

So, regrets of 2015:

• I don’t think I completely made the most out of my time in Japan and there are still so many places I want to visit and friends I want to make.
• I didn’t budget carefully enough and ended up owing my mum a lot of money which I’m still paying back. Luckily I still have that Skype tutoring job (which is going great, by the way).
• I didn’t work as hard as I could have and this is still a problem I’m facing back in British university.
• I didn’t make a big deal out of my 21st birthday back in September. That’s not a HUGE regret, and I was too exhausted at the time to have a huge party, but I think in 2016 for my 22nd I’d definitely like to try inviting all my friends around.
• I can’t go to California this year after all. One day I hope I can.
• The disaster that was New Year’s Eve. I’m not drinking at all this month and after that I vow to limit a night’s drinking to four drinks only.

 

And my resolutions for 2016:

• Drink less, eat less, sleep more, exercise more
• Do all my homework on time and keep up with assignments
• Read for leisure, not just for my degree
• Do an internship in Japan this summer (in the works!)
• Visit family and friends more
• Travel a bit around the country and get to know the UK a bit better
• Be creative and use this website to enhance my artwork and writing skills
• At the same time, try to work on my internet addiction
• Plan ahead for people’s birthdays so that I can give them great presents
• Learn a new skill – I’m studying Korean at the moment, but I think I’d like to learn to drive in my final year of university so that I can work towards getting an international license and then be able to drive in other countries.

 

Happy New Year!