The Fourth Blogday

Konyanyashiwa! Welcome to Nekomimi Tuesday! Err... Oh wait, this is my blog. The Necomimi Maridah above threw me off for a sec... Ahem, anyway, as the title above, this is my fourth blogday. Meaning it's been four years since I started this blog. Usually I try to prepare something special on this day, but time has been lacking lately. So I decided to do a quick project that I asked Chun about way back in the end of May of this year ^^; The fanart above is Chun's Real-Life Nekomimi Saber after hearing about Maridah wanting a Necomimi. I commented that Chun should make a movable one like in Maridah's Necomimi video, but no such luck... So I figured I'll make one. Since I'm no artist, I can only work with what's there, so that's all I can do above. I had more fun animating the ahoge than the nekomimi XD

Durarara!! Ending Parody

You can guess from the title and picture that this will be about the ending song from Durarara!! using Figma in the animation. Well you guessed right... Unless you guessed that I'm making a Saber Lily Can-can dance video, that is. Which I'm not.

How to Spend 20,000 Yen Part 2

My Saber Lily arrives at last! She is the final piece to finishing this 2 part post and of course the figure I've been waiting for a while now. It was delayed and delayed again several times. This is part 2 of how I spent my winnings from Danny Choo's 'Your Room' Giveaway. In Part 1, I got myself a Yoko figure and a Saber portrait book, along with my brother's birthday gift :)

I thought they dented the Saber Lily box when they shipped it to me... but turns out it actually looks like that.

Saber Lily was supposed to arrive in August; 2 months ago. I was hoping that Amazon Japan would have two of the figures I ordered on the same time and would be shipped in combination through Tenso. Unfortunately Amazon could not wait, nor could Tenso... so they shipped two separate figures with EMS, which costs half of what the figure is supposed to be. Good service, but I think they need to give some of us a break with shipping ^^;

The other figure I ordered is Mizore Shirayuki. My aesthetically favourite character from Rosario + Vampire. She came way back in August, but I thought I'd wait til Saber Lily arrived to make a combined photoshoot.

So up first is Mizore from Shueisha. I kept thinking back and forth whether to get her or not as a part of my winnings... I'm actually liking her a lot. Thigh highs, cute face, shimapan and some nice cast-off features!

First we start with the clothed option... I like the skirt too. Maybe because I went to a school with uniforms.

The obligatory panchira. That belt thingy that's attached to her left thigh is kinda interesting. I don't complain about it. It looks great on her!

"Ooops! Where did my skirt go?"

"Okay I found my skirt... but what did I do to my shirt??"

Lovely shitapai... she may not be as big as Yoko, but she still looks nice! I guess it's hard to find a bra her size in the monster world?

Fully cast off! It's a weird combination of colours... but I'm not a colour co-ordinated person, so I'm not complaining.

Now here's where I'm noticing the quality... I thought I'd have some fun with the newly discovered macro option on the camera, but then I notice the shimapan. Not really painted well unfortunately. Still if I wasn't using the macro, I probably wouldn't have noticed.

And now on to the Main Event!!

We begin with the base... FREAKING AWESOME! It's a flat base, but the amount of decoration on the base exceeded my expectations! The damage on the tiled floor, possibly from Excalibur, looks well done! Very nice Fate/Unlimited Codes logo as well. The base reminds me of this one stage in the game.

The accessories and extra parts: Caliburn, Avalon, Excalibur and a variant hand to hold Avalon in the air. I'm surprised how they did it. It'd looked good on some angles, but not all...

Closer look at the hand that rocks the crad... err... the hand that holds Avalon. It reminds me of the Franco Il Nero figure I have.

On to the figure! I figured a lot of people have done this photoshoot... so I didn't take too many shots of her.

Instead I try to focus on interesting angles, such as this one... the hand that holds the swords... or something else...

Doesn't this shot make it look like it's a lily flower in full bloom?

Lovely design on the lace of her stocking! Too bad the pantsu doesn't look as good as the Saber Maid...

Trying to take a peek under the armor... tough angle to do.

And finally........

Fate/Triple Play

"Are you my manager?" A new series starting where masters and their servants play baseball to determine who will win the Holy Grail... and a pennant. Play ball!

See more of Saber Lily from Kodomut, RadiantDreamer, Blue Blue Wave and Meronpan ^^ UPDATE: New review by Tommy at the Inferno Project

Happy Birthday Selphie Tilmitt!

