Striking that BLOOD!

ANIME REVIEW TIME... FEATURING.... STRIKE THE BLOOD!

well as you can see today I Lehvorak, owner of Defensor Artz will be talking about Strike the Blood and my first comment on it when I first watched it was... I NEED TO SEE MORE!

It is your typical action anime and I understand not many people would enjoy it due to how it is like a harem and a lot of anime have that fan-service set-up, but I am not here to argue... but to present why I enjoyed this series.

First things first we all know the whole vampire idea was overused like couple years ago and such and really got killed by the Twilight series... YUCK!

I am sorry but if you are a die-heart Twilight fan I respect your fan-base and all, but it wasn't for me. There were also a ton of anime that featured vampires and it started to become overused...

The uniqueness of this anime is you got this magic shaman girl who does her magic and a computer hacker who is the best in her world.

Yes... I am talking about these 2 characters:

Himeragi Yukina

Asagi Aiba

And you can tell from the very beginning like the opening of the series that these girls is going to fall in love with the main character, despite how many times these producers try to cover it up... but they fail at!

If you saw the video, you see basically almost all the characters that will show on this series right at the very beginning. It was obvious how this would be a harem series just after seeing all the girl characters.

I do warn you, that this is a one-sided anime that only appeal to men... if I were a woman I would be offended by this series.... but oh well, all we have to do is appreciate the story.

There are a ton of story arcs in this series which made it exciting, it kind of reminded me of bleach in a way because of how many story arcs that series has or even.... yeah Naruto....

The concept idea of how the main character: Kojou Akatsuki is the 4th progenitor is pretty interesting and how he has to help protect his island home or even protect Yukina. I don't want to spoil too much of the series despite the openings of the series already does spoil a bunch... unless you are bad with the metaphors/hints in those videos. Overall, I did enjoy it and would suggest checking it out!

-Lehvorak

Drawing it on Digital or Traditional?

Digital Art

Can be described as a range of artistic works or practices by using Digital Technology as your medium.

 

Art by: Tomoyuki Yamasaki

Our world has changed a lot over the years, do you guys remember when it was all hand drawn on paper with graphite pencils or charcoal pencils? Those types of mediums are still being used today, but the thing is... everyone is into the digital age and trying to keep up with it. As Illustration artists, we want to be part of the trend by using any drawing tablets to draw on a digital medium using any program like Paint Tool Sai or Photoshop.

Not only we use our computers... we even started using apps that are on our smart phones or iPads. The point here is what are the struggles of transitioning from our comfy pencil and paper to a metallic/plastic material where we have to scrape these two together? I guess the question to ask is... do older illustration artist have a chance against the new age or are they able to adapt?

Back in the day it was all about sketching it out on paper and then painting the pictures with the good old oil paint or acrylics. In my opinion, I think it is still alright for us to learn with paper and pencil because that is where we learn how to do the traditional way and touch on something that all artists of today kind of lack which is value. We can learn value by using this head statue

A lot of my ways of learning value is by my former mentor, Harry Ahn who taught me that "Value is key." Without the basic understandings of how the old masters did things, how can we call ourselves artists? Maybe more of a rebel? I guess that is how the whole art movement came about creating odd things such as cubism, but without this whole understanding of value... we will never learn how to do the right portraits or even learn how the human head value scale works.

Moving back to the digital art, I am not saying it is a bad thing to transfer to the new age, but embrace it as a whole, because this is what our culture is into now! Who knows what other new things we will see in the future? For the question about older artists, the answer is that they need to be up to date to the latest trends of today because whatever artist do, we need to be up to date because that is where the money is! I mean we are trying to gain money for our works right?

But I believe we should use both the digital and traditional ways of art and combine it as one entity, because that might be the key point on discovering your own style. Who knows? Hopefully this talk was more of an inspiration than insult.

As you can see adapting to digital art took me a short while, but I believe there is a lot more to learn from... Well, that is all I have to say, so...take a look at this sketch I did!

-Lehvorak