Julie's Cave

Happy New Year !

2012-01-18T17:54:00.001Z

Hi ! 3 new drawings for this beginning of the year :)

The first two are new characters from my story to come : Eve's Apple. The story's coming along slowly, my imagination gets so limited sometimes that it takes a looong time to get just a simple idea out of my brain... it's depressing :)

The 3rd one was supposed to be a character from the story Dreamkeepers written by my friend, but it didn't seem to fit the character so well so I kept the picture as I kind of liked it :)

Have a good day !

Back from vacation

2011-08-28T17:20:00.000+01:00

And a few drawings for you :)
These are characters from my boyfriend's story "Dreamkeepers" : Kyriuss, Letti and Idyline. The last one doesn't have a name yet...

New drawings... well not so new

2011-07-19T21:25:00.000+01:00

Sorry for those who have been waiting for more here, inspiration hasn't been my friend for quite a while now... =_=
Anyway, I did these drawings last year and never got around to post them here...

The first one shows two main characters of a story my boyfriend wrote : "DreamKeepers". You'll find it here but it's in french :\

And here are 3 new doodlings ^_^

Well, see you next year ! (just kidding......... I hope)

Back again!

2010-03-14T18:30:00.003Z

Hi everyone,

Did you know that moving takes an awful lot of time? Well, now I do... =_=
Anyway, I'm now set up in my new room, with a giant desk and a very VERY comfy chair. Drawing will never have been so pain-free :D

Sooo, the drawings: 4 pictures from my project "Eve's Apple".

I'm still working on my plot, but it's getting more and more precise and I think I should be able to write the first scripts soon.

I hope you'll like it!

Happy New Year !

2010-01-08T21:39:00.003Z

A Happy New Year (I know I'm a bit late) to you all !! May it bring all you need and want!

For you today, a rough I made for Kalinara. (You'll have to ask her personally if you want more information on those two characters (they're awesome)):

... And 4 new "reacquainting pictures" for the Pen Stealer. They're no good, very quick roughs but well, I haven't got much more to show these days :P

Next time, I should have more Eve's Apple stuff to show!

2 new doodles for Christmas

2009-12-26T09:14:00.002Z

Merry Christmas everyone!

Here are two new doodles for you.
The second one's been titled "the old man and the pigeon" and was drawn while I was listening to "Hej Noïta" from the newest CD album by Nosfell

Enjoy !

More reacquainting pictures

2009-12-13T15:45:00.002Z

Hi everyone,

here are a few more roughs from the Pen Stealer, same as last time, they're "reacquainting pictures". Meaning me trying to remember how to draw the characters from the Pen Stealer.

The first one's characters are kind of our mascots. The second one pictures schoolmates of Ryota. and the last two are... another secret. The katana guy is my personal favorite <3

Enjoy!

Eve's Apple : 3 more roughs

2009-12-02T15:11:00.003Z

I think I'm going to keep that title for my new project. I've been using it for months now, I'll never be able to change it.

As promised, 3 more (very roughly) roughs! and only one week after my latest post too! That ain't going to last, I can feel it... =_=

Next week will be more "reacquainting pictures" from the Pen Stealer.

Have a good week :)

Yes I do hate myself sometimes...

2009-11-25T16:55:00.003Z

...for my laziness.

's been a while heh? :P

So today's pictures are a few (very very rough) sketchs from the Pen Stealer.

These two below are part of my "reacquainting pictures", I'll post more later. It's been an awful long time since I worked on that story Kalinara and I have created and my style has changed quite a bit too. So I needed to go through most of our characters to remember how to draw them...

The first one pictures Shinobu, one of the very first characters you'll meet in chapter 0 (when we do finish it =_=)
The one on the right is... a secret... most of the "reacquainting pictures" will have characters I can't talk about :P You'll have to read the comics if you're curious (and patient.... )

Now is a picture I did in the hope to make it a chapter title page someday. I used it to try my new toning software as well. I still have a long way to go before I master that one...

I have more pictures waiting, so I should have a new post more quickly this time...

The Doodles make their Grand Return!

2009-05-31T17:50:00.004+01:00

Some news at last on this blog!

Unfortunately, all I can give you after all these months are doodles :D
I blame my jobs. See, the stress's got to get out someway... Who said "What stress?" hmph
Anyway, here you are. Don't hesitate to tell me what you think of them :)

Now that I'm once more unemployed, I may be able to do actual drawings. Kalinara and I are once more working on the Pen Stealer. So there's a lot of chance that next time I'll post drawings here it'll be roughs for the PS.

