Illustrator | VTuber | Developer
Another MG assignment – was asked to do a mermaid this time. Figured it’d be fun to try a clione. Also, she’s a maid, get it? Was originally going to put her in frilly lolita or something but making long sleeves reminded me of kimono sleeves.
Also, transparency is hard, but she should suit almost any background color, I think. …I hope.
Not really sure what I was thinking while drawing this. It certainly didn’t come out as planned. I recorded the process though! (Somehow whenever I record stuff it’s never anything good or interesting haha)
The video process is here.
I don’t speak Greek, by the way. That’s 100% pure Google Translate. Cookies for anyone who figures it out.
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I recently came across an interesting web application on Twitter. It’s called いいねボタン風エフェクトアニメジェネレータ (iine botan-fuu effect anime generator; something like a “Like button-style effect animation generator”. いいね is the Japanese equivalent to “Like” on most social media platforms), by Twitter user @WL_Amigo. It’s a cute and simple little app that can take an image like this:
![[2015-11-06 - 12;35]](https://old.mimi-min.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/2015-11-06-1235-300x234.png)
and turn it into an animated gif that looks something like this:
Super cute, am I right?
There are a variety of options to customize your little button. I’m going to do my best to translate them so that English speakers can use it as well!
If you click the link above, you will be taken to a page that looks like this:
You’ll want to click here to upload your image.
For the purpose of demonstration, I’m using my Plusle/Minun drawing that you saw above.
The first button (生成 – seisei, generate) will then highlight in blue. Go ahead and click it!
Encoding GIF…
and…
Ta-Da!
…But wait, part of the image is cut off! (´Д｀;)
By default, this generator crops your image into a circle. We can change that!
(If you like it that way, go ahead and skip to part 3.)
For such a simple little animation, there sure are a lot of settings you can customize to make it your own.
Below the generated results, there are some tabs where you’ll find these settings.
Remember to re-click “generate” when you change a setting to refresh the output preview!
出現画像 (shutsugen-gazou) – something like “appearing image”. Basically, they are settings to tweak the output of the image.
The first setting is a number – 出力サイズ (shutsuryoku-saizu), “output size”.
Obviously it’s in pixels. You can change this to alter the size of the output image.
If you click the orange button on the right (出力サイズを確認する shutsuryoku-saizu o kakunin-suru – confirm output size), a box will appear in above that will quickly show you how big the output will be.
However, the text in red says:
GIFアニメを生成していた場合、「出力サイズを確認する」を実行すると破棄されてしまいますのでご注意下さい。
“If you’ve created a GIF animation, executing ‘Confirm Output Size’ will destroy it, so please be careful”.
The blue text simply says:
Twitterへの投稿時は500px以上がオススメです。
“When uploading to Twitter, 500px or more is recommended”.
And that’s all for the size tweaking!
—
The next two options are in check-boxes:
The first one, left, is gazou o marugata ni trimming-suru – “Trim the image to a circle”. In other words, that’s what you’ll use to enable or disable the output image having the corners cut off. It is set to do so by default; you can disable it by simply unchecking the checkbox.
—
The second checkbox, 押されていない時風の画像を付加する osareteinai-toki-fuu no gazou o fuka suru, roughly means “Add an image like it hasn’t been pressed”. Basically, this will add a silhouette to the beginning of the GIF so if you’re actually using it like a button, you can make it transition from the unpressed-state smoothly. This is the result:
Below, it explains that the setting will use the transparency of the base image to create the silhouette.
「押されていない時風の画像を付加する」は、透明度が設定されている画像のみ正常に動作します。
—
The last setting on this tab has to do with interpolation, which I’m not entirely familiar with, but I’ll do my best to explain.
画像拡大時に補間しない gasou-kakudai toki ni hokan shinai – “Don’t use interpolation when image is magnified”.
