DunMeshi comic p1 render test

Here is how the first page of this silly fancomic turned out. I tried to study Ryoko Kui's style, and I think I got a lot of aspects very close, but there's a fundamental layer I'm missing (mostly about head/face structure, and stroke selection for inking). Throughout my draft there's all these head shapes and faces that are just a bit off, but it's not worth it to me to do another sketch pass I think.

Studying the rendering style in dunmeshi has been very interesting. Ryoko Kui is such a powerful artist that I find I barely percieve the art— the narrative reality just gets transmitted straight into my brain. It surprised me on closer inspection that the rendering tends to be pretty flat and simple. Here's some notes:

• Flat screentones used for tone— not shading

• Textured patterns, especially for fabric (eg noise pattern on Laios' bracers)

• Most toning is white, 50%-ish grey, or black

• Shadows are usually indicated by hatching

  • She'll use hatching with a boundary line in places, particularly for the shadow under ppl's chins. I think this is a hard/soft shadow distinction, I've also seen shaded areas with only partial outlining. It also seems like it hints at the thing where the edge of a shadow closest to the light looks the darkest/has more saturated colour

• Backgrounds have a greater shade variation

• The adorable nose hatching. It's very cute. Almost always upper-right to lower-left; this is comfortable and natural for right-handed inking, I wonder if that's why? Combined with screentone when ppl are blushing/flushed

• More broadly, it seems like there's a focus on capturing form/shadow/texture with the inking brush, screentones are secondary

• There's a pretty significant difference between how the changeling party is shaped in the manga vs anime. I think some of the inconsistancy in my draft is from following references from both. It's mostly in the head shapes

• Not much use of shines or rimlighting (a habit I'll struggle to break), especially in screentone areas. Marcille's little black tunic has hard white shines in dramatic situations

• Marcille's hair in this section, I hadn't noticed until the closer reading I just did that her cute little asymmetrical fringe is because of the braid she cut off to make familiars in a prior chapter. On her right side, the equivalent hair is tucked back behind her ear, and then she has symetrical shorter sections hanging loose in front of her ears and the long remainder in plaits behind. It makes me want to go back thru the whole manga and study Marcille's hair journey, because it's so lovingly detailed.