Well then, take care!

Bear, Otter and...

2008-12-10T18:25:00.005Z

Two new designs from my new manga project (i have to find a name for it!)
And I think I might become an eternal student just to keep the inspiration coming :P (why is it that my hands only want to draw when I'm supposed to do something else!)

As a little bonus, here are two fanarts. Give it a glance, the explanations are just below.

For those who know the series, you might have recognize Goku and Bulma from the great, the awesome, the legendary Dragon Ball manga (by Akira Toriyama).
I've re-read the 42 volumes of the manga and watched (no, not the 3 hundred something DBZ episodes, I'm not *that* crazy) the 64 episodes of Dragon Ball GT. So, obviously, it had to get out somewhere ^^
Dragon Ball's the first ever manga I started copying, thus starting my "drawing manga" obsession. Now that I've got my own drawing style, I wanted to try drawing it once more and see what the mix would give :D

... and just because it *has* to be said, Dragon Ball GT SUCKS. I know now why I never wanted to watch it. It's awful, stupid, incoherent, slow, uninteresting, and it's definitely NOT Dragon Ball. It's like the 40 or so years that Goku and the rest spent doing things, fighting evil (or not) monsters were for nothing!! And the characters have all been brainwashed!! I can understand that 20 years after the Boo story, they would have changed, but what we see in DBGT are not changes but completely different characterizations!! And Oob's non-existent, as well as most of the Saiyan tribe...
I didn't really expect much from it but it's still really disappointing...

Aliens!

2008-12-10T18:18:00.003Z

Hehe, I love drawing those :D
Can't explain where they come from... mostly from boredom during classes :D
and don't try finding any sense to them, there isn't one. at all. I just like them, and I hope you too!

New designs

2008-12-10T17:45:00.005Z

I've finally caught up with my more recent drawings!

Now, I'm going to present you the latest designs for my new manga project. I'm still pretty much at the planning stage, waiting to see where the story's going to take me and who the characters really are. I find that I really need a drawing to picture more easily a character and give him/her substance. I really like that whole process (even if it is far more difficult doing that alone rather than with a co-author, as it is for the Pen Stealer)

Anyway, here are 4 character designs (you may recognize two of them as I already drew pictures for them) and 4 drawings featuring scenes that may or may not happen in the actual story :)

Still can't tell you much about it, except that it's going to make me learn to draw animals on a regular basis :P
oh, and for those wondering, yes, the dark-skinned light-haired guy's got only one arm

Drawings for Diamondrock

2008-12-10T17:31:00.003Z

Diamondrock is another friend I met in Japan along with Kalinara and just like Kal and I, he likes to write stories and draw manga. So, of course I had to play with his characters and draw them with my own style ^_^
Same here, if you want to know more details about them, just go pester him :P

New Project !

2008-12-10T16:58:00.005Z

Earlier this year, I started working on a new manga project, those are the very first designs I drew for it. Can't tell you much about the story, nothing's really set yet :)

Drawings for Kalinara

2008-12-10T16:37:00.004Z

Kalinara is an awesome writer. I love everything she writes with a passion and sometimes I manage to get passed my laziness and draw some pictures featuring characters and scenes from her stories.
Those pictures are just that, and if you want more details on who and what they are, you can always ask her (or pester her to write the damn books! :P)

Doodles in colors

2008-12-10T16:29:00.002Z

Once I had perfected my art of "doodling", I started mixing them with real-looking things, mainly human faces or bodies. And then, because I liked it so much, I did two of them in colors :

They're still doodles, they still don't mean anything, but now they do it with colors! :D
I really enjoy drawing those things, it helps emptying one's brain :P

2008-12-10T16:10:00.002Z

Sometimes drawing just doesn't work and you have to find something else. I'm not the "abstract art" type usually, but at one point my hand no longer wanted to draw and I started doodling, *really* doodling (something that never really happened to me, my doodles always *looked like* something). And those are what came out, and it might be presumptous but I really like them :D

Anime Music Videos

2008-12-10T14:24:00.002Z

I like exploring new ways of creating things. That's how I got to try making AMVs (anime music videos)... well that was when my computer still allowed it (he's been angry with me since then).