Below it says:
ドット絵などを使う場合などにオススメです。(一部ブラウザは対応していない可能性があります。PC版FireFox, Chromeでは利用可能です)
“Recommended for situations like when you’re using pixel graphics, etc. (May be incompatible with some browsers. PC versions of Firefox and Chrome are acceptable)“
I’m still not really sure what it does, but here are the two versions side-by-side to compare (left is the “disabled” version).
I think it just changes the way the image is loaded, as the one on the right seems a bit choppy, like it’s trying to load properly. At any rate…
弾ける大きな丸のエフェクト – hajikeru ookina maru no effect, the big bursting circle’s effect. The setting will let you change the colors of the big circle that seems to “pop” with the appearance of the image.
This tab gives you two color options:
To change one, you can simply paste a hex-code in, or click on one of the boxes and it will bring up a color picker:
The color on the left will be the initial burst color, while the one on the right will be the after-effect color.
(出現時の色: shutsugen-toki no iro, appearance-time color; 消滅時の色: shoumetsu-toki no iro, disappearing-time color)
I changed mine to start with an orange-yellow and end with pink:
Mess around with it and see what you like!
飛び散る小さな丸のエフェクト tobichiru chiisana maru no effect – Scattering small circle effect. This lets you change the settings of the little circles that shoot out from the burst.
There are two different ways to handle the little circles; by default, they are set to 虹色 niji-iro – rainbow, which is pretty darn cute. However, if you want to set specific colors, you can choose the second option, 指定色 shitei-iro – set colors, which you choose below.
Left: 色1(早く消える方) – Color #1 (The one that disappears quickly).
Right: 色2(遅く消える方) – Color #2 (The one that disappears slowly).
It’s kind of hard to tell which is which, but the one on the left is the one I set to yellow, and the one on the right is the one I set to pink.
Rainbows are pretty awesome, but pink and yellow is pretty cute, don’t you think? (*´▽｀*)
高度の設定 koudo no settei – Quality Settings.
Unfortunately, I’m not too familiar with this either, but I’m pretty sure it has to do with the quality of the image output.
It actually says:
説明で何のことかが分からない場合、設定値を変更しないことをお勧めします。
“If there’s something you don’t understand about the explanation, changing the setting value is not recommended.”
But as usual, I will do my best to explain!
The setting says クオンタイズ品質(1 〜 30), quantize-hinshitsu – “Quantization Quality”, with an acceptable range of 1-30.
I have no idea what ‘quantization’ means, so I looked it up!
According to Wikipedia:
Quantization, involved in image processing, is a lossy compression technique achieved by compressing a range of values to a single quantum value. When the number of discrete symbols in a given stream is reduced, the stream becomes more compressible.
So there you have it. The explanation the app gives is this:
sgif内で使用されているNeuQuantに与えるquality値。小さい程クオンタイズ品質が高くなります(元の画像との誤差平均が小さくなる)が、ものすごく計算に時間が掛かります。
“The quality value given to NeuQuant that is used in ‘sgif’. A smaller quantization quality setting will output a higher quality (the errors from the original image will be small), but the calculation will take quite a bit of time.”
Again, I have no idea what NeuQuant or sgif refer to, but it would appear as though this is a pretty standard quality setting; a lower value will be high quality but take longer to load/create, while a higher value will be faster but have a lower quality. The default value is 10. For comparison, I did one with a setting of 1 (left) and one with a setting of 30 (right).
They look pretty similar to me, but the file size is different, albeit only by a hundred KB or so.
That wraps up the settings. Now for the final step – saving the animation!
This generator provides two options for downloading your image file. The first appears at the top next to the “generate” button, in orange.
Click this button, and a dialogue box will come up to let you save your GIF animation.
Additionally, at the bottom, there is another button that will let you save the animation as a series of .PNG images, wrapped in a .ZIP file.
And that’s really all there is to it!
This tool is rather simple, but the resulting images you can create with it are just so adorable. If possible, I would like to find a way to actually use a GIF like this; maybe in a video, or as an actual like button (using a heart as an image?), but we’ll see. If I use it for the latter, I will definitely make another guide explaining how to set it up.
