The Art of Cosplay

I'm going to quote my journal from deviantART, I posted about just recently here. And add some updates to it!

"So this is my first entry on this Deviant blog, so since it's the first one I thought I'd post about something interesting. This time I'll be talking about my Wacom tablet process. Generally when I draw for fun in my free time (outside my game design related work), I do portraits. I like drawing forms of faces, and I really enjoy working on eyes. Usually when I draw portraits I use Adobe Illustrator and make vectors, which is something I'm comfortable with. However, I've started using my Wacom tablet more and more ever since I started doing comic colorist work. It's an amazing tool, I love. But when I do portrait attempts with it, I tend to leave them black and white, because the sketch grows on me as is. But this time I when in and worked layers and layers of outlines and colors to see what types of effects I could create with it (as you can see from the image below). For my subject, I picked Taymeho (a co player from YouTube, who's videos I like -being based largely on Kuroshitsuji why wouldn't I? Being the Otaku I am. She has some really great videos and more over she looks the part of Ciel Phantomhive quite well (one of the best Ciel's in fact I've ever come across). So I decided to draw her, luckily for me she had a Deviant Art link on her YouTube page with tons of terrific photos for me to reference (this one being the one: [link] ). -I started to only upload the final version of the drawing here, but I figured showing the process from start to finish would be a good reason to use the journal option on here."

Since the above drawing, I decided to do another of my favorite cosplayers. Why stop at one right? So I chose to draw one of... No the best Grell cosplayer I've ever seen (Aicosu you can view his deiantART page here: [link]). He is a worthy subject indeed.

-Really I would like to see him and Taymeho casted for the Black Butler live action film (given there ever will be one). I doubt the series will ever make it to the big screen though unfortunately, I think us fans will be lucky to get a third season to be satisfied with. Unless your into reading a lot of manga. -Don't get me wrong I love manga, but I prefer my anime moving with music. Oddly enough, I actually tend to enjoy the Japanese versions of anime. Even though I have to read the subtitles, the voices are often times much more fitting than the English version. I would say this is true for a lot of series such as Monster, Death Note, and so on. But as far as Black Butler, I actually really love both the English and Japanese versions as both Grell voices were amazing, and Alois had the perfect voice actor. -But the butler(s) themselves were better in English, in my opinion. Thinking of Claude's ever so famous line "Yes your highness..."o.O

But for the most part I do love the Japanese versions of anime, which is the main reason I have started learning it. So far I've found its very tricky, since there are so many different terms and usages for the same word. Depending on things like occasion, formality and yes even gender of the speaker can play a role in how one speaks, or the way one speaks (word choice etc). But I think it's worth learning, it's an amazing language, from an amazingly rich culture.