Recent Reads - Knights

Knights is a Japanese fantasy manga which follows a young squire in the kingdom of Exclude, created by Murao Minoru, a writer artist team. The kingdom is gripped by a witch craze, with women being kidnapped, tortured, and killed by corrupt 'holy men'. Our protagonist, Mistletien, is infamous as 'The Black Knight', and he travels the kingdom rescuing these so-called witches with the aid of his best friend, Euphemia, among others. His mission is to end the witch hunts, by killing those involved with perpetuating it, and by foiling executions. Mist, as he is often called, is able to perform this mission, which goes against one of 'The Ten Precepts', this kingdom's rules of knighthood, because there are many who believe he will never become a full knight. You see, he is not called The Black Knight due to anything he wears.

He actually is black.

This presents a problem for him, as Exclude is an overwhelmingly white country. Almost every character who finds out about Mist's skin tone react in horror, having never seen a black person before. To add to it, the corrupt church labels black as an evil color, making many people believe Mist is a demon due to his black skin, and mistreat him.

One thing I find interesting in the art style of Knights is that, aside from the characters, the art reminds me a bit of a woodcut, a medieval method of creating art. Seeing as this is a manga that takes place in a medieval world, it seems very fitting.

Podcast Recommendation - Writing Excuses

Writing Excuses

Writing Excuses is a podcast created by a group of professional authors, all about how to tell stories. Each episode is only fifteen minutes long, meaning that the information is bite sized, the sort of thing you can listen to on short journeys or between doing other things. It also means that the group tend not to stray too far from their basic points, doing something they call "can of wormsing", which means that sometimes, if they stumble across a subject during their discussions that could lead to a larger tangent, they will add that larger tangent as the subject of a later episode. Another thing I like is that they aren't all one kind of storyteller, giving a range of viewpoints. One of the group, Howard, is even a cartoonist rather than a writer of novels. Finally, another thing I like about the podcast is the informal tone of it, something which I find helps me to remember their points and discussions better than if they had used a coldly professional tone.

Illustration

Over the past week, I've been working on an illustration, using a large number of my own characters as a crowd scene.

Firstly, I drew all the characters on an A3 sheet of paper, using pencil skeletons to ascertain the character's positions and poses, before inking them in pen. As you can see, the inking process went through a few hiccups, and there were also a few extra versions of the piece that did not reach completion sue to smudging. These extra attempts taught me not to ink the way I usually draw, which is in a somewhat chaotic manner, starting wherever I feel is the most convenient. However, while doing this, usually I will end up having to rest my arm on parts I've already drawn. This is fine on quick drying biro, or pencil, but with ink pens such as the one I used to ink this, it causes smudging.

The above photo was taken with a camera, as I did not have access to an A3 scanner. However, a photograph like this is not as high quality as a scan would have been. That meant that I had to carefully fix the linear, so that it would be clearer.

I realized while I was trying to fix the linework that there was a problem. If one side of the linework looked good, the other side would either look too dark or too light. To combat this, I created a copy of the linework layer and used gradient mapping on each. On one, I set the gradient map so that one side looked right, and on the second I used gradient mapping so that the other side looked good. After that, I deleted the dark section on one layer, set them up so that the overlapping made the complete image look good, before combining the layers.

After doing this, I thought to begin coloring it. However, the computer I was on had a difficult to use mouse, and all the other computers in college were taken. So I did some preliminary colorings, not bothering to keep it tidy, as I intend to finish coloring it at home.

My targets for the Easter holidays are:

• Finish coloring and shading the illustration.
• Start the writing for the college modules that I will have to hand in the week after Easter.
• Look into Illustration Friday, and it's prompt.