If you enjoy using this tool, go ahead and send a tweet to the developer, @WL_Amigo as thanks!
Happy creating, and as always, stay curious!
Tools like this are a great way to learn some vocabulary and modifiers. I’ll go over some useful ones in this section.
ii ne – How nice!
This is basically the “Like” button on many social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.
You can attach する to make it a verb:
「いいね！」する – to “Like”
@○○さんがツイートをいいねしました。 – @○○ liked your Tweet.
gazou – image, picture, portrait
画(picture) + 像(image, portrait, statue)
Exactly what it sounds like. I think 画像 focuses on the image as an object, as opposed to 絵 which focuses on the content of the image.
画像ファイル – image file
画像掲示板 – image board (forum)
画像圧縮 – image compression
dotto-e – pixel image
ドット(dot) + 絵(picture)
An image made of dots, aka “pixels”.
settei – settings
設(prepare) + 定(decide)
Pretty self-explanatory. The word for settings or configuration. You’ll see it in games or applications and on websites. It’s easy to remember, because it kind of sounds like the English word “setting”. You can also think of it as “set-aaaayy lmao”
設定する – to determine settings
初期設定 – default setting
Good luck with your studies!
Hello, pigeons.
This week has been insane. A lot of things have been going on, and my nerves are not happy about it but I’ve been learning a lot and making a lot of… stuff. As usual, there are always projects on my mind. The difference is that I’ve decided I’m actually going to work on them (and stop letting the fact that I’m neglecting the others get in my way).
In the beginning of the week, I was learning how to use Adobe After Effects. Now I’m wrestling with RPG Maker. Both have been extremely frustrating and, at times, physically painful experiences.
The thing about learning something new is that it’s hard. It’s really hard. And when the thing you’re learning is a software, it can be extremely intimidating and confusing as you try to shove your ideas and style of problem solving into the mold that the developers have set for you. Usually that doesn’t work. Until now, when I tried to use a software and found that it wasn’t as comfortable as Clip Studio Paint for example, I gave up and said “this is too much to bother with right now, I doubt I can get it to work”.
But I noticed something a few weeks ago when I taught myself how to crochet. I had barely ever worked with yarn, so to save time (and materials) I went through dozens of tutorials to figure out the easiest one to understand. It actually took a few put together to finally figure it out…. but once I did, I was crocheting like crazy. I could read and understand the crochet lingo and patterns… all within the span of an hour or two.
When I was first wanting to try digital art, my expectations for the medium were low. I knew you could draw on it, and I figured out how layers worked. I never got frustrated because I didn’t want it to do much; just draw some lines. Over time, I discovered more and more things that could be done with the particular software I was using (usually by accidentally screwing up my project with them).
Then, until recently, when I would go to learn a new software, I would have dozens of expectations before even having touched it. I have ideas and I want to make them real. While I was once an explorer, I had turned into a conqueror. One who was really bad at her job and often quit and returned home, defeated. This stubborn, headfirst, charging-right-in style of learning just really doesn’t work, especially with software. You have to start somewhere much more simple.
It can be frustrating when “simple” isn’t what you want. I’m super impatient when it comes to making things work. I want everything to be perfect and amazing and something I can really be proud of… and this is why you never see anything being posted by me. But you know, thanks to a TED Talk I watched recently, I picked up a single sentence to reassure myself:
“I may not understand it now, but I will. I’m not going to let failure stop me.”
It’s frustrating when you spend hours on something tying to make it meet your standards and it never seems right. I’m always afraid of sharing my website, or blog, or portfolio, or the projects I’ve been working on because I’m embarrassed. I’ve been hesitating to start making and uploading videos to YouTube because my online existence hasn’t been “perfected”. But I’ve realized that honestly, everyone starts out like this. Everyone starts out with outdated social media accounts and messy websites because they’re too busy working on what they’re really here for. Over time, they’ll clean things up here and there, but it doesn’t start out neat and tidy. They don’t have perfect logos or awesome video effects or HD cameras in the beginning. Just like After Effects, or RPG Maker, or Crocheting, these things take time to learn. And I may not understand them now, but I will.
