In my recent exercises making comics, I’ve been studying how tkmz achieves the specific graphical style that he displays in Girls’ Last Tour, which I find very intriguing and has been a great learning experience. I'll attempt to briefly list out my findings.
The first thing that I think is worth mentioning is a high-level idea. The shading is non-literal in the way it interprets colour. By this, I mean that my first intuition when making comics in shades of gray was to treat them as if it was a black-and-white illustration, and using the shading as a way to convey the details of rendering. Other artists do this kind of style to great effect, but tkmz, not-uniquely, but quite interestingly, does not. The shading in GLT is distinctly non-literal, and always focuses on creating contrast and guiding the eye of the reader.
This non-literality is apparent in every aspect of the shading. Blocks of colour often have hard edges and seldom are specific in their depiction of three-dimensionality, instead more intent in conveying broad volumes rather than specific volumes. Dark shades of gray are typically reserved for colouring the clothes and headgear of the characters, and distinctly separate them from any kind of environment, which has light-shadow flatly rendered through white and light gray (much like the skin of the characters). Quite similarly, when the characters are absent or otherwise small or hard to pick out in the frame, the rendering tends to illustrate light-shadow through white and light gray.
The above scheme serves quite decently as a rulebook on shading daytime scenes. Dark grays for characters in specific spots, light grays for environment detailing. Occasionally, when relevant, this system might be also be broken, such as when conveying distance and depth.
Shading deep dark settings is done through enveloping the frame in black and removing all volumetric information by flatly filling in the drawing with light gray, effectively conveying the flatness of sight in the dark.
However, when there is light in these dark settings, it shifts the perception of darkness. Skies and backgrounds may become dark gray rather than black, and normal rendering apply to the frame. Alternatively, they may remain black, and increase contrast to the lit areas.
Notably, when the light flickers, such as with fire, that is conveyed through chaotic hatching.
Making use of such a simple system of rendering has an interesting side-effect – the simplicity of most illustrations is deeply contrasted against more carefully rendered illustrations, which in turn feel a lot more awe-inspiring than they otherwise would.
tkmz's style is rather unique among the manga landscape, in part because of the non-literality of his shading. One thing that I feel deserves further exploration from me at a later date might be how blacks, specifically, are used, as they have quite a few applications that I haven't systematized or understood yet. However, that is for later, and for now, this little summary of my findings has proven useful to me... and I hope it proves useful to you as well.
24 Oct 2024
Taliyah, named after the flower Ta’Liyah, is a child from a tribe called the Nasaaj, who live in the southern reaches of Shurima, by the hills of Icathia. She was raised a goatherd, but from a young age, she felt the pull of the Earth, a magic nobody else in the tribe felt or knew about. Eventually her power grew and became unstable and in a coming-of-age ceremony typical of her tribe, where she’d pick a trade and a mentor… she was not only unable to, but caused a commotion, as she felt pulled to weave the earth beneath. As both her and everyone else knew they couldn’t teach her, she left her tribe, looking to find herself and her magic.
At first, she came across Noxians, who venerated her magic and taught to wield it like a weapon of mass destruction, but when forced to do it, she refused and was thrown overboard the ship. Unable to swim, the currents carried to a nearby beach. She wandered, unintentionally caused an avalanche that buried a man and promptly rescued him. That man would become her mentor and he taught her how to find balance and peace, and truly control her magic. When concerning news of her home reached her, she promptly left again, journeying through the north until she eventually returned home, now with a mission to protect those she loves.
To state the obvious, Taliyah is not and has never been an original character of mine. She had her first teaser trailer – Taliyah: Homecoming – released by Riot Games on May 2 2016, and would be released into League of Legends two weeks later as a playable champion, in May 18 2016. Since, she since has also become part of multiple short stories, Legends of Runeterra and TFT (periodically).
Despite never quite having been able to explain it, I distinctly remember reacting to the teaser as if I’d found my soul mate. This girl from the desert with a breathy voice and a unique determination fuelled by love who weaved the earth as if it was water… it just resonated with me in a way unlike anything I’d felt before. For those two weeks, I remember I played the game more than I ever had, intent on being able to unlock her the moment she was released… and I did. On May 18, I had Taliyah, and as a little fun fact, the very first match I played with Taliyah was against Azir. How fitting.
