Eiri and Shuichi
Life is Good

The title refers to the feelings in the picture. Initially, it referred to Shuichi's happiness. Shuichi's lover, Eiri, is lying against him, content to be there and letting Shuichi hug and snuggle him. In fact, life is good for Eiri as well. He has a lover he can trust and who loves him for himself. Even with all the trials and tribulations they have had to endure, the boys are together and content.

I started this one back in April 2005 and it quickly came together. Then I forgot about it, as usual, when other things are pressing. I found it again and decided to finally sign off on it in June 2005, shortly after A-Kon that year. This is not surprising; after a con I am usually really hyped creatively and I start drawing a lot. I discover almost-complete drawings in my various sketchpads at that time and sign off on them.

I now scan everything in at 150 dpi. After the scan, I used Auto Contrast then faded it to about 50%. I cleaned up the scan chatter and cloned out all the scan bed scratches like I have to do for every scanned piece.

The pillow patterns were made with the selecting two Orient Pattern fonts, making tiled patterns, defining them into Photoshop and using them as fills. The fills' layer modes were changed to Multiply. The Opacity was adjusted to 4% for the top pillow and 9% for the bottom pillow.

The headboard wood and the wall were made with built-in Photoshop patterns. The patterns were placed, then sections were erased so the drawing would come through.

I made three separate sections for the bed wood, even though it does not look it with the headboard and the headboard edge. The top of the headboard was done by making a rectangle then using Distort to line the grain up with the perspective defined by the window edges. Each layer's Mode was changed to Multiply and Opacity was taken down to between 20% to 36%.

The wall's simple pattern was duplicated and darkened for the edges of the windows. The wall's layer mode remained Normal and the opacity was set at 20%. The window edges' layer mode was set to Multiply and the opacity was kept at 100%.

The scroll behind Shu's head was scratch-built in Photoshop. I put a narrow drop-shadow on the rectangle so it would match the perspective established by the pencil lines. A built-in Photoshop pattern was used for the scroll's texture. The texture's layer Mode was changed to Multiply and the opacity was adjusted to 50%.

The buildings in the window were from photos I took from my 18th floor hotel room at the Adams-Mark hotel when I was attending A-Kon 16. I placed the photo into the main drawing then cut it in half to divide the buildings into two sections. I used a Reticulation filter on the building layers to break them down into simple shapes. Both layers were left at Normal and the opacity was changed to 40%. The window highlights were placed on a separate layer. I drew white streaks then used the Blur and Smudge tools to soften them.

I went out to a translation site, typed in "Life is good", selected 'English to Japanese' and got "Seimei wa yoi". I was surprised a "desu" was not a part of the sentence but I suspect this is one of the many cases where the phrase has been shortened in the basic Japanese language and the "desu" is now implied. I translated it back to English, just to make sure and got the same thing. I made a screenshot of the translation and brought it into Photoshop. I changed the screenshot to 150 dpi. I selected each character separately, made a copy, then pasted it into the main drawing. After setting each character in place, each layer's Mode was changed to Multiply to knock out the white around each character and the Opacity was taken down to 50%. I smoothed out the pixelization by drawing on top of each separate character.

Interesting enough, after I completed this, I looked up the word "yoi" (good). The Japanese dictionary shows "yoi" with a kanji and a hiragana, not two hiragana. I went ahead and left it this way because it was the easy thing to do.