This illustration is the fanciest I have ever drawn. It is bright and pretty, sort of. It's kind of like a door picture of a comic book or a cut from one of the TV cartoons. But a little more decoration and shading would have been nice.
Also, I did a pencil sketch of each character as a practice before drawing this illustration.
I seem to have gotten more comfortable with pencil sketching these days. I can now draw a character's face in one shot. It feels good to be able to do it cleanly and without eraser marks.
Looking Back
Look back at the review notes you keep for each illustration. I remember how I was feeling at the time. In this case, it is the notebook from when I drew the four-frame comic.
This is one of those pieces that reminded me how hard it is to create a manga. I think I had done a couple of black and white one, but this was the first time I had done a color manga. Even without coloring, it's hard work. Creating this color one was several times harder.
First of all, I tried to draw a story about how birds sometimes come in contact with glass and startle us. So, in the first draft, the plot was about a rock pigeon trying to enter a building and hitting a glass window. But that wasn't good enough, so I changed the plot so that the birds wouldn't somehow get hurt or hurt themselves. The subject matter is the behavior of animals, which can be fatal. But after a long process of changes, I think I was able to tell the story in a way that did not make it feel sorry for the animals.
Also, the initial plot was a mistake, my mistake. I thought that the bird was unaware of the glass and was trying to enter the building and hit it. But what causes the birds to come into contact with the glass is that the glass becomes a mirror. They fly into the view reflected in the glass. The cause was similar to breaking your nose in a hall of mirrors at an amusement park. This was also added to the change so that it became an open café scene, and we had to include an explanatory diagram. There were a number of changes from my draft story. So I thought I could no longer summarize the story in four panels. But in the end, I am glad that I managed to shape the story. This took me several days.
It was hard to make up a story. However, it was fun to draw the pictures. I drew strong facial expressions, such as surprised faces or faces crushed by glass. I usually don't draw these gag-like expressions in my single-picture illustrations.
I have learned how difficult it is to create a comic strip. Illustration and manga seem to be close to each other, but the techniques required are very different. But I have a desire to continue to dabble in manga as well. So I am going to make use of this review and work on it.
