Mosaic Fragments

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

( Speaking of fangirling... (Spoilers up through Gokusen 8, in case anyone cares.) )

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. ^.~

So I gave in and started watching the Gokusen live action drama. I'd tried watching Densha Otoko a few weeks ago and basically concluded that dramas were not my thing. Obviously, my motivation for watching Gokusen is stronger, but I already had to console myself by deciding that I have no reason for watching the second season since there's no Shin, and by all reports it's just the plot of the first one rehashed. A lot of the online fandom I've found so far centers around the drama rather than the anime, though, so I figured I should see what it's all about. I watched the first two episodes last night around the CDS110a midterm, and I've already become unhappy with most of the changes.

( Long rant-ish thing with spoilers. )

Closing thought: I really should cosplay as Yankumi or at least make the costume. It'd be really simple, and also really hard to tell that I was cosplaying, but it's just so perfect. She doesn't even have bangs! I'm always worried that if I cosplay I'll look weird if I don't have bangs, but Yankumi really does have pretty much the same hair as I do, so it's not a problem.