Beware, these videos contain mass spoilers and are a bit big (around 50 Mo piece)

That one imposed itself when I first watched the movie FF7 Advent Children. It is set on the music "O Fortuna" from the Carmina Burana opera.

Card Captor Sakura is a very cute anime that needed a similarly cute music : Kingfisher girl ~ The song of "wish you were here" by Maaya Sakamoto and Yoko Kanno

enjoy^^

More wallpapers

2008-12-09T20:44:00.004Z

I do love playing with Photoshop when I've got the time. Even though I never got the grasp for vectorizing my wallpapers, I do like composing a picture ^_^

This wallpaper comes from a very cute and touching shortstory by one awesome mangaka : Sumomo Yumeka (also known as Mizu Sahara). This one's called "Chou ni naru hi" which could be translated as "the day I/you became a butterfly" or "the day which became a butterfly" (a translation used in the manga). The annoying thing is that we never get to know clearly what gender that long-haired character is. As it was published in a shonen-ai manga, we could suppose he/she's guy, but really... he/she's way too feminine... It's still very cute either way.

This one's not extracted from a manga but from one of the most awesome cartoon of the moment : Avatar, the last airbender. It's simply excellent! excellent characters, excellent story, and even more excellent animation. The teams did a really great job there and it's really nice to get such good cartoons once in a while ^_^

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Back to manga. One of the mangaka that made my own style change so much is Hiroyuki Asada (author of the manga "I'll"). His talent's simply unfair. He's beyond anything I've seen this far. Not only his art's good, but his compositions are perfect and full of poetry. I highly recommend you to look through his artbooks, even if you've never read his mangas.

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Shonen-ai wallpapers

2008-12-09T18:49:00.006Z

I started making wallpapers early this year (cause I wasn't very inspired to do anything else and I needed an excuse for NOT doing what I was supposed to :))

So, I begun, of course, by doing wallpapers I most wanted at the time, meaning shonen-ai wallpapers.
(For those who don't know, shonen-ai is a type of manga dealing with male x male relationships, sorry for those who don't like that sort of stuff :P)
Anyway, the first 2 are very similar versions of a wallpaper from the manga "Kakumei no Hi" (Day of revolution) by Mikiyo Tsuda, also known as Taishi Zaou. It's a very cute manga, I encourage you to read it! (and it's not *technically* a shonen-ai manga, but it's ambiguous enough that at least *I* put it in this category)

The 3rd wallpaper is from a manga called "koi wa ina mono myouna mono" (love is a strange and curious thing) by the same mangaka but more yaoi-ish (meaning porn:) ) and it's very funny so you should all read it!

The last wall is from one of my favourite mangas ever "Komatta toki ni wa hoshi ni kike!" by Abe Miyuki. It's awesome and you MUST read it!!

and no, I'm not the type to enjoy making people read what *I* like... *cough* well, maybe just a little... :P

Winamp Skins

2008-11-30T17:00:00.004Z

At one point, around 2005-2006, I got crazy with winamp skins. What can I say, I love learning to create new things, and I love winamp. But more than that, I wanted some skins that I couldn't find anywhere, so I had to do them myself ^_^
The very first skin I made is a Pen Stealer one, but I won't show it here because I don't like it.

That skin is based on "I'll" by Hiroyuki Asada, one of my favorite mangakas. His style is just awesome. And Akane Tachibana is the coolest character ever <3

I love the Final Fantasy series, and I love pretty things. I could but love the movie : Final Fantasy VII : Advent Children. The story's so-so, but it's soooo pretty. (I never knew, when I was playing the FF7 game, that Cloud was THAT hot ;p)

Earth Girl Arjuna is a strange and great anime. If you don't mind having to re-think your whole life, I recommend it to you greatly! (plus, it takes place in Kobe, the city I lived in during 9 months!)

That one is my latest skin and was done a good deal of time later than the others (summer 08). It pictures the anime "Heat Guy J", a really nice anime! The characters are well done, the music is awesome, the designs are great... I love it ^_^

Fanarts

2008-11-21T22:21:00.002Z

I don't draw many fanarts, but it happens. The first one is a request from a cousin who wanted Temari from the Naruto series. (not my favorite character mind you, but she is cool).
The second picture is for my own pleasure :) These two guys are from the Nightrunner series of books by Lynn Flewelling. I think I'll never thank Kalinara enough for pointing them out to me. Those books are fabulous. XD

The Pen Stealer in Colours Part 2

2008-11-21T22:11:00.002Z

Those are my most successful attempts at colouring, even if they still need a lot of work... *cough* backgrounds *cough*...
Anyway, as you can imagine, they were drawn and coloured on Photoshop :)

The Pen Stealer in Colours Part 1

2008-11-21T22:03:00.003Z

Those are my first coloured pictures for the Pen Stealer. I had asked my mum to send me my inks all the way to Japan especially to make these :D
I really like the first one, but the others make me go all *yuck*, especially the backgrounds. (I hate backgrounds even more than I hate colouring pictures...)

