The Melancholy of Noel Quinton

 

I came up with Novella's outcry sometime last friday. Although I haven't watched more than a few of the series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, I've watched enough to mock it's silliness. Half of the problem with my slow progress in watching the show is that I tend to watch the most anime when I'm flying somewhere for work purposes. I watch anime on my PSP for an hour or so before deciding to read or nap. This anime isn't exactly "plane safe". In case you're interested, I've watched Blood+, Noien, and parts of Nana on my travels.

I drew and shaded most of the left panel in about 4 hours. The right panel took a bit longer for no particular reason. Over all, coloring took the longest time. The reason was that I wasn't using a familiar application. In previous years, I had a copy of Photoshop at my disposal. When I bought my laptop, I found that I no longer had the photoshop install disk. After tearing apart my apartment, I still couldn't find it. My only option was the open-source GIMP.

I had used GIMP a few times over the last few years, but it's been only recently that I've really began to use it seriously. GIMP 2 is an excellent application, although very different from what I'm used to using. As a result, it took me a while to reproduce the same effect as I would have before. Overall, I'm impressed with the results. A free, easily downloadable application produced a reasonably good piece of artwork as the very expensive commerical equivalent. My faith in open-source is thus maintained. Unless I run into another complication, I intend to continue using GIMP to produce Novella.