It's Selphie's birthday today on July 16th! She's my favourite Final Fantasy character to date. That girl named Lightning might be a second fave, heheh. Selphie Tilmitt is originally from Final Fantasy VIII and in that game she's the token girl with the bubbly personality, along the lines of Yuffie (FFVII) and Rikku (FFX). But don't mistake her to be airheaded though. She can hack your computer in seconds! She's a computer whiz in the game. She's also the reason why I also like the colour yellow ^_^

Oh and it's also my grandmother's (from my mom's side) birthday! Selamat ulang tahun oma!

This figure still in its original packaging and is probably one of the first few figures I've ever purchased. Back then I was still under the impression that figures that are still in their packages worth more. Although to me I doubt I'll sell this since she's a favourite. I remember that I bought in the United States when my family went to Seattle. I probably bought it from an Electronics Boutique (that's what GameStop used to be, in case some people don't know).

A close up of the face... Unfortunately since it's such an old figure, about 10 years old now, the blister plastic is turning yellow. I wonder what caused that?

Here's the back of the packaging... They were hard to find figures if I remembered correctly.

And there you are, July 16, Selphie's birthday ^^

The following I wanted to have a special picture with my 1/8 Kotobukiya Selphie figure and the Play Arts figure, but I didn't realize how big the Play Arts figure was. I was going to have the big Selphie to carry the smaller one ^^;;

Instead you get a sisterly love picture. Chibi Selphie is cute, ne? ^.^

"Yay! Sephie-onee-chan can play with me!"

The following is another tribute to Selphie using the Kotobukiya figure. I'm also using the pictures as the figure.fm giveaway. I'm not expecting to win since I just did them in a rush... Either way it was a tribute for her birthday ^_^ So without further ado...

Selphie in Odaiba!

O wow she's just looming there! A bit too shiny perhaps ^^; I pretty much just googled for a picture of the Odaiba Gundam to find this picture. Seems to be everywhere now!


Here are the original pictures.

A big crowd is waiting for the boards to be taken down so they can see up Selphie's... Umm... yeah, you get the idea... Anyhow, I'm calculating that this Selphie is around 12:1 scale ^^;

The original untouched picture.

And now a closeup of Selphie from almost directly underneath! I was begging Chun and her hubby to let me borrow this picture, but I sorta butchered a lot of it, lol... sorry Chun and husband ^^;;; Thanks for letting me use it... sorta XD

And here's the original picture. Much better looking, right?

This was my favourite angle of the Odaiba Gundam... and now it's got my favourite Final Fantasy character on it ^_^ This picture was originally from Punynari's blog.

The original picture. I only had to use a section of it, thankfully ^_^
Lastly I'll leave you with Selphie's reaction to her newly built bigger-than-life statue XD

Thanks for all the Visits!

ども　ありがとう　ございます！　

Ever since Danny made that Kira Trooper picture, I've been dying to play around with it to the above result (Apologies to Danny Choo, Lucasfilm & Marvel Comics ^^;). To commemorate a milestone on my blog, I thought I'd do a little Photoshop project I've been meaning to do. ^_^

I didn't think I would make a big deal out of over 10,000 visits and over 20,000 page views (since January), but I think a very big thank you to all the regular readers and visitors just dropping by is something that needs to be done. Especially this silly little blog that some people found interesting enough to read and view. ^^;

It's also thanks to Danny's hijack of my AnimeBoston loot post that finally gave it the push to these numbers. Somehow that hijack attracted the attention of a Japanese site called goyaku.seesa.net that was translating his news to Japanese readers... I'm not quite sure what the name of the site is unfortunately. I guess Japan was interested in what Rin and I, the foreign otaku, buy from anime conventions ^^;

You might be asking why "since January"? Well apparently I forgot to put on a site counter when I first started this blog... I finally added one courtesy of SiteMeter. So technically I should be around 11,000 visits and 23,000 page views (more or less） if I added it right at the beginning...

So here are the current numbers as of June 2nd, 2009. Over 10,000 visits, almost 11,000 with over 22,000 page views.

June 2nd was also the most visits and page views I've ever had ever since I started this blog! The 2nd most visits were the time when I won the "Your Room" giveaway.

This pie chart shows that 76% of the readers on June 2nd were Japanese... Time to make a Japanese version of my blog? ^^;

Of course I don't wanna bore people with just silly stats... so that's why I made the Spider-Trooper to make it more fun ^_^

Your friendly neighbourhood, Spider-Trooper shooting a webline!

