Lookie Lookie!!!

Hey everyone, welcome back!

Hey, what do you think of my new logo? As you guys may have seen if you follow my DeviantArt especially, I tend to draw my little mascot characters a lot, so I thought 'hey, maybe I should just make a logo with one of these guys? I need to make a logo for my Online Portfolio anyway'. So, I ended up making two versions of the logo and a little icon as well.

As you may or may not know, my Username online is Chosha Kurenai (or some variant of, if I can't use a space in the username). Since practically everything I do online uses that name, I thought why not continue with the theme?

Oh yeah, sort of mentioned it in passing, but yeah! I made an online portfolio!

Some of you may already have seen it - heck, you might even be here on this blog having come from that site (if you are, hello!) - but for those who haven't, the online portfolio is currently in its early, but functioning form, where you can now look up some of my artwork, get some clips of both Dreamwalkers and Susanoo, my two comics, find out about me and even contact me. Eventually, I'll also be adding to it with more artwork, extra comic information, a shop area and info the studio that I'm part of as well, especially once TanraStudios webpage is up and running, so there will be lots more interesting things to check out. I'm considering at some point doing an ask the character thing too? If nothing else it might be fun. :)

For those of you that haven't gone through the website to get to this blog, here's is the link:

choshakurenai.weebly.com

I'd love to hear what people think, if there's anything you would like added or improved upon I'll admit, I'm pretty much a novice at website building, so any kind of help or constructive criticism would be great!

I hope that you'll enjoy the site and will enjoy what's to come!

Until next time!

Tara (aka Chosha Kurenai)

Degree Show - It's Coming Soon!!!

Hey guys! Welcome back!

Not much to show you in way of pics today (sorry about that) but many an update to share.

Firstly, a Dreamwalkers update! Sketch work on part two is coming along well, but oh boy! I've already hit 40 pages and its not done. Part two looks like it'll certainly be longer than part one. I'm estimating it to be about 60 or so pages, depending on how the fight scenes go. Still, having fun with it. Would love to show you some, but at the moment its a bit spoilery - you would only see small thumbnails. But suffice to say, its coming along well.

Part One will be making its first appearance during the Degree Show at Staffordshire University.

Yes, the Degree Show is coming up really soon now (Our hand in is the end of this month, with the show coming up in June and Graduation coming up in July!) and we've all been helping towards it this week. We've cleared out the room we'll be using in preparation, and soon we'll be setting the whole place up for our things to be displayed.

Its a scary thought! Where has all the time gone!? I guess time must be as they say - it grows wings and flies off just to give people with deadlines things to worry about. lol

Still, I'm looking forwards to it as well. I'm currently having a think of what pages I want to show on the wall. Most of them I have in mind, but I just need to shorten my short list.

I'll be mostly covering how things are going with the degree show on the build up, and talking about a couple of cons we have lined up the next few weeks, but I'm hoping to give more lovely pictures in those times too, rather than only reading me ramble. We have brochures being made and posters being put together after all!

I'm also hoping to be setting up a online profile soon, too. I'm hoping to give you all links to that when its finished.

So, busy times currently and to come! I hope you all keep supporting me! :)

Until next time!

Tara

May....be getting nervous?

Hey guys! Welcome back!

So, we've hit May. Its a bit of a scary thought as deadlines are starting to come up. Not to mention that it'll be really soon that the Degree Show will be on us as well. May is going to be busy for all of us, especially since as well as our deadlines we also have to help clear out the space we'll be using for our show and help build it up, too. I'm hoping to take pictures as we go along, so you can see what we're up to.

But that will be then, and this is now. So! What I've been up to this passed week.

Well....admittedly less drawing than I would like. I haven't really done much more on the comic, mainly as I've been working on some little things like trees for backgrounds, mainly to be used in Pandora, but I'll likely use them in Dreamwalkers at some point. I'm rather proud of those background trees.

Most of the week has been spent on advertising. In one of my posts last month I showed the poster that Nadia and I worked on together. Basically we went to various places to see if they would stock them for us. We've had agreements so far from an Art shop, a Forbidden Planet store and a branch of Waterstones. We just have to get more of them printed. We ended up getting some quotes and found a place that, as well as being able to print our comics professionally, will also print of fliers as well, which would be mega useful to us. Once we got those printed out again, we'll be going on a flier spree, so to speak. lol

One thing I have been working on is a new poster/print for Dreamwalkers. It's currently still being done, so its not finished just yet (I need to mess with the colours a little to be sure that everything stands out from the background. But, if you'd like a preview of the print so far, then here is a screenshot of it!

