Ai Haibara winter wallpaper

• When I decided to do a drawing about Detective Conan (also known as Case Closed), which is a series of Gosho Aoyama, I first whished to paint a wallpaper with the main characters of the story: Ran, Conan, Dr. Agasa and Ai Haibara while they're walking in a winter-style street. It became absolutley much more complex than what I first guessed, so I decided to paint Ai Haibara only and the grown version, Shiho Miyano. And also this second idea has proven to require much more time than I imagined! At the end of the day I finally opted to paint only Ai, in a winter style wall paper.
• Ai is probably the most misterious character of the series, since she had the same fate as the main character, Conan. The authors of the story decided to not revealing too much informations about her, except that she was involved in the creation of the deadly poison APTX 486 and she herself felt victim of this substance. Both Ai and Conan, which were known as Shiho Miyano and Shinichi Kudo, taken a kid's apparence after the assumption, avoiding the death.
• So, first of all I made some Ai's face from differents points of view to improve my knowledge about her.

  

  Ai Haibara(Shiho Miyano): faces pencil sketches

• This time I didn't used a raster image editor but I've tried to use an unfamiliar kind of painting, as a vectorial editor. My choice fell on Inkscape. This picture below is my first try in spreading of vectorial ink, I had a lot of care in choosing the pen angle as for a real ink pen.The great think about vectorial painting is, absolutely, the modifiability of the paths and the possibility of adding transformations over an object, e.g. gradients. I've first filled, in a seperated layer, the areas delimited by the ink. Then in a new layer I've added the shadow effect, these are actually black lines with a blur plus a transparency effect, then, overlapping the two I got the final result:



Ai Haibara's sketches used in the Detective Conan wallpaper.

• Then added a nice, in winter fashion, background with snow flakes and a sort of imaginary street which can that can represent the path of life or whatever you want, and TADAN! the Detectiv Conan wallpaper: (If you like the this, just click it and download it:)



Ai from Detective Conan wall paper

• I'll leave you with this citation by Ai Haibara:

  Being patient is also a performance of bravery...

  Ai Haibara

  That's all, BTW, i'm going to do a Summer Wars wallpaper now

How to draw a child face of a character

• I'll take as example the marvellous series Detective Conan. This anime there is a great example of a series where there are both the young and the grown version of the character.Shinichi Kudo is a teenager detective who found himself in troubles with a criminal organization that forces him to drink an experimental poison which is supposed to kill him. The substance fails to kill him, leaving but a side effect: he returns a kid.
• You can guess it is a wonderful inspirational example, on how you can draw a young face from the face of him grown. In this example is drawn Shinichi Kudo as adult character and his child version, Conan Edogawa. Drawing a manga face of an adult and a child is then shown here step by step with this useful example. As alredy mentioned, artists usually decompose a complex object in simple geometrical ones, and, by experience seems that a good way to draw manga faces is to sketch a circumference which is:
  - Divided by two horizontal lines (which mark the eye's position, in fact these should be more distant in the sketch of the child).
  - Divided by a vertical one(which mark the nose position). We are going to sketch a three quarter face this is why i put the vertical plot in the left.
  
  
• Now here we'll see the real differences between a kid character and the grown character one. You can draw a child face by sketching the main details a bit deformed.
  You should paint a sort of mask over the circle, it serves to contain the chin and mouth.
  - You can see that the kid face version is a kind of stretched, shorter vertically.
  - The face of the young has the mouth and eyes closer.
  - The face of the kid has the eyes bigger. These are actually the basic ways to draw an adult face and to draw a kid face.
  
  
• We have so painted the basic aspects of child and a grown face. Now we have to let the two characters to be the same person, particularly Shinichi and Conan . This is done by drawing the main qualities in the same way but just warped in the child drawing.
  They have the same nose, same chin, same ears, same hairs, same eyes and eyebrows.
  These are just put in a different way.
  Now you can notice a fact of the usual Aoyama painting: there is no trace of the nose, if not the lack of a part of the eye.
  
  
• Now there is the problem of "how to draw the body?" of a young character. The most used body proportion for kids in the manga style is to make both the torso and legs long as the head. The whole body will be long as three times the head.
  By the way, you see this is a sort of winter-version of Conan (sweatshirt and gloves). Yeah, some things I like of Case Closed is that Characters - some times and in special events - they change clothes!
  I'm now making a Desktop Wallpaper, there will be Conan, Ran, the Dr Agasa and the young Shiho Miyano, in a winter version, playing with snow, in an intense snowfall.
  
