This was a collaboration with NoWaifuN0Laifu based on his design, where he wrote a character quest for ES Hozuki and imagined her as a crystal element hammer user - “I made ES Hozuki’s quest (feel free to use WFS)”. On a whim, I offered to draw his design for him.

You can see 2 other images on either link, a full-body view and the prototype designs:

You may have already seen this, but I thought I’d share it here on kbin since I deleted my posts on reddit.

This was kind of tricky for me because I had to improvise a lot on the design. I had a few prompts, like “beautiful black and purple kimono”, but they say a picture is worth a thousand words, and that was five words. So I had to research what kimonos are like, and learn about cultural things like don’t draw the right side over the left, because you only do that for dead people, etc. I watched a video where someone showed how they put on a kimono. They’re really complicated to wear, but interesting nonetheless.

Looking at it now, there were some things I wish I fixed, but by then I wanted to be done!

One thing I wanted to mention is that in this drawing, I tried out the bloom effect where you imitate the way light bleeds when you use a physical camera. It tends to make things look softer and more full of light. You’ve probably seen it in anime here and there, or video games. I didn’t know how it was done and always wanted to imitate that look, so it was intriguing to try. I couldn’t do it too much in this piece though, because I already abused applied glow dodge to a lot of the drawing and it would have made everything look too washed out. If you’re interested in how to do it with Clip Studio Paint, You can see this tutorial video by Manu Mercurial (timestamped at 11m14s).

  • OpenStars@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    I had never heard the guy’s name, but yes I am familiar with the principle. Ironically in the example you showed, there are no error bars, plus how could there be a “graph” in a peer-reviewed statistical journal that lacked any sort of axis markers such as the 1st and 3rd ones did? I think the principle is actually quite solid, at least as it was explained to me: take out whatever UNNECCESSARRY elements that you can (hehe, see what I did there? oh uh, I mean ah, yeah, on purpose, totally… :-P), when they do not add to the end product. On the other hand, if the difference between like 16% vs. 18% is crucial, then yes you should have a horizontal line or even better some major highlighting of that fact. Ultimately, the graph should convey the readers’ intention, and the intention should not be “my teacher told me to do it or I’d fail the class”:-P So if normally the difference b/t 16% vs. 18% is merely within the margin of error, then it becomes preferable actually to remove the horizontal lines, b/c in that case what do they add? Even the difference b/t 14% vs. 16% in that example would show up b/c of the white line, but that would be a side-effect whereas the real intention would be to make it more obvious that they occur in “blocks” of 5 - so like 9% is a block and most of another block, while 12% is two blocks plus a bit, and so on. At that point, the fewer “distracting elements”, maybe the better, b/c the average reader gets easily … ah… what was I saying again? :-D

    But yes, you do have to apply the principles, not just “me likey so me do”, but like, THINK about what it is that you are doing, and what you are trying to accomplish by adding it. So in my earlier example, why did I have TWO horizontal lines separating the header from the lower portion? It was b/c “it just looked better”, although if I had to articulate why I would say it was that the horizontal error bars off to the right looked similar, so having the separator bar be double-lined helped distinguish it. And yet I did like having the bar to distinguish the above as a “header” describing the text blocks below it - as opposed to simply leaving the space entirely blank. Along similar lines, I said the full three words “generic damage type” in it instead of merely “damage type” that naively seems like that could have worked just as well if not better? However, I chose to attempt to convey that some characters use “nonstandard damage”, e.g. Violet’s Combo Attack and Sword Dance both have non-generic mechanics to think about, but those S/M/L/XL were just the beginning, and even then not always followed, e.g. 4★ Tsubame’s “Twin Snakes” attack does a whopping 300% damage, despite it saying “x2 (S)” and normally an S attack would be 150%, so like 75% per each of the two hits. Eventually I wrote the latter examples into a text-only guide, a year later, but I was already thinking along those lines with that graphic.

    So I like what you said about it being a form of storytelling - yeah, that’s it. If the story is better without that fluff, then remove it, but ofc if it is somehow relevant, then by all means keep it. Just be intentional about it either way - show some loving “craftsmanship” either way:-).