So, similar to one of my last prints, this one is of one of the Dreamwalkers cast - this time, Somnus. Is it odd that I both enjoyed drawing, yet despised doing his hair? weird, huh? Still, I do like how its coming out so far, but there is still a lot of room to play with this, parts to finish so the lightning is correct, lights and shadows to play with a bit more. If there's no major interruptions, I should be able to finish it next week and hopefully get more thumbnails done for Dreamwalkers 2.

In the words of Undertale, enclosing deadlines fill you with determination!

As such, I should hopefully have a lot more to tell you when we see each other next.

But, until next time!

Tara

Posters and Previews

Hey guys! Welcome back!

So, with Stoke Con finished with last week, I've been getting back to work on Dreamwalkers part two. I have also been working on a few other things as well.

At the end of May, my uni is hosting the Degree Show for all of us who are graduating from the Cartoon and Comic course, so we've been doing some work towards that. I have mentioned it in passing before. We'll have a space set up for ourselves in the Uni, where our best art work will be presented, along with our comics. The first part of Dreamwalkers will be making its first printed appearence there, too! I'm excited!

One of the things we needed to do was to create a brochure to advertise ourselves somewhat. One of the things that I worked on for the brochure was what has pretty much become my mascot these days.

Basically a big Luphin!

Since I'm pretty un-photogenic, or I at least don't have any good photo's of me, its likely the Luphin will represent me in the brochure.

Does me drawing this thing so often mean I'm obsessed...?

Well, either way, I suppose since I draw it so often it practically represents me at this point. lol

We're also currently raising money for the degree show, so some of the money made at the last con is going towards it, for printing costs etc.

On a slightly unrelated but related (since Dreamwalkers is involved) note, I've started on the thumbnails for Dreamwalkers part two and currently have up to 25 pages planned out (which, unless I'm working it out wrong, is roughly half, if not a third of the second chapter. Well, I did think it was going to be a long one.

I can't show you all of them (for spoiler reasons) but I can show you a few of the thumbnails.

Sorry they're so rough. I'm really scruffy where my thumbnails are concerned, unfortunately. lol. But I guess so long as I can understand them, right? lol

Oh, lastly, I've started working on a second dreamwalkers print. So far I've only got the base sketch done, but I'm pretty sure it should come out well. I'm hoping to follow a theme of doing a print for each dreamwalkers character. 

I actually like the idea for this one - assuming I don't mess up his hair, or course. Curly hair can be a little difficult at times (so of course I have to have curly haired main characters. lol)

Either way, I do hope they come out well. I'll give you more updates there as I go along.

Until next time!

Tara

Stoke Con: Post Con

Hey Guys, welcome back!

So, as I mentioned last time, I was at a convention this weekend (main reason I'm posting today, rather than my usual Saturday/Sunday post. Though for those of you that have been following me on Twitter (@chosha_kurenai) or have been following the TanraStudios Twitter (@Tanra626) then you may have been privy to our live tweets about the event. As we were there as TanraStudios, we were also blogged a few times on the Tanra blog.

The Tanra Studios blog usually covers our comic work and conventions as if we were in 'verse with our joint creation, Pandora, so its a funny, comedic twist on events. So if you want to read up on the adventures of Agent N (Nadia) and Agent T (me), then you should check us out here:

tanrastudios.blogspot.co.uk

Though for those of you who want the less 'in verse' version, then I'll update you guys here too!

So, not much to report on the week before we headed off to the convention. We were mainly preparing for the convention, making sure we had our prints and our new leaflet promoting Tanra Studios.

Similar to the website designs we're working on, we went for a joint style - meaning I did the base sketches of Rodessa from Pandora, and Rem from Dreamwalkers, while Nadia completed the line art and colour. We took some of them with us to Stoke Con, while the rest we have at a few shops that were happy to take some of them. It's certainly interesting to see Rem in our joint style, since its the first time we've done it with him, but it's cool seeing him in Pandora colours as well!

So, armed with our fliers, badges, prints and comics, we were ready for Stoke Con

Truthfully we weren't in the best place - we were on an upper floor in part that had the least amount of through traffic, so we didn't do as well as at True Believers, but it wasn't a flop, either. Our lucky Dip went well - someone even got the gold prize too! And we also sold a couple of prints, a comic or two and badges. Our main draw (literally in this case) was in the commissions, though. I managed to sell four sketched commissions and Nadia got a digital one as well.

