Artwork of Berserk interview - Page 2 (part 3)

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Interviewer: I see, you mean that with digital, it's impossible for something to be created unexpectedly.

Miura: A part of analog work was about how to use accidents, and that was also the case when penning in black and white manuscripts. Digital is inflexible because the pen-work is done under total control.

Interviewer: You started drawing digitally a few years ago. How did you feel when you shifted to it?

Miura: At first, I was in panic. However, color (work) could be smoothly shifted, so the merits were bigger (than the demerits). Gradation was so easy and both modification and correction were so effective that the color work was accelerated. For manga manuscripts, I’d say there are pluses and minuses as well… I think it has been growing late. *laughs* However, I can’t say conclusively about this because it depends on the current content of the series.

As I said about color (work) a minute ago, I can get very close to my images with digital, but such a live feeling, like something drawn in a continuous stroke in raw manuscripts, disappears instead. However, it’s quite unlikely that I would go back to drawing by hand. It’s because digital has a lot of merits and it’s perfect to hand work over to my assistants. If I just think about my own drawings, in some parts I prefer analog, but digital is definitely better when considering the repartition of work.

Interviewer: Were there changes in the pictures drawn digitally?

Miura: The drawing process has been accelerated and there are a lot of reference materials, which enables me to work hard on backgrounds or sceneries. Actually, I wanted to take enough time for these before, but I had no time for them when I drew by hand…

Drawings like sceneries of the Elf Island or the many elves I've drawn these days are impossible without digital. I collected photo materials in the past but it’s not like I could draw as they were, so it required a lot of work. In the end, preference for digital or hand-drawing is up to the viewers’ taste, I think. The problem I'm confronted with currently is how to realize the squishy painting effects I did before with digital. Digital lines are so flat that it’s hard to recreate the feel of a rough brush (stroke). Maybe it’s just because I don’t know the tools. *laughs*



Note: When Miura talks about drawing by hand, he means with pen and paper versus using digital tools.
Note: When he talks about "images" in Katakana, it usually refers to an impression or a mental image.

Image caption: In the perspective of these storyboards, we can see that the images seem to have already been determined.