Louistrations

We spent today in Tokyo's electronics district, Akihabara; A series of tightly located electronic stores and hobby shops. There were several floors dedicated to retro video games, manga, mech and anime figures. The variety and expanse of the items was unbelievable. It's easy to understand why Akihabara is known as a geek's paradise. I'm surprised I spent as little as I did, there were a lot of things that I wanted to buy, but I managed to constrain myself. I left with just 3 manga books, a copy of Dengeki Daioh, a Yotsubato figure and a mug. (The tea cups provided in the hotel room were far too small!) I could have spent a whole lot more, if not my entire savings!

In the evening, Barry and I found a quaint little ramen bar down next to Aoyama station. Oolong tea is apparently served cold.

Hey! This post is brought to you by generic internet cafe near Mount Fuiji!

I never really went into any detail in my last post. I'm here with two friends, Peter and Barry. I was invited along hence the suddenness of the trip.

The flight was particularly terrible, roughly about 10 hours in duration from London. I only managed to sleep for three minutes or so, although not consecutively. There was an annoying little child that insisted on playing with electric cars in the aisle next to me.

Our first day was basically 2 days long in length, although it helped adjust to the time difference quickly.

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Excuse me for not having a more imaginative title, but it is five in the morning so go easy on me. I leave for Japan in just over an hour, and I'll be there for just a little over 3 weeks. It still doesn't feel like I'm going, it all happened relatively quickly.

I'm going to try and post to my blog while I'm away, but I can't guarantee anything. It all depends on whether or not I have the correct means to charge my portables and the availability of Wi-Fi internet. Supposedly Wi-Fi flows like wine in Japan. But, wine's not free, is it? Unless it's communal wine or buy one get one free.

My very basic knowledge of Japanese has never been used other than reading manga, web-sites and playing through the odd imported video-game. I've never actually had to speak anything. So that should be fun, I think!

On a semi-related note, I've received my application back from SOAS. I'm a candidate for this year's Japanese Language Proficiency Test in December, albeit just the newbie level(4)! I'm not quite sure how badly I'll do, but as long as there are lots of questions concerning memes on 2channel, then I should be fine!

Just as shiny objects attract the attention of crows, so does the appeal of a shiny gadget attract mine.

It's not an iPhone - that has yet to be released here. It's just an iPod touch. I was sure I would be buying an iPhone when it came out here, but after the announcement last month that the European iPhones will still use the EDGE network, it's made the iPhone fairly dead on arrival. Which is a shame. It would be crazy to enter a £40 per month contract for something you can't use, then again, you have to take into consideration the whole shiny appeal.

Anyway, the iPod touch is probably better suited to me in hindsight. My mobile phone really only gets used to listen to my friend brag about his high-scores on Guitar Hero.

The iPod touch really is a wonderful device. It does everything you'd expect a media player to do, and does it very stylishly. But it was the Safari browser that really surprised, it's by far the best mobile browser I've used.

I'm just hoping they release cases for it soon. I've collected enough fingerprints on mine to start a small forensics lab.

Who's this? You'll probably recognise her as the girl drinking from a mug in the top right-hand corner of the web-site.

She's been there in various different forms from early on in the development of the web-site. She's named Chipper, which is actually the project name I gave to the web-site which she inherited. During my time coding the web-site and doing menial database work I came up with a handful of tea related comic pages about her. You see, this is what happens when I get left to my thoughts for too long!

This page took far too long to finish, a lot longer than I had anticipated. Although it's all my own doing, it's very much an experimental piece. I tried out a lot of new techniques, most of which failed horribly. Most notably was my brilliant idea of inking directly on to tracing paper; I could have lovely clean lines without the original pencil lines interfering! What was I thinking? Ink doesn't take well to tracing paper, I got ink everywhere! What a noob!

I did have success in a few areas though. For instance, this was the first time I've used masking in Photoshop.

Update: I've gone back and compiled snapshots of the piece at various stages like the subsequent pages.

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I've spent the past week home alone with the dog while my family has been away on holiday. I never would have guessed that such a small dog would be such hard work!

I tend to be very secretive about my personal projects. I get easily embarrassed about the work that I do. So as I take my first steps into breaking the silence around some of my projects, I apologise if my writing reads a little forced. It's not something that comes very natural to me.

Over the past year the project that has garnered most of my attention will probably be Charcoal, albeit I don't exactly have anything solid to show for it. I just have lots of writing, scribbled-out scenes, sketches of locations, diagrams and house floor-plans.

If you're new to my web site, Charcoal is one of older comic characters. She's a tall girl that normally dresses in black, or rather a very dark grey. There are various pictures around, she's not hard to miss.

Charcoal has had a fairly strong story-line for several years now, not that anybody could notice. That's what I've been concentrating on. I've been putting events into chronological order, adding narrative, filling in plot holes and making everything flow as seamlessly as possible. There are some that would argue that I'm actually going about things properly for the first time. Scripts and planning? What a crazy idea, that'll never work! I must admit, it's a nice feeling having all the pieces fall into place.

The story as a whole is split into books and chapters spanning two epochs, although only figuratively at this point. As much as I'd like to go into specifics on the plot-line, it wouldn't exactly be wise to do so at this point. Would it?

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When I saw this figurine when it was unveiled last year I knew I had it get it! It's a figurine of 涼宮ハルヒ Suzumiya Haruhi from 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, one of the better anime shows out there. Produced by Max Factory it's 19cm tall and made in PVC. For a commercial figurine it's really well made and they've perfectly captured Haruhi's iconic pose. Well, I really like it anyway.

I'm not a big collector of models and figurines, in fact I only had a couple before this one. Although the do interest me, albeit not enough for me to spend a lot of money. Some of the resin models that are created are nothing short of amazing. Assembling and painting figurines from kits isn't something I can see myself doing, mainly due to my dislike of getting my fingers dirty.

On a side note, my camera can take some really nice photographs when it wants to! I bought it cheap in a closing down sale. If the camera didn't resemble a cinder block in both weight and aesthetics, and if it had a battery life longer than 5 minutes (no, really!); I'd probably go so far as saying it was the best camera in the world!

Firstly, for anybody that's unsure of what vector-based images are; they’re images consisting of sequences of points and paths that are used to create lines and shapes. Artwork created using this technique is often easily identified by its clean lines and precision. The main advantage of vector artwork is that it's infinitely scalable without degradation, making it perfect for logos and print material.

Programs that specialise in vector-based images include Corel Draw, Freehand and Illustrator. However it's also possible to achieve a similar result from within Photoshop, albeit it's a long shot from being ideal. This is obtained by using the often over-looked pen tool. The pen tool was absent in my old copy of Photoshop Elements, so I spent a short while seeing what it's capable of.

I've touched on vectors in the past with my short time with the Illustrator trial, as well as for a project that I'm currently working on. (I'll talk about that at a later date!)


This is the drawing that I will be making into a vector image. It's a quick drawing of Harriet that's nice and simple. The original pencil sketch is on the left and a cleaner copy drawn on tracing paper is on the right.

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I recently drew some illustrations for a short story by Stephen J Wright entitled "The Goblin". It's a charming children's story following the mischievous antics of the last surviving goblin named "Glob" and his magically over-sized bat, "Butch".

Although I'm not really at liberty to post the story in its entirety, here are a couple of the drawings that I made. Due to tight time restrictions, I didn't have time to create detailed backgrounds.


If I recall correctly, the story was available to read at a library in Chester. I don't know any further details other than that. However, the author is apparently looking into publishing and planning a sequel, "The Return of the Glob". Zing!