From then on, a dug into her stories, and into her character, and fun facts, and multiple things kept me close to her.
Her narrative of never quite excluded but always out of place, of concealing a gift nobody quite comprehends, and of needing to leave and wander, lost, to learn and figure herself out has since been a deep part of a lot of my other characters and despite not being quite able to articulate it, I feel it very much as well.
The fun facts, her being a dancer, her name coming from a flower, the middle-eastern origins of her aesthetics and all those small details kept coming back on and on and on in everything I made since.
And lastly, her development, the process behind the scenes… it played a role in my attachment too. At the time, there were conversations behind the scenes, by the designers, of making Taliyah the very first transgender character, which found its realization in her deeply allegorical backstory as well as her non-conventional appearance. Ultimately, she’s not trans, but I don’t think that quite matters, because her story says more than the word ever could. To me, at least.
From 2016 to 2022, almost everything I created was somehow related to Taliyah. My characters, my stories, my first pet rock, my rock collection, the stick I picked up while hiking (which I still keep), to my current love of flowy clothes and capes. She was a rolemodel and someone I wanted to become, someone true to themselves with the determination to move the world for good, in the name of passion and love.
I also just really love her freckles.
18 Oct 2024
As time relentlessly passes and I constantly change, I find myself going back to old diaries of mine and rereading those old writings repeatedly gives me insights on myself that I have no memory of. It’s quite a shock just how much memory is flawed. Because of that I want to use this page, this “thoughts” page, as a record that I come back to in years to come, of everything – academic thoughts, memories, feelings, opinions, histories. This is, at its core, what this page is for, and I intend on using it as such.
Unlike some of my friends, I don’t make a lot of OCs or fanart. Rather, I create OCs that stick with me for years and change with me for years. They change, spawn other OCs and build lineages in their own right. Since I’ve been doing this for over 8 years now, I think now’s as good time as any to take a moment and look back, and document what my memory still recalls.
In August I made a chart tracing that history. This is that chart.
It’s partially incomplete. A few characters are missing, but I’ll mention them here.
The year is 2015. My first OCs were me and my sister. The name I gave myself was “Cedros”, but I don’t recall what I named my sister. At the time, I told steampunk stories and realistic space revolutions with them. After them, in 2016, Ori and the Blind Forest occupied my mind for a while, and mixing with Taliyah from League of Legends, gave me my second OC – a spirit creature, just like Ori, but with flowy ‘wings’ just like Taliyah. The art for all of them is buried in the garage, unfortunately.
2017 rolls around and the chart begins. It begins with Taliyah, and with me intending on writing a novel retelling Taliyah’s life. As I wrote, I loaded the story with too much of myself and a character was born, Aster. She was ostracized in a non-magic world for being able to perceive magic. And the physical manifestation of that became a spirit companion, Miriam, who only she could see. Then, I watched Girls’ Last Tour, and Aster became a goatherd and Miriam her spirit friend. They roamed an empty desert with their flock, and philosophized about life. Lastly, when I inserted my conlang into their world, they became Numari and Hili, and later, Nomaari and Rhiili. Just like Taliyah, Nomaari takes her name from a local flower. And with them, Tesiiro, the world they live in, is created too.
Imiiro, a callback to Emil from NieR:Gestalt, Nomaari’s strange, non-speaking brother obsessed with masks is the first to have an animation of his own and would come to redefine the visuals of Tesiiro. After him, Omaaisi and Rhookai came along, in a small story about childhood and grief that, unfortunately, was quite rushed. At the end of 2021, Nomaari and Rhiili had an animation of their own and I finally felt like I’d finished the circle of Rhaarini Aamiteshi (Goatherd of the Steppe).
A few loose threads come after, namely text roleplay and DnD.
