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Three introductions to making manga characters, at libraries across the Rotherham area. The daytime sessions are for invited school groups, but the evening session is open to the public.
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The new site is almost ready to go live. Just a few bits and bobs left to do, and then I can put it up.

Report coming soon

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Report coming soon

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“What are memories? Souls? Spirits? This is a world where memories can be turned into data and stored. Even if the body dies, its memories live on, and can be transferred to another body. Bad memories can be erased, and good ones downloaded. However, this is something only the privileged can do. In a world like this, our protagonist, Kaiba, is travelling in another body with no memories of his own.”

Kaiba is a 12 episode series that came out in Japan spring last year, from Masaaki Yuasa (MindGame, Cat Soup) and Madhouse, which won the Excellence Prize for animation 2008. After the first 3 episodes, I can see why. (more…)

Okay then, everyone is gearing up for NYE parties (myself included) so I guess that means it’s time to do that whole ‘year in review’ thing.

So, here we go. 2008 in not-especially-ordered list form.

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As people who talk to me a lot probably already know, I’m a bit of a fan of Pixel’s excellent freeware platformer, Cave Story (aka Doukutsu Monogatari). So when I heard that it was being ported to WiiWare by Nicalis, I was pretty excited even though I’m kinda still lacking in a Wii right now.

And got even MORE excited when this week, Nicalis contacted me asking to use some of my fanart for promotional work!

So, here it is on the Wii page of IGN, as a preview to the new gameplay videos. (Full size version of image here)

It’s great to see Pixel getting some money for his creation, and the guys at Nicalis seem to really love the game and are giving it the care and attention it deserves—I especially love that rather than using an interpolation algorithm to up the resolution, the sprites have been tweaked pixel by pixel, most of them by, uh, Pixel. And they’re looking fantastic, especially the hero. I can’t wait to see Curly Brace!

(And I was given the revelation that the hero’s scarf is actually green rather than the red 90% of fanart of him makes it. How about that.)

Okay, so not actually done today but due to my ISP being muppets I was lacking in internet for a while. Anyway, I thought I should start throwing up sketches again, so here’s some materials testing and playing with hands in prep for a comic thing I’m working on. Verdict: need to be better at hands.

Growing up with both parents and an aunt in the traditional music scene, I’ve been around folk and world music ever since I was a tiny pram-bound little KT. I’ve been to more folk festivals than I can count, and while I drifted out of it as a teenager a bit, now I’m older I realise I really do still love some of it. Other parts, namely the bits that involve excessive amounts of morris dancing, bohdrans or taking yourself too seriously I’m less of a fan of, but there’s a huge amount of trad and world music that I adore.

And with that in mind, the more I think about it, the more insane it is that I never went to Musicport before.

If you don’t know the festival, it’s a weekend long celebration of world and trad music that used to take place in Whitby but this year took over Bridlington Spa. The atmosphere was great, really friendly and up for anything, and some of the music was top notch. Artists from all over the world, with music ranging from straight up traditional, through jazz and dance of all kinds from tribal to tango to techno. I paid my way by running a small workshop on the basics of manga drawing, which was a lot of fun and I’d love to do again some time. (Perhaps with more than an hour to do it in next time, although some of us relocated to the bar afterwards for more doodling.) I had been a little concerned it was a little unusual to run at a music festival, but there was a decent turnout and it was great to see people of all ages having a crack at drawing. I helped out with the artists’ green room as well, and then spent the rest of the time hanging backstage or being out there enjoying the music.

Suffice to say, I’m more than geared up to go again. In the mean time, I’ll leave you with some of the photographs I took while I was there.