Wednesday WIP - Edition 2

The last week or so has been a bit slow for getting stuff done on my projects thanks to being sick for most of that time. However, it's not been completely useless.

I finished the blanket from the last WIP post. The finished blanket has been posted to my DeviantArt account.

Anime Tarot: Howl has moved beyond the concept phase. He's been drawn, and the lineart is finished. I need to clean it up... a lot. XD I also need to color it. =P Still, I'm really excited about the last part of the Wands suit. Starting with Howl here, most of the characters left are some of my favorites. I loved Howl's Moving Castle. It is my favorite Miyazaki movie, replacing Princess Mononoke. Some of the favorites that are coming include characters from Slayers, Trigun, and Code Geass.

Plushies: I still haven't finished that Moogle plushie. Lame, I know, especially all that's left is the wings... still. XD I've been a little distracted. I finished one custom plushie since then though. Plus, I'm working on a plushie submission for the Mom's Basement April craft contest. The theme is Dungeons and Dragons. From the start, I wanted to make a plushie something... I think the original plan had been along the lines of crochet dice (which I still might do) or something like that, but my husband gave me the idea of doing a Beholder--one of the archetypal monsters in the D&D system. It seemed like a fun challenge: make a hideous monster into a cute chibi plushie. =D I've got the base body and the central eye finished (not attached yet though). I'm working on the eye stalks and smaller eyes now--I sketched them into the photo to give a rough idea of what they might look like finished.

Hopefully by this time next week, both of these projects will be finished.

The Evolution of Anime Tarot

 The process of deciding what characters to put in each slot for the Anime Tarot set has been ambiguous at best. It is something that has been in a constant state of modification--at least until a card is finished; then, for my sanity, the card is set in stone. As most good writers can attest, you can go back and edit and tweak stories (or in this case the card list) endlessly. I drew the line at the point a given card is finished.

Originally my husband and I had brainstormed a long list of characters and just pulled from that. We were just trying to find enough characters to fill all the slots. At this point the list consisted of primarily characters that we liked (which means it was at least 75% Bleach, Full Metal Alchemist, Final Fantasy, and Clamp). This more basic goal changed. After the Major Arcana and the Swords sets were finished, I started reanalyzing the character list I was using to assign slots for the set. Instead of keeping to the original list, I decided I'd rather see how many different series I could represent in the set. There are some cards from the Majors and Swords I would have changed out, but they were already finished, and I wasn't about to touch that. So, I highlighted all the characters from series I had already drawn from or had multiple characters (exceptions being the Kings and Queens). I sat down with a committee of friends and we rehashed over the remaining three suits.


Some characters stayed the same--for example the King and Queen of Cups, Sakura and Syaoran from Tsubasa Chronicles. I already had Fai as The Star and Kurogane as the Eight of Swords, so Sakura and Syaoran were high on the list of characters I wanted to take out. I spent a lot of time looking for replacements. However, the King and Queen of Cups represent an emotionally mature man and woman--anyone familiar with anime can relate to how difficult it is to find one character with that quality, let alone two from the same anime. And so, Sakura and Syaoran remained the Queen and King of Cups.


For a lot of the slots, we did find adequate alternatives. For example, the Seven of Wands was originally going to be Light from Deathnote. He had been highlight since I had already drawn L as Death. Several suggestions came up while discussing this card. The first replacement for Light was Kamina from Gurren Lagan. Kamina eventually moved into the Three of Wands (leads by example) replacing Hikari from Magic Knight Rayearth--it was determined that I had way too much from Clamp even if they were spread out over at least four different series, and I'll admit I'm guilty there. What can I say, I'm a big fan of Clamp's stuff. Heero Yuy was suggested along with some explanation for how he fit the card from a couple of friends who had seen Gundam--as of yet I still have not watched even one episode of any version of Gundam.


In conclusion, we tried to put a lot of variety into the Anime Tarot set. The choices were, in the end, still limited by what we (myself, my husband, and a couple of friends) have seen--I will be the first to admit there are many anime series out there that I have not even heard of. Then, the selections were also affected by my personal tastes--when there was a choice between several characters, it frequently boiled down to the one I liked best, or wanted to draw the most.