I also collected some of my older Photoshop manipulations I did on DannyChoo.com. You've seen here in some of my comics, The Melancholy of Saber Lily, and some that were made before this blog was even started.

Hwang Mi-Rai Hee

A fun little project after someone found a potential model for Mirai, DannyChoo.com's mascot, in the form of a Korean model named Hwang Mi Hee. Someone suggested that a Photoshop should be done to make her look like Mirai... I figured I'll take that challenge ^^

Now here's a before picture of Kanu Unchou in Goth Loli dress. I used to run this little series called, "Guess that Thigh High", showing only peeks of the figure's thigh high. It was way too easy, so it wasn't too much fun. This one time I used Kanu's stripey thigh high and everyone was guessing Ronald McDonald XD

I disappointed everyone when I revealed that it was Kanu... but that didn't stop me from making a Ronald McDonald version of Kanu :P

Behold! Kanu McDonald!

Which Photoshop manipulation do you like best?

By the way... two of the most visited pages are the ones that hardly have any comments... The most visited page is Yuri Mania 6 where I talk about Shoujo Sect, a yuri hentai; and the second most visited page is The Lunamaria Hawke Shrine. Very interesting tidbit, eh? What's your favourite page?

Once again thank you everyone for visiting, reading, viewing and commenting on this blog! Hopefully one day, before I reach 20,000 visits, I'll put up an actual header with pictures on it instead of just the text, lol. Here's to more shenanigans!

Coloured Bunny Girl Mikuru

Art by Yakuri-Moe

Coloured by Lightning Sabre

My first Photoshop line art colouring project is finally done and even approved! This Bunnygirl Mikuru was beautifully drawn by Yaku and posted on Halloween of last year at DannyChoo.com. I spent about 6-7 hours colouring from December 23rd to 24th. Surprisingly it didn't take me as long as I thought it might've been, so I've delayed the project until I had enough time to do it over the 2 weeks off I had from my office.

The first obstacle I had was that I only had the low resolution art from DannyChoo.com... Darkening the lines was priority, but then the gray pixels started showing up, ah such a pain. It's not too bad though since the line art was pretty clean in the first place ^_^

Then I was stuck... where do I start colouring. Easiest part was the bunny ears. So red and I also added dark red for shading (which is the only place I shaded lol). Oh and I also read somewhere in Newtype that one of the popular artists in Japan created a layer of colour in Photoshop so that he can use that colour over and over again. I don't remember who it was though, okama or Range Murata, not sure. You can see my palette below.

Looks very ghostly, eh?

Ok after the ears I have to move to the bigger parts... then I realize I should've closed some of the gaps which made colouring so much easier. The eyes are very cute, but a bit difficult to colour because I could never draw anime eyes before in the first place, let alone colouring it, so I went and surf the net for eye colour references for Mikuru. I also realized something as I was looking through the pictures. She needs a star-shaped mole on her chest! It was good I looked around first. Oh and here's a secret... I know how to make a star in Macs using Zapf Dingbats, but for the life of me I couldn't make one in PC, so that's actually an asterisk lol.

After much of the colouring was done I decided on the stocking which was surprisingly easy to do, so I challenged myself. I was in over my head though... Fishnet stocking, which is what I wanted to do when I first seen this art. I had no idea how to do it. I was a total nub at colouring and drawing. I can probably do it outside the computer, but how the hell do I do it in Photoshop?? This is the result which involved a lot of duplications and memory eating on my computer. It was sluggish as hell XD What do you think of the result?

The last few details is a bit of a shine on her hair which I've seen a lot in anime arts. If I had a tablet I can probably do it better. Using mouse is hell for this btw. Oh and some art also has these reddish shine on their knees and joints. I duplicated that effect here. I showed this to my friend, who doesn't looks at a lot of anime art, and he asked me why her knees are bruised... I explained that it's one of the anime styles. Then I sorta realize what he may have implied with the knees, carpet burn perhaps? XD

I also made a couple of variations because I can play around with the Photoshop layers :P I need to learn shading for sure... I just don't understand how lighting and shading works, thus why there's no shading here, except for a few parts.

Bare legs!

White Bunny Suit variation

So a first (somewhat) successful colouring project done. Hopefully this won't be the last because it was quite fun. I'll be working on Mikuru here and there though since I'm an editing fiend!Special thanks to Yaku for supplying the great art and the approval ^^