If I can let go of my ego, my fear, and stop giving up so quickly, I know I will.
Hello, everyone! How have you been lately?
I’m sorry I haven’t been updating lately! You know, school, job, life…
*talking to a wall*
But today was the first of my finals for this semester; tomorrow will be my second and final …final, and then it’s Spring Break! Which I’ve decided to spend revisiting Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji (RTK for short). I was actually studying from it when I started this blog (before school violently devoured all of my time), and thought it might be fun to have progress updates and such, along with some of my notes so it’s like we can all learn together!
![[2016-03-15 - 02;55] tsundoku nau](https://old.mimi-min.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/2016-03-15-0255-tsundoku-nau.png) |
| So many tools…. |
Now, the thing is, it seems like a lot of people dislike RTK, saying that it will not help you learn actual Japanese. I agree that it won’t help you learn if it’s the only thing you use. For me, I use it mainly as a tool to help me do exactly as the title suggests; remember the kanji- and as a tool, not exactly a method. I mainly use it as a general road map alongside a plethora of several other tools, where said other tools are actually where I get the more useful information.
RTK focuses mainly on producing mnemonics and quirky ways to remember a single keyword that supposedly pertains to the character, but it leaves much to be desired in the way of readings, vocabulary, and context, and unfortunately, at least in my experience, context and readings are so, so important. I find that if I have nothing to stick a character to, I’ll forget it, no matter how great of a mnemonic I find or come up with. Nine times out of ten. But I still like the way RTK is laid out… the fact that it starts simple and gives a few chunks to work with at a time, then expands on them and shows you the characters you can make with the chunks you have accumulated before introducing you to new ones just makes a lot of sense to me and actually makes learning some of the characters less intimidating. I mean, I’m not exactly sure when I’ll be using the kanji for pig iron (銑), but I sure as heck know what it’s character is comprised of (actually, I didn’t even know what pig iron was before using RTK…). I already knew about the concept of radicals, but it was difficult to remember them when a bunch were thrown at me at once… Introducing the parts first then a bunch of characters to give the radical context is much more useful and has allowed me to take them more seriously. Context really is everything.
Now, about how I use RTK, here’s a secret: I actually don’t own the book! I started using it a few months ago when the Android application was on sale for $0.99 in celebration of the new release. The application actually doesn’t have any of the famous “stories” included in it, as it’s meant to be used as a supplement to the book, but I’ve found that it’s still very useful and I actually like that I have to come up with something myself. Sure, it’s more heavy lifting, technically… but it’s also more personalized so it sticks better in the context of my mind! It does, however, provide the characters, the keywords, and the “primitive elements” (which are actually shown rather than just listed, so I’m not like “what the heck does ‘crown’ look like again….?”). Usually I go through each character, writing each one down in my notebook, along with it’s primitives and meanings. It looks something like this (note the progression of the characters):
水 water
氷 icicle
永 drop + water = eternity
泉 white + water = spring
腺 flesh + spring = gland
原 cliff + spring = meadow
願 meadow + head = petition
For each one, I come up with a little image to remember. For example, for “spring”, I think back to the Fairy Fountains in the Legend of Zelda games; they were always really pretty and glittery and had a “white” feeling, and they were called fountains but they were really more like springs. Bam.
Note that the act of actually writing them down helps to solidify them in your memory! It also gives you a quick cheat sheet when you just want a quick refresher to stave off boredom.