Ishla, as my OC for the Star Wars universe, is a force-sensitive child of the Empire Era, who severed her connection to the Force because of the trauma of growing up hunted. Aasuhtip (and Ohetta) was my first DnD character, a child from a colonized tribe that just wanted freedom. Sadly, that didn’t fit the campaign. Refi came next, inspired by Toph as well as Taliyah. I wanted to write a child, because I never stopped feeling like one. In her case, with blooming powers she didn’t know how to control, and was on a quest as a means to learn about herself. Lastly, Torfiel, a callback to Toriel, inspired by Katara, was an attempt at writing an old character out of curiosity. She never had solid motivations, and never worked in roleplay, sadly.
Taliyah: Heartbound was a short animation about Taliyah’s treks through the Freljord that I never finished. The cast varied, from the characters listed, to the Notai, to the Kindred, to Udyr.
After failing with Taliyah: Heartbound, I went back to Rhaarini Aamiteshi to reinvent it. I pulled away from the desert-y aesthetics and towards the mountain ranges of Portugal. The goatherd became a mountain shepherd. I wanted to tell a story of isolation and grief, but I was struggling. It was in Made in Abyss, in a port of Nomaari, called Ryita, a lone girl who slowly loses her family to the Abyss, that I was reminded that in Portugal, we have a similar Abyss – the Sea. With these new ideas, Ryita became the protagonist of story about grieving her brother, lost at sea. Then Ryita became Rita when I dropped the pretence of fiction.
Then as I started doing self-insert comics with Rita, and the setting became claustrophobic for those comics, Regina became the self-insert. Those comics won’t be continued.
This was a short history of my OCs. A lot of detail is left out, but I might at some point do the history of each, individually, as they have a lot to say. I hope you liked reading this little bit of myself.
12 Oct 2024
I got the book The Transcendental Style in Film recently and talked to a friend about it, which led to me telling her about my deep dives into Deleuze's cinema theory. She then recommended I share my thoughts and I thought "what better place than here?".
This will be a two-parter, with the first part dealing with the movement-image and the second part dealing with the time-image. If you want to read the originals, you can find them here: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image & Cinema 2: The Time-Image.
In the book Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Gilles Deleuze sets out to build a framework to understand how meaning is constructed through sequential images. He was not a director nor a film historian, and as such, his perspective is neither a technical one (concerning shot length, framing or angles) nor strictly historical one, but rather a philosophical one that attempts to create a dynamic semiotic system of cinema.
Working off of Henri Bergson’s ideas on movement and duration, he splits film history into three fundamental phases – the proto-cinema, the cinema of the movement-image and the cinema of the time-image. In this part 1, I will explore the movement-image.
Proto-cinema exhibits the technological ability to create cinema, but also the lack of the cinematic technique and is the phase in which it begins to develop. The first, crucial step in this development for Deleuze is the movement of the camera iself. The first films which were purely technical demonstrations – such as Lumiére’s films – all display a stationary fixed camera. Some cuts can already be seen in Meliés’ work, but the camera remains largely fixed, and it’s simply as if the scenario changes between the shots. But it is through progressive change like this, that the camera first starts moving, and later that movement is abstracted through the cut, allowing for an expansion of the frame and the permeation of movement and time into film – these are the first montage techniques – the American organic montage, the Soviet dialectic montage, the French quantitative montage and the German intensive montage.
Through these, and especially through the organic American montage, we witness the development of the movement-image, which creates meaning in film by appealing to the intuition of the human body, a schema which Deleuze calls the sensory-motor schema. In this system, there are three privileged instants: the instant of perception, the instant of affection (emotional reaction) and the instant of action. Through these three instants, meaning is created.
A situation is perceived
→
which causes an affect
↑
↓
which, in turn, changes the situtation
←
which leads to an action
This system of intuitions derived from Bergson is aligned with most intuitions from other disciplines, such as acting, animation or even fiction writing. From these three instants, three broad types of movement-images are created: the perception-image, the affection-image and the action-image. These work circularly, each leading from one to the other, and thus elaborating through their circularity a series of actions that create meaning, visually. Due to their nature, there are some rough associations that can be drawn between these images and technical aspects of them, but these are neither direct nor strict, and must be adapted to each scene and narrative.