Here's the one's I did :)

 



Undertale seemed to be the main commission asks - though it might be because I had some example sketches up showing Undertale characters I doodled - but I also did a picture of someone's cosplay as well. It was pretty cool. They even let me take pictures with them too.

They were fun - I enjoyed doing the commissions. Everyone was really nice as well, so I'm glad they were happy!

Either way, we had fun, though admittedly my back was killing me afterwards - it was worth it, though!

I believe our next convention is in June, but I'll talk more about that one a little closer to the time

But if anyone following us saw us over at the Stoke Con, I want to thank all of you for coming to check us out! It means a lot to us!


Updates from me should be back to normal now, and I'll be talking more on Sunday about more Dreamwalkers and anything else I have been working on, so hope to see you soon!

Until Next time!

Tara

Posters and Comicon News!

Hi guys! Welcome back

So, as I mentioned to you guys last week, albeit very much in passing, as I was talking about my external work at the time, but next Sunday is Stoke Con Trent, based in, well, Stoke. lol. Well, me and Nadia are going to be there selling our work, so if you're in the area and you're interested, come check us out!

This is one of the posters that was designed for Stoke Con, with art from all the talented people in my course, with characters from their respective comics, including one of mine! Which was one of the things I was working on this last week. Since I will be selling Susanoo over at Stoke Con, I thought it best to use him to represent my art this time. Here's a close up of the image I contributed:

Its been fun drawing Susanoo things again. I enjoyed it when I was working on that comic after all. Though I can certainly tell where I've grown as an artist since then. Perhaps I'll revisit it one day. But I'm glad I got the opportunity to draw him again!

My caricature I did is also represented on another Stoke Con Poster too! Though I unfortunately don't have the picture of that just yet to show you. Maybe next time?

Speaking of things I did this week, I finally got the first draft of Dreamwalkers 2 script done. Its very basic at the moment, with only vague stage directions (so to speak) and mostly dialogue. Though I might go through a few drafts, to be sure that the dialogue flows naturally and that it wont get boring for the reader. Once I've done that, I can start thumbnailing for it. Woot!

Not much else to report for now! But next week I'll be covering how we did at Stoke Con and any other new news I can think of.

Until next time!

Tara

Pictures Galore!

Hi guys, welcome back!

Well,. I had been meaning to do more work on the script for Dreamwalkers part 2, but a little stuck in places at the moment. I have some scenes I know exactly what I want to happen, but I mainly need to connect them so they aren't really awkward. I think I was having some writers block this week, though, unfortunately, so instead, I've been working on some sketches.

Firstly, I've been working on an external piece at uni - basically we were asked to draw caricatures for the guests that will be coming to Stoke-Con-Trent this April. I decided to draw Jesse McClure. (Here's hoping he's ok with it...After all, no idea what kinda art styles he likes. lol). Here is a quick photograph of what I was working on mid way through:

Forgive the bad photograph. Anyway, I had just finished flat colours at that point in time. It's now pretty much finished, though I probably wont have it up anywhere until after the con, just in case. Still, I certainly had fun with it. I just hope that it's what Stoke-Con was after.

I've also started working on base sketches for a joint poster with Nadia for when our comics, Pandora and Dreamwalkers, both come out. Though I have to do the characters separately, in order to be able to do any tweaks before they go on the same page. I'm in the middle of working on a good pose for my character from Dreamwalkers, but I did complete the base sketch of Ro from Pandora:

(please forgive the fluffy part near the top of that picture, my dog was sleeping. lol)

Lastly, if you've been following Nadia and I over on the Tanra Studios blog, a few weeks ago we mentioned that we're starting a Youtube channel, with various playlists on there that range from talks about our comics and the joint universe, to discussing things like tropes, to general rants about silly anecdotes from real life. The Youtube channel will be partially animated, with drawings that were done by Nadia and I. I've basically been doing some of the 'puppets' based sketch forms (which we would later add clothing and more detail to, etc. I had to do a bunch of different emotions in body language. As they are in a 'chibi' style, they are a bit different from my normal work, but it's been fun to draw them - its then drawing regular things that felt so weird afterwards! lol

I wont show all of them here - save a little of it for when the channel is up and running - but here is a bit of some of them:

There are several pages worth of these sketches, ranging from happy, startled, angry etc, though admittedly there are more than two or three sketches on those pages. Still, I hope that you'll look forwards to the finished ones.

Anyway, here's hoping that I get over my writers block for next week, as I really want to try to start thumbnailing chapter two of Dreamwalkers soon. But I'll keep you posted.

Until next time!

Tara