Week 5: Last Analyses and Starting Work
April 1, 2026
It is finally the 5th week!
This week marks the week that I finish the last bit of my analyses into current works. The works I looked at this week were, Shimeji Simulation by Tsukumizu, Otherside Picnic by Eita Mizuno, Happy Sugar Life by Tomiyaki Kagisora, Girls’ Last Tour by Tsukumizu, and How Do We Relationship? by Tamifull. These were honestly great reads and a big breath of fresh air from the cliches of the genre. Please check them out if you are interested, I cannot recommend them enough.
There is not too much I want to share this week besides the completion of my reading and analysis part of the project. I am still going to be reading and synthesizing author interviews next week so in my next blog post, please look forward to reading about my full thoughts as well as how I plan to incorporate and choose specific details to focus on in my own work. I will also probably be starting to create some real plot next week so look forward to that as well!
Now to get to the more fun part, to make up for last week being unable to finish my character designs, I finally settled on a design for my second character. This will be shown below. I made a fully rendered design for them, although I have not come up with a name yet.
In other news, after completing the final design of my second character, I was finally able to start creating real work surrounding the series. I thought it would be most fun and easy to start with cover art. This is a little bit of a different style compared to the style I will be going with for most panels because it is a little messier and more cover-like. You may notice that I have actual text and a title. Honestly, this means nothing because I have not settled on a name yet for the series. I simply put the first word I got from a random word generator and translated it to Japanese kanji to put on as a placeholder. However, I think it looks more complete with it there.
Without further ado, here are the 2 pieces.
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I know you talked about it before, but the textures that you previously used in the background seem to be on the clothing here, which I think is having a great overall effect. It would be interesting to have some textures associated with some characters and have those textures appear in the background (instead of clothing) when other characters are talking about that characters but she’s not in the room. Or other kinds of things like that. I think it really works here. Also, again, the hair is a very strong part of your design as well. I enjoyed it on the original character but I think it’s even more effective on the new character.
I think the cover art does look very traditional to things I’ve passed in stores before, so in that way it’s very recognizable as cover art. If that would make it stand out or not is maybe a discussion. I do have a few suggestions (anatomy wise) on the art itself, but we can discuss that later if you are interested. Overall, seems to be going well!
Super amazing designs Leo! I think this might be something you’ve mentioned before, but what does your thought process look like when deciding what color scheme to use for each character? Could the color of their hair or outfits reveal something about the character?
Hi Rinisha!
To be honest, it is mostly to just keep a consistent and differentiable character design. A lot of it is not given a huge amount of thought besides what value I want the outfit or skin or hair to have.