Perception-images show situations and are typically wide shots.
Affection-images show emotions and are typically close-ups.
Action-images show actions and are typically medium shots.
Bergson’s theory however, realizes that the human intuition exists in multiplicities and uncertainty, and as such another kind of image can also enter the scene: the mental-image. This subset of the movement-image explores precisely the complications and uncertainty that dwells within the sensory-motor schema, and by doing so, stretches its ability to create meaning, demonstrating that the movement-image does not hold the monopoly on the cinematic image, and will ultimately come to be challenged by precisely this deconstruction of itself.
And this is my general summary of Gilles Deleuze's Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. While I am an academic in this field and I hope this summary helps anyone in need of understanding these texts, I do sincerely recommend reading the original, as it is quite dense and talks about a lot of material that I couldn't get into due to the brevity of this summary. Regardless, I hope this satisfies your nerdy need for film theory.
23 Sep 2024
Pronouns!
I've been seeing these around for some time and while I've never bothered with one of them, I am one of the transes, so I thought now was as good time as any.
Below is my table of pronouns and words. Because I've never quite done a table like this, I'm still figuring if all this fits, and things are subject to change.
Names
Pronouns
❤
shuriee, bea
she/her
✔
rocc, beatriz, bae
they/them
Words
Honorifics
Person
Adjectives
Relationships
❤
⠀ Ø* ⠀
girl, woman person
cute, pretty
friend sis, buddy
✔
ms. ma'am, madam, comrade
lady dude, bro
Ø*
partner, girlfriend
*Ø stands for an empty field.
Any word in a row marked with ❤ is a word that I'll always be happy to be addressed by. Words in the rows marked with ✔ are words that need some kind of prior history for me to comfortable with.
Names, pronouns and adjectives are self-explanatory I believe, so I'll skip them. For the rest, I'll provide some kind of example on how I see the words to be used.
Honorifics preceed the name, like "ms. shuriee". I'm not really one for formalities, but if they must happen, there's a list. Person words are words that refer to my person, such as "shuriee is a girl". Relationship words explain how I relate to others, like "shuriee is my friend." or "my friend shuriee"
Anything that's not in this list is something which I've either forgotten or would rather not be addressed as. Given that language is so complex and everchanging, I find it easier to list that which I enjoy, than to try to be exhaustive. If it's not here, just ask me directly about it or don't address me by that word.
And with that, I have finally done a little list of pronouns and words. I guess it's a kind of rite of passage of internet queers, so yeah! Now you know how to address me, if you ever want to.
13 Jul 2024
「 SPOILERS FOR GIRLS' LAST TOUR 」
I love Girls' Last Tour.
Besides the obvious fact that I'm currently trying to copy it page by page, panel by panel, it's an anime that's been with me for most of my journey as an artist, guiding my tastes both in experiencing and creating. I've rewatched it countless times, each time breaking down different details, or sometimes just enjoying the coziness. Last semester, I wrote a piece on Chito and Yuuri and their narrative function as co-protagonists, to figure out what makes them tick, and hopefully be able to apply it to my own work.
It's important to state a few relevant things about the narrative of Girls' Last Tour. At its core, it's an exceedingly simple narrative: a journey to the top floor of the city - and a journey which is long, but not harduous. Because of this extremely simple framing for the entire narrative, there is very little space for plot to take over, lending most of the narrative space to the characters themselves - the travellers - and their own internal and interpersonal worlds.
Chito and Yuuri work together not only in the sense that they both want to reach the top floor of the city, but they both want it for the same reason, as they believe that, once at the top, they'll find their place in this desolate and abandoned world. However, the two characters still define themselves in their contrasts - Chito's restraint, rigidity of thought and obcessive worry to Yuuri's carelessness, open-mindedness and spontaneity, Chito's love of the past to Yuuri's love of the present, Chito's intellectual and narrative memory to Yuuri's sensory memory. Chito and Yuuri are narratively aligned - they share the same external and internal arcs- but are personally contrasting - and often react in opposing ways to the same challenges. Despite that, the two act as one, in a way that seems to echo the concept of two voices of a singular conscience.
