Good Taste Just Never Goes Out Of Fashion... or Vectors

Says the pink fox tailed fat guy....

This is a vector design. Starts as a pencil sketch, but is converted into a series of mathematical lines, curves and objects, some with cut outs in them and completed with a solid color or a mathematical graduation between 2 colors.

Doing this makes it size independent. No mater how small or large you print the file, the lines and colors are "perfect". Never get any jaggies or pixelization you would if you digitally painted it at whatever resolution instead.

The thing sign makers and printers love. Of course of it was done in color at 300dpi, that is good enough for a glossy magazine, and we do that too.

We can be found at Art & Technology.

The Artists Art and The Artist - A recent Twitter Artist Event.

The Twitter Art community has a few yearly Art promotions.  One is for Artists to post a picture of themselves surrounded by eight of their works.  Such as the above.

An interesting aspect of this is that many artworks look a lot like the artists. Many artists that do character art appear to draw themselves in most of what they do.  Not the case for me, but as I mostly do mechanical/ automotive related commissioned work that wouldn't happen anyway.

Thing is I found it hard to select just 8 artworks. I do caricatured, cartooned, but also realistic depictions AND logos.  The above was the comprised selection I came up with a few months ago.

At another time I would have a different selection.

To see the range , visit our website, ArtandTechnology.com.au  where the range is on display... where you will also find links to our store, videos and music.

The New 2019 and a Realization

Just noticed 12 months ago the post here was on comic printing. Getting those double sided pages in the right order.  Others involved music production and my first try at translating manga.

So if I look back at the year I didn't talk much about the ongoing illustration work I do.  Mostly Automotive related.  As a lot of that is caricatured, it does relate to much of the comic related posts. A picture tells a story, even if a comic is much more about the story. But as I put the new Art samples up on our website, I rarely mention them here.

The translation thing is the topic that stands out as being  very different, as far as topics go on this Blog, but has been a very significant aspect of my life for 35 years or so.  Even if making those 20 or so pages of the manga in English looked like they came out of the blue.

My wife and kids are native Japanese speakers.  So I have been involved with a lot of English to Japanese and Japanese to English translations, without being a "translator" for many decades.

There are a lot of expressions in English that if directly translated don't mean anything. A lot of Slang is the same. And the reverse is true of Japanese.  So a lot is not what it says, but what it means.

I am now following a few different Japanese to English Translators on Twitter, people that do that for a living, and have found them to say what I was thinking all along.  Fluency in Japanese and being a great Translator into English are "almost" not related to each other.  The Translator is the one doing the writing in the new language, and must be a good writer in that language. They also must be an expert in the field the text is in.

So I Realized I was on the right track all along....

Five Star Stories - A Japanese Manga Running since 1986... for Kanji Study

The Five Star Stories is a manga that has been running for decades. We have the first 10 volumes,  each some 177 pages.  All in Japanese of course.

I bought the first 4 volumes many years ago when living in Japan,  with the intent of reading them "some time".  My daughter read all those, then bought the next 6 volumes in the last 10 years or so, then read them too.

The way things go with working in Japan, and I was there for 15 years,  meant that I never got around to being fluent enough in written Japanese to read them ( It just wasn't something the company I worked for needed me to do).  These don't have the furigana (phonetic hiragana) along side the Kanji to help young readers as many Shonen (boys) manga do. 

So it has come the time to actually study enough new Kanji to be able to read them.  Current computer based dictionaries and just the front end Japanese processor in Windows makes looking up and entering the printed Japanese  much easier than when I first started learning Japanese.

I also have all the tools for comic development.... so doing some as translated pages is something I'm playing with.   As the current fashion is to retain the right to left reading format when translating Japanese manga, I don't need to swap all the images horizontally.  It does mean in my translations I've added arrows for panel order, starting at top right of each page, and numbers on the speech balloons for reading order within the panel..

I have done my own cartoons, such as Heavy Metal Garage and the comics Terraform.  Been using Photoshop, CorelDraw and recently Clip Studio Paint. Fonts are from Blambot. For the experiments here, I've used CorelDraw to make the balloon plus text overlay.

For me, Japanese has been a thing I've been committed to for a very long time.  But it is just now that written Japanese is something I can devote the effort to.

I do know a few Kanji, and don't have a problem with hiragana or katakana. It is really encouraging to be able to type a balloon from the manga  directly into the editor.  I am working from the printed page, so I am first converting that into a text file.

I then hit a Kanji or two I don't know and have to look them up via radicals. Radical are the bits of characters it is made up from, and the stroke count. I do know how to count strokes, and probably the order a kanji should be drawn, even if I don't know it.

Sometimes getting the right Kanji is fast.... but other times I currently pick the wrong radical to start from, and it isn't in the character list with the stoke count it has.  But this is why I'm doing this exercise, so I get faster at it, and know more so I don't have to look them up.  I keep another file with the kanja, hiragana and meaning, to use in revision.  My "script" file looks like:

It is then I type in what it could be in English.   I put "Aaa, that is probably MORTAHEAD fighting",  but the Japanese is closer to " Aaaa, most likely, the sound of  MORTAHEAD fighting".
The "sound" seemed irrelevant as the question was what is that noise in the previous balloon.

The more I revise, the less the spaces breaking up words is needed and I streamline how I am doing this.

This text script of the manga, and the Kanji study file is my actual goal.  The comic in English above is just "a bit of fun, because I can"  and isn't for distribution , as that violates copyright.

Yes I do know Google Translate. It is just monumentally bad with Japanese! Turning most sentences into meaningless junk. 

Now I have read that there is an English version of Five Star Stores now, but that doesn't help me in my language studies. I can always ask my wife or kids if I get really stuck, but haven't done that yet.

Five Star Stories itself is in the Japanese tradition of the huge powered suits similar to Gundam. But there are twists to that.  The machines are one off bespoke Knights, rather than the mass produced tanks of Gundam.

Not all about giant machines though, this much later page I did as a standalone with a bit of colour shows.

There are also many colourful characters and settings. Just two being:

Their names are actually Ladios Sopp  and Chrome Ballanche, but I haven't updated the above graphic.

The thing about the manga is that the vocabulary isn't exactly the kind of thing you use at the Japanese post office or bank.  But either is the dialogue in Star Trek, Babylon 5 or Dark Matter.
That is one of the attractions and things that makes it interesting to use for study.

DREAM - Not A Pop Song

Our Dream track kind of sounds like a pop/rock song. About the most pop thing I have done.  It is however far removed from the structure of a standard pop song.  Billions of people are writing those, and so I don't need too and play around with structure a lot in all recent works

I think that it sounds like a pop song is kind of from the expectation of the instrument arrangement and sounds.  The pop vocal treatment probably helps too.

It does have some words in it, but they aren't organized as verses or anything like pop lyrics.  They are just another instrument sound.

It does have a musical chorus, but that is organized more around a heavy rock riff structure.  All of my tracks are based around Riffs. The synth equivalent is a sequenced pattern. And like Tangerine Dream, I try to have such a pattern running throughout a track. It is something I like. Does anyone notice? No idea!

The actual tracks:

The Dream VERSE/CHORUS is basically 3 parallel repeating Riffs, that are slightly changed in prominence to give the effect of a Verse Chorus structure. 

There is no Guitar solo. The 2 synth lead line melodies are the closest it gets to solos.

So the Not a pop song track.