  See you soon! ;)

How to draw a manga face

• To make a comic character you should train yourself to draw less details as possible and still letting the peculiarities of the person exalted. This is the way I draw a face: I first pencil a cross where the horizzontal line should be aligned with the eyes and the vertical one with the nose.
• Some tips to better represent a face:
  • You can draw a little line under the mouth.
  • If the face is turned, one eye is usally more distant to the nose, and only one side of the nose is drawn(the one more near to the eye).
  • Usually, if the mouth is open, the tongue is positioned in one side (see the last image of the post)
  • To draw better the whole scene, you should first pencil few lines just to have an overview, like this:
  
  
  
• I've decided to draw the face of Sachiko Hirokouji: a character of the movie "From up on Poppy Hill" of Goro Miyazaki. She is the sister of the main character Umi. Sachiko has a particoular role in the movie: Every morning she assist at the nostalgic moment of Umi rising flags to the Yokohama port in memory of his dead parent(in a ship during the Korean War), and, because her room is in the upper floor every morning sh also see one guy riding his bike under the flags. This boy one day dedicates an anonymous poem to her. In the scene I've painted Sachiko who is going to tell to Umi who is the poetry author, obviously she first have to wake up completely.

• In a new layer, with the ink tool of GIMP and the GIMP Painter Sutdio, you can start drawing the contours with the ink tool.
  Tip: rotate the nib accorting to the direction you'll trace a line.
  
• Then open a new layer with a low opacity(like 30%) and start coloring of black the regions with a shadow.
  
• Now create a new layer between the shadow's one and the one with the ink, so
  • Select the region to color in the ink layer.
  • Go to the layer which will contain the colors.
  • Add some pixels to the selection using Selection->Increase.
  • In this layer fill the selection with the appropriate color.
  
  
• Now just let be a bit creative and add some some shades here and there...
  
• I'll end this post with the ending theme of From up on Poppy Hill. "Summer of Goodbye" is composed by Satoshi Takebe and singed by the marvellous voice of Aoi Teshima:
  
  
  Since Satoshi Takebe is not used to work to the Studio Ghibli theme(as Joe Hisaishi), you can evaluate his talent by the translation of the ending theme of From up on Poppy hills:

  The ship veiled in the shining sea leaves a whistle of the good-bye.
  Will I meet the wind of summer color if I go down the gentle slope?
  My love, it's a melody. I sing highly and low.
  My love, it's a gull. I fly highly and low.
  Will I meet tender you if I call for you in the setting sun?
  
  The sound of the piano somebody plays sounds like sea rumble.
  Do people coming and going in the late afternoon carry the dream of summer color?
  My love, it's a diary. I spell a daily page.
  My love, it's a boat. I go the sea of sky.
  Will you look for me if I look back in the setting sun?
  
  Trees shaking in a promenade cast a good-bye shadow.
  Can the weathercock of an old chapel see the town of summer color?
  The yesterday love, it's tears. It dries before long and disappears.
  The tomorrow love, it's a refrain. Words without the end.
  Will you hug me if I meet you in the setting sun?
  

  (got from nausicaa.net)

From Up on Poppy Hill - Easter egg

In this interlude I show a brief plot of From Up on Poppy Hill and the snapshot in one of the last scene, where, as you can see above here, the Ghibli logo appears in the front of a ship.

• The movie is directed by Goro Miyazaki (the son of Haiyao who written the story), it is set in Yokohama in the late '60. It is about a two students love and the scholar environment that helps and complicates the situation.
• Umi Matsuzaki, an highschool girl, fatherless and with an absent mother due to work, looks after the house where the other sibilings live. One day she finds a poem in the school newspaper going like this

  Fairy girl, why do you send your thought to the sky?

  It obviously refers to her flag rising, each early morning, to the Yokohama sea.
  As the story goes on, she get engaged in a project to prevent the demolition of the Quartier Latin, the buildings of the high school clubs.
• She get then closer to his schoolmate Shun Kazama, a determined student who also works for the school newspaper. Their relationship is complicated by the non-clear origin of the guy blood. In fact Shun was adopted by a family friend of Umi's father, who's dead during the Korean war.
• One afternoon the chairman of the building, visiting it, decided to not demolish it. During this prominent event Shun received an emergency call about a sailor who was in the war with Umi's father, and can tell him the truth about his origin.
  The are here my favorite scene: The chairman noticed the two guys running away and laughing says the most great quote of the movie:

  Escape! it's great to be young!

  (from the eng subtitles)
• There is so a race against time in the streets of Yokohama to come to the ship as soon as possible. They so get a ride in a sort of old car like the italian three-wheeled vehicle Ape Piaggio.
• They finally get on the ship, and this is the front of the craft. You can see the Ghibli signature of the easter egg in the bottom of this picture of the ship they get:
• PS: there is a great character in the movie, she is Sachiko Hirokouji, girl doctor in training ,also painter, dreamer and of few words. In this scene (which i'll paint soon) she just woke up and tell Umi that the bike rider guy can be the one who wrote her the poem.