Then I use my handy dandy quiz application of choice (for me, it’s Obenkyo), enable that chapter for the study pool, and do a few quick run-throughs with the writing mode while the characters are still fresh in my mind. I take a quick break, grab a snack or something, then come back to my notebook and start looking through vocabulary. Obenkyo actually has a nifty feature where you can open up the kanji’s page during a quiz, allowing you to look at readings and vocabulary that use the character. And that’s exactly what I do! I then take notes; I write the character, then the readings, then 4-5 of the vocabulary that stand out most to me before moving on to the next character. I like that I can do this during a quiz, so that I can also review older characters simultaneously.
The vocabulary bit is the most important part of my study routine. Because I’ve been studying Japanese for a long time, there are quite a few words that I know and use but can never seem to remember the characters for. Then when I looked at RTK, there were a lot of characters that weren’t really clicking with me. Take for example 的 – RTK says that with a dove (白) and a ladle (勺) you get “bulls eye”. Okay, I kind of get it… my story for this is that you can have dove in a soup and it’ll hit the spot. But really, what the heck is “bulls eye” supposed to mean…? How would I ever realistically use that?
Then I took a closer look at it with Obenkyo, which states that it can be bulls eye, mark, target, etc. and can be read as テキ for the onyomi or まと for the kunyomi. I peruse the vocabulary that 的 is present in… and viola, I come across things like 目的（もくてき）, a word I’m actually quite familiar with. The word means something like objective, goal etc. – and it would make sense that it’s written with an eye and a target! Then, in my class, a bunch of words appear in our readings, like 一般的（いっぱんてき）, 基本的（きほんてき）, 全体的（ぜんたいてき）. Suddenly 的 is much more relevant!
One thing that’s important to remember is that you have to take the keywords and primitive elements very loosely. I like to talk about forgetting English in order to learn Japanese, and it’s a serious thing. The English keywords can be helpful in conjuring the concepts and ideas that the characters are supposed to represent, but if you cling to them, you’ll be thinking about it all wrong. Japanese is not English! So stop using English! When you start looking at the language like a child would, associating words with their concepts rather than more words, you’ll start tapping into your brain’s natural ability to learn languages, which is critical.
I like to think of it like just adding more words to my arsenal for communication, with the difference being the context under which they’re used. Then it’s like telling your brain that we already know how to do this; we did it in grade school when we would read novels and look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary. It’s the exact same process, so don’t overthink it!
(Disclaimer: This actually tends to lead me to accidentally throw in some Japanese words when speaking with Americans because they sometimes pop up sooner, but… they know I’m a study maniac, they understand! …I think (*´▽｀*);; )
Now that I’ve gone into a rant about how I use RTK to my advantage rather than labeling it as useless/misleading and throwing it out the window, I think I’ll actually get back to studying now.
…Or maybe I’ll take a nap first… なんてね!ww
皆さん、頑張ってください!
* Edit: I’m now thinking it might have been good to touch on the fact that it’s most effective if you’re actually using the kanji and vocabulary you learn on a regular basis after you learn them, but I’ll save that for another post. I think Firefox’s Furigana Inserter has a feature that lets you ignore known kanji… I’ll have to devise a way to use this to my advantage. …In other words, I haven’t gotten to the actual use part, and still have to use the dictionary quite often… which this next two weeks is supposed to help with. I’ll see how it goes and report the results! (-‘ ω ‘-)ゞ
Hello, everyone!
Because I hope for this to eventually give insight on how I got to Japan as an illustrator (stay positive!), I hope the occasional personal post is not too annoying. I think the thought process is also good to consider when making these kinds of decisions. This time, I’m going to talk about school.
For me, school started last week. Usually, American students start school in September, but in my case, various things have happened, so I had to start with the winter term instead. At any rate, I’m here now, and very happy about it!
One of the things I want to do is attend a specialty school (専門学校 senmon gakkou) for game illustration, but the ones I looked at required a near-fluent level of Japanese speaking and comprehension ability. Because of this, I decided that I would major in Japanese, and possibly minor in art; however, I may also consider the reverse. For now, I just want to focus on taking as many Japanese language and culture classes as possible so that I may be more prepared for the later steps in my plans. I feel like taking a major rather than a minor in Japanese will be more beneficial in the long run.