This complementary relationship of theirs is challenged at multiple points in the narrative, either by threatening separation, forcing it, or posing the question through encounters with other travellers. Kanazawa, one of the people they encounter, lost his complement - his partner. He wanders the world alone, carrying the memories of her on his camera and in his maps, a sort of echo of the search he seems to endlessly continue. Ishii has no complement, so when her work comes crumbling down, she embraces hopelessness alone, knowing there'll be noone there for her.
Through their similarities and their differences, their unity and complementarity, highlighted primarily in the moments of separation, the narrative builds a very intimate and strong bond between Chito and Yuuri, leading us to conclude, once they do reach the top floor of the city, that they realize they weren't trying to find their place in the world afterall, but simply struggling to recognize that they already had it - beside eachother.
Until recently, I hadn't made this connection, but once it was pointed out to me it became increasingly clear that this kind of narrative is one that draws me in incredibly well. I find a lot to relate in these long, not materially difficult but extremely introspective journeys, and it probably has something to do with my own relation with my constant struggle and search for identity and belonging. It's a note to look to when creating my future work.
This is a good starting point.
7 Oct 2024
A list of all songs used in this website, as well as their respective page. None of them are mine. The pages are linked, and so are the songs.
ㅤhowl's moving castle
ㅤmy neighbour totoro
ㅤkiki's delivery service
ㅤnausicäa of the valley of the wind
ㅤprincess mononoke
ㅤgrave of the fireflies
ㅤghost in the shell
ㅤ star wars (episodes 1-6)
ㅤmia: dawn of the deep soul
ㅤa silent voice
ㅤshows
ㅤgirls' last tour
ㅤmade in abyss
ㅤneon genesis evangelion
ㅤhourou musuko
ㅤnon-non-biyori
ㅤmushishi
ㅤsound! euphonium
ㅤarcane
ㅤsteven universe
ㅤstar wars: the clone wars
I am shuriee. I am an artist, and I have thoughts sometimes, and I love stories and I love animating things. And I love maths and I love programming and I love languages and conlanging and music... and honestly, I love far too many things.
One of the many things I love is neocities. Ever since I came across this place, only god knows how many years ago, I've been fascinated by the kinds of things people here manage to do with their websites. Here, I saw websites that blew me away, websites that completely shattered the idea I had of what a website could or even should be. It was fascinating. Sure, there's plenty of "normal" websites (which, on their own, retain a lot of personality, and deeply inspire me), but there's also websites that I can't describe as anything other than works of art. Installations, maybe. They aren't websites you visit, they are websites you experience. They are weird, in the best, most delightful sense of the word.
Those websites inspired me, and for years, I tried to be weird and fascinating and artistic like that. I tried to make my website an experience, and live up to those I found fascinating, but everytime I tried, I gave up. Over time, it became a chore, I didn't want to follow my own rules for my own installation. It happened, if memory serves, at least three times. I had an idea, programmed the experience, and left it to rot, alone, because following the rules became too boring. The last one was was the Children's Circle, where stories were tied to images - but everytime I looked at it I felt like I either didn't have an image, or didn't have a story.
Now, I work freelance as an illustrator and animator, but that means I have a brand I need to keep. However, every now and again, I think of something outside of my brand, I think of something with a different format, or strange themes, or weird style - or at least weird for me - and make it. And then I look at it, and it looks back at me, and we both agree that it has nowhere to go. And so, some of my art ends with no closure, existing in a limbo where I feel it cannot be shared.
So... now here we are. My website is not weird or fascinating anymore, but it is going to embrace my chaos and my weirdness. From here on out, this beach is where all my weird, displaced art goes to. It won't be organized, or make sense, or have a style, or have a theme, or have a story, or have any of that. All this is going to be is a corner of the internet where I can freely share my creations, chaotic and senseless as they may be.
Now, because I'm fluid and somehow everchanging, I can't promise that this'll be how it'll stay forever. With that being said, this is how it'll stay for now, and I hope you like it that way. Thanks for joining me. Check out the chatbox, and feel free to leave a message if you like my art! ^-^