The Pen Stealer Sketches Part 2

2008-11-21T21:50:00.003Z

Some more sketches for the Pen Stealer. The first one was drawn with black ink, but the others were drawn directly on Photoshop with my magic graphics tablet :D
You'll recognize Ryota on the first two pictures, the others are characters who haven't been introduced yet in the story, so I'm not going to tell you their names yet ;p

The Pen Stealer Sketches Part 1

2008-11-21T21:29:00.005Z

The Pen Stealer is an amateur manga Kalinara and I created during our year of study in Japan. She writes the scripts and the side-stories, I draw and take care of the website. The story's pretty basic as it started as a joke, but the more we worked on it, the more complex and crazy it became. :D We actually managed to make 1 chapter + half of the second. However, as I live in France and she in the US, it got hard to keep working on it, since we both have busy lives :)
Plus, as we got older and got to see other things, we agreed that the story needed a serious revamping.
That's why the Pen Stealer's been on hiatus since then. I do really care for this project so I'm sure we'll definitely go back to it at some point. :)
Anyway, here are some sketches for some of the main protagonists of the story : Ryota Kurohitsu, Haku Shiroishi, Shinobu, Haruko and Sullivan.

Old Colored Pictures

2008-11-21T19:46:00.003Z

It is NOT in my nature de colour my drawings... I'm lazy and I far prefer doing sketchs than actually finish a drawing.
Nevertheless, I managed to do some of them.

These 3 are my first attempts at colouring drawings with my computer. At that time I didn't know Photoshop and had to use a Paint-type software to colour them. Considering that, I'm quite proud of myself, even though they're full of defaults...

Those are a little more recent (around 2003). The first one is one of my attempts at ink-colouring. Not very successful, but well...
The second one is Photoshop-coloured. I had discovered the existence of layers :D (oh, and for anyone who wonders, my 10 year-old cousin had asked for a "princess" ;p)

Old Drawings (last part)

2008-11-21T17:50:00.002Z

That's the last of my old drawings (meaning before 2008), those were done around 2004. (After that I got too busy with The Pen Stealer to draw many other things)
These ones are your usual fantasy/sci-fi girls

These were aliens in my collection at the time. The first one because it didn't look like anything, and the second because it's actually a drawing of my brother playing the guitar :P

Old Drawings (part4)

2008-11-21T17:32:00.003Z

...and some more 2003 drawings, and see! there ARE boyz now! hehe

Old Drawings (part3)

2008-11-21T16:48:00.002Z

Here are some more old drawings.
As you can see, for the longest time I was only able (or inspired?) to draw girls. And it's apparently something many people do when they start drawing (at least many of my friends did). I always wondered about it... For me it was far more simpler to draw girls, maybe because the female proportions are so much easier to get...
Anyway, those drawings were done around 2003, and the second one is actually inspired by a story written on a forum by several people. The concept was very interesting too: some people bore tatoos that invested their owners with the characteristics of the thing tatooed... for example, a guy with a bat-tatoo would be able to use some sort of sonar to "see" in the dark...
To make a story short, the girl on that drawing was licorn-tatooed and one of the main protagonist ^_^

Old Drawings (part2)

2008-05-04T08:20:00.002+01:00

Here are some drawings from a project I had started in 2002. Never got around to finish it. It was supposed to be a short story about faeries and madness. Maybe I'll draw it someday, I liked the design ^_^

Old Drawings (part1)

2008-05-03T08:01:00.000+01:00

So then, first, I wanted to show some old drawings of mine ^_^ These were done between 2000 and 2002. I've done loads of drawings during this period, but these 3 are the only ones my ego would allow me to show. ;p

You'll see if you keep coming here that I love to draw everything from the "fantasy" worlds =P, faeries, magicians, sorceress, spirits... but mostly fairies. I loved fairies stories as a child. And big bewitched swords. And dragons. But I don't draw dragons. Too difficult (I'm lazy =))