I was a little concerned about what level courses I should take for Japanese. At my school, once you reach third-year, the classes are actually split up; you have two terms of Speaking and Listening (301/302) and two terms of Reading and Writing (304/305), which overlap during winter term. When I went through the placement screening, my adviser told me that I would be fine in the third-year level classes, but technically the major requires a student to take 301, which I had missed. Additionally, once a student takes 302, they cannot take 301. But, she told me that if I absolutely did not want to wait for next year to start taking Japanese classes, that I could take 302 and fill in 301’s slot with a different class. Sounds good to me! So I decided to do that.
This term, I’m taking the two Japanese classes and one General Studies class (here we call them “University Studies”). Unfortunately I transferred in with a credit amount just short of the threshold to only require two University Studies classes this year rather than three, so I’ll have to take the remaining two next term alongside the final third-year Japanese class (305). That will make for a slightly boring term, but this one is pretty fun, so I think it balances out!
One thing I’m a little worried about is that everyone says the jump from third-year to fourth-year is pretty high. I have a somewhat strange situation, where unlike most of the students, I’ve actually been studying Japanese for a very long time; through a mixture of self study, podcasts, and classes in high school, along with some befriending of and chatting with some native speakers online, I’ve come to a point where I am very comfortable with the language comprehension-wise (though I’m a bit shaky with vocabulary; nothing some flashcards won’t fix). Actually speaking, though, is a little different.
For the most part, my writing (er, typing) seems to be understood, though I’m sure there are errors here and there. But for speaking (as in verbal communication), I have very little confidence. Not only do I have a bad habit of completely forgetting how to use keigo (polite speech), especially when conjugating verbs, I also have a habit of speaking much more quickly than I can think, which leads to a lot of grammatical errors and stumbling over words. There are also several grammar points that I remember learning but have forgotten the details of; as a result, I use them incorrectly. I think this is because I haven’t actually been in a class since early 2010 (almost 6 years!), so I’ve mostly been exposed to purely casual settings and conversation (and maaaaaybe a little anime…).
I feel like maybe I shouldn’t worry about this as much as I do. After all, many of my classmates seem to also struggle with their speaking ability; but I think they have a better all around stable level and more recent practice using specific grammar points whereas for me it’s very hit and miss; I have a tendency to cling to the ones I know best. In the end, I think it will come down to putting forth more effort and making sure to practice often.
とにかく頑張ります!
If you’re here, I’m assuming you’re interested in learning Japanese. I don’t blame you! Japan’s culture is incredibly rich; no matter what you’re interested in, be it anime/games, fashion, food, sports or technology, Japan probably has a lot to offer. You might be a little nervous to start learning Japanese. After all, it’s considered to be one of the most difficult languages for English speakers to achieve proficiency in. However, I believe that if you approach it with the right mindset, it is definitely an attainable feat. In this post, I’m going to share some tips I’ve picked up during my language journey.
It may seem daunting to tackle a language knowing that you’ll have to learn to think in an entirely different way, but you shouldn’t be put off by it. Think about when you were a baby; you couldn’t speak any languages, but you had a very open mind. You were listening, observing, taking mental notes constantly, and slowly, you got to where you are now; reading this post with very little effort, having fluid conversations without a second thought, even able to recognize (most of the time) when a child or foreigner uses the language incorrectly. It doesn’t happen immediately or without struggle, but it can happen. It will happen. You just have to be patient; never give up just because it seems difficult. If it feels like a struggle, it means you’re learning. Also, pace yourself! Make sure you don’t try to tackle too much at once; choose something at your level. If you’re playing an RPG and you want to level up your Lv. 15 characters, do you go off and fight Lv. 70 monsters? I didn’t think so. So don’t do it when you’re studying, either! If you go in trying to watch anime without subtitles straight away you won’t get very much out of it save for a few overused phrases. Cool for impressing your friends, but if you really want to impress people you’ll want to learn more than that.