Explorations

Elective Explorations Project

“How can you find, explore, and expand your passion?”

Comics, specifically manga, have always been an important part of my life. Back when I was little, my mother (who also likes manga), told me that I should read them in order to practice my Japanese. 

…so as the rebellious, hateful child I was, I absolutely refused to, declared that I hated manga, and swore to never read it.

My mother still had hope, though. So she kept all of the shoujo (or romance) manga, in the hopes that I would someday read it – and all of the shounen (or action) manga she gave away to all her friends’ sons. 

Cut to like, a number of years later, here I am, a shounen manga addict, mourning all of the manga that I wouldn’t have had to buy all over again if I had just liked it from the beginning. 

There’s no real point to this story other than to introduce the fact that I have a manga addiction, I want to be a manga artist when I grow up, and then when I heard about what exactly the explorations project was I thought it would be a good opportunity to learn and practice actually making manga!

I’ve attempted making manga before, and the most notable time was over the summer of 2020, in the midst of the pandemic.

However, back when I made this project, I can’t truly say that I left my comfort zone – though it was a good experience, and I learned quite a bit about structuring a page and placing panels, even as I was making it, it was a story and concept that I was unsatisfied with. And despite how I learned how to structure comic pages, I can’t say I was the happiest with the end result. (The photos above show the traditional versions – all of the pages were later finished digitally.)

So, for this project, I thought that I would try my hand at something similar, but a little different.

Fight scenes!! I’ve always struggled to add motion to my illustrations, so I thought that it would be a good idea to combine two different skills I need to work on – motion and page structuring – for this project.

Killing two birds with one stone, essentially.

We also had to connect this project to at least one of the 21st century skills Freestyle has us strive for. I’d say the two that relate the most are technological literacy and high productivity. With this project, I wanted to learn better how to draw fight scenes and action, specifically (the technology), as well as be more productive with my drawings – since I draw things very very very slowly. If I want to become a comic book artist, that’s something I absolutely need to work on.  

So!! I set out to make a comic with a fight scene!! At first I decided to try and take notes on how to make a fight scene, scrapped that idea, and just winged it. 

I’ve read a lot of shounen manga, and because this was meant be an introduction into fight scenes, rather than something super full-fledged and professional, I thought that winging it would be fine, at least for the first try. (For future projects I will use better references and I plan to do research, but also I just had no time). 

So!! Character designs!! I decided I would use two characters from a story that had just been swimming around in my head lately. The premise involved a detective trying to catch a phantom thief who stole magical items from museums, and wealthy colonizers who stole the magic items from the original country’s inhabitants (the mages). I didn’t actually have designs for these characters yet, so I decided I would work on those first.

Later down the line I realized that I would need to make a third character reference sheet for a third, policewoman character by the name of Nyx, though due to time constraints I never ended up making that third reference sheet.

So, now that I had characters, I set out to make the comic!! The first thing to do with making comics is to make a ネーム (read as nehmu), or rough draft, or sketch of your comic. I began with an opening shot of the setting – the location was meant to be in a vaguely European-esque city, as this was meant to be a colonized country. I also added rain, because I thought that rain would be a fun aesthetic to work with.

Because it was only a rough draft, I wrote many notes for myself and what I intended to do for the finished product. Also notable is the fact that I chose to make the dialogue in Japanese. I thought it would be a good opportunity to practice writing dialogue in the language – as it’ll be a useful skill should I ever manage to do this professionally. (For those of you who can read Japanese, please forgive the less than stellar hand-writing and vocabulary. I have much more experience speaking and reading than I do writing.)

Before I could continue any further on the rough drafts, however, I ended up catching COVID-19. 

Catching COVID-19 was a huge setback. While I hadn’t truly expected to finish more than a page or two by the deadline, falling ill left me with truly no time what-so-ever to finish (or truly get started on the final product of) the project. Because of this, after I recovered, I was only able to finish the rough drafts of the manga.

Ultimately, the comic ended up only being six pages. This also ended up being because of the time constraint. Though near the end, I believe I ended up using that as an excuse to lessen the amount of action and fighting in the comic, and retreat back into my comfort zone – meaning that I wasn’t truly able to fulfill either of my goals for this project, which were to draw better motion, as well as produce a finished comic.

I have to admit that I’m quite disappointed with the end result.

I started drawing (rather, cleaning/lining/making the finished product of) the first page, but again, due to time, was unable to finish. The image below is all I was able to finish.

However, from what I have so far, I think it has some potential, at the very least. As of right now, I haven’t really done anything I haven’t done before, but I hope to finish this project over the summer, if not for Freestyle, then for myself.

Maybe I’ll be able to come back and update this page!! We’ll see 🙂

Experimental Music

For Digital Media, we were required to used the skills we’d learned with MIDI instruments to create a song, or music of our own.

My inspiration for this project was actually a game that I’ve been playing recently: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. In this game, the main character, Link, uses a magical Ocarina (as well as magic songs) in order to travel through time, change the time of day, teleport to new places, and communicate telepathically with his sister(-figure). Essentially, magical music.

I liked the concept of this, where something so simple could hold that much power – and the music itself feels magical: when you listen to it, you can kind of feel the power that’s being expressed, or summoned. I wanted to make something that captured the same vibe. I’m not quite sure I managed it, but this was my first time ever making any sort of music, so I’m quite proud of what I made.

I suppose the thing that I value most about this project is that it taught me how to do the basics of virtual instruments. I feel like now, if I ever get stuck in a project, I could maybe try to create a sound that would match its vibe – and then maybe use that to move forward in the story/project I’m working on, so I feel that it could be useful in the future.