Talk about flicking.

[elwen]

Today I decided to sign up for the Valentine's Day exchange at shinkumi. I've never done a V-Day exchange before, but I figured an icon or a wallpaper is no longer beyond my abilities and shouldn't be very time-consuming. If I'm feeling really motivated, I might make a Winamp skin, but that's highly unlikely. As should be patently obvious, I do not write fic anywhere near quickly enough to gift it.

So I guess that put Shinkumi on my mind.

After dinner, I started reading the article I'm reviewing for STLR, which is a lot longer than the one I edited last term. [Review = read and make a recommendation as to whether the journal should accept for publication. Edit = go through and fix stuff.] So between sections, I started getting distracted, and decided that I wanted to make a Shinkumi icon I've been thinking of making for a while, using this scene from volume 8 where Kumiko is in her schoolgirl disguise and is practically fangirling over Shin. [The truth behind what's going on, of course, is very different, but I thought it would make for a great out-of-context icon.]

I . . . I ended up coloring it. ._.;;

As the comm post says, I've never shaded anything before. I've been doing more colorizing lately for my Zaphkiel icons, but I just rely on the original art to provide the shadows and color variations. [The only exceptions are a few gradient fills, and highlights in Anael's hair.] So yeah, what followed was a lot of fudging and screwing around. Elbows and knees are hard, and they're probably still wrong. ^^;; And the final result looks hardly spectacular -- although I liked to turn off the line-art layer because then it almost looked like I knew what I was doing. I don't know if I'll do it again. But I guess it was a good experience.

Much credit goes to nendil, who not only has helpful tutorials posted at AFC -- OMG, magic wand and bucket-fill when you've got pure line-art <3 (but sadly it doesn't work for most of Kaori Yuki's stuff) -- but also from whom I've heard lots of random tips over the years, like use blue for shadows on white. ^^v

I haven't done an icon purge to upload the new icon yet, but I'll get around to it eventually. It says "fangirl", which I originally intended to refer to Kumiko's squeeing, but I when I look at it now I realize it has the ideal double-meaning of Kumiko's fangirling and being a fangirl of Shinkumi itself. :D

The icon (and the image) really does look like innocent fangirling to the uninitiated, but there's so much more to it, which makes me love it more.

The setting: Shin and Kumiko are rescuing Fujiyama-sensei from a stalker who's holding her hostage in her apartment. Shin tells Kumiko to break the glass when the stalker is distracted, and he'll jump through and rescue Fujiyama. Kumiko thinks it should be the other way around, but Shin says she's a girl, so she can't afford to hurt her face on the broken glass. Kumiko replies that he's 100 years to soon in trying to act manly around her. Shin, with a look of utter defeat, does as he's told.

Then, after they get in, Kumiko suddenly realizes that she has to hide her fighting skills from Fujiyama, so she swings the stalker at Shin, who knocks the guy out. That's what leads to Kumiko [falsely] fangirling over Shin. I just think there's so much tension in that scene, because she's just told him he's just an underaged brat, and now she's rubbing salt in the wound by pretending to praise him. Poor Shin! There must be so much bitterness loaded into that "shut up".

I guess I really enjoy the angsty!Shin segment that begins with his admitting to the boys that he has a crush on Kumiko. [Right after where the anime stops, conveniently.] The date with the evil schoolgirl and all are just great. I feel so bad for Shin, but I guess in a way it's nice to see him actually being affected by things rather than just being amused or exasperated at Kumiko. I dunno, or maybe it's just because that's when Shinkumi really starts to become more than a fangirl's dream. [Hey, as long as one of them wants it, it can't be that uncanonical . . . right? Right?] The festival at the end of Volume 8 really ends that phase of the "relationship" -- people like universe42 will know what I'm talking about. ;) After that I think the story moves toward more of Kumiko showing that she cares, though not necessarily in the way Shin would like.

... *happy sigh* Shinkumi defies my capacity to squee. <3


And finally, some meta about tags: I realized that the "fandom" tag is used extremely inconsistently. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it from now on. Also, I wonder if I should change the "gokusen" tag to "shinkumi"? Eh, well, you guys should be able to figure it out. ^.~

Comments

[nendil.livejournal.com]

Zomgz, obsolete tutorial :D I oughta go back and check through it for bad advice, even if the chances of me updating it have gone down from 1% to 0.01%.

[nendil.livejournal.com]

P.S. Recommend being bolder with your colors, because right now I can hardly see much shading.

[ctrl-a.livejournal.com]

If I made it bolder, then you could tell how crappy it was. ^^;; More importantly, I only did one set of shadows/highlights, and I think if I were to make it darker, it would require another layer, or at least more feathering.

I dunno, I guess it's hard to tell if you haven't seen how flat the original looked. But you should have volume 8, so you can see for yourself. ;)

[ctrl-a.livejournal.com]

Hey, at least it's in better shape than my Winamp skin tutorial. In that it's actually complete. ._.;;