Eiri and Shuichi
Inspired by the fic "Don't Eat the Daisies"
by Aja

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Aja writes wonderful Gravitation fics, weaving lovely and visual tales in the universe. Her writing is realistic, bringing fascinating Japanese facts together with interesting original characters mixing with canon characters, along with many emotions and interesting situations. She keeps everyone in character while still allowing them to grow beyond the confines of canon, and does it in a logical and believable manner.

Her "Alphabet Arc" has a great following. Read her multi-chapter stories at gurabiteshion.net.

This sketch is from a chapter in her story "Don't Eat the Daisies", where Eiri and Shu, along with the six-year-old girl child they are wishing to adopt (named Naora) are visiting the Shindou household for the Bon Festival. This is not exactly an image of what happened, so I was concerned Aja would not like it. I sent the sketch to her and asked her if it was okay. She loved it.

I hadn't decided what technique to use with this piece, whether to continue with the pencil or try ink. Fel's wonderful inking inspired me to try to ink it, something I had not done for a long time.

This time I wanted to use thick and thin lines like Fel and some manga and doujinshi artists. I used Staedtler pigment liner sizes 05, 01 and 005. The top lines of the hair of E & S are thicker than the underside lines. The yukata lines are also thicker than what I usually do.

Naora's hair was inked very softly with the 005 liner, to keep her delicate.

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The skin shading and fabric shadows/highlights were done in Photoshop using web-safe greys at about eight to 10% opacity. The tones were then smudged to soften the lines. Shiyuu's hair was done with a gradient. Eiri's hair shading was done the same as the skintones but not smudged.

Each yukata (light-weight cotton kimono) was done a little differently. Naora's yukata pattern is from an actual Japanese screentone. Eiri's yukata is from a Hawaiian fabric pattern which was then adjusted with 'brighten and contrast' to make it more black and white in tones. The resource graphic for Eiri's yukata pattern came from a swatch graphic on a tropical fabric website, The Seam Shoppe (http://www.tropicalfabricsonline.com). Shiyuu's yukata stripes were hand-drawn and the fill is three layers of texture and grey tones.

The lamps in the background were taken from various lamp photos then various filters added to make them silhouettes. The symbol on the lamps was made with a free font called Orient Patterns and was selected by Aja to represent the Shindou family since nothing could be found on the internet.

Note: I dated the completion date incorrectly. It should say 6/12/04, not 6/8/04. I may fix this one of these years.
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Page created June 13, 2004
Last updated: April 23, 2006
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