This is going to be a short, update post on my Love Live project. To give this post a bit of context, I'd like to begin with an appropriate short quote from Gunslinger Girl. 

I'm still very, very, very far from where I want myself to be with Photoshop. Which, by the way, is an incredible tool. Every time I start a new session I always get something new out of it. But it is an incredibly complex tool, and how good the final product comes out depends entirely on how good the user is.

So far into the project, I've found that planning is incredibly important. You have to know what you are doing beforehand and still allow enough leeway to make changes. I didn't plan early enough or as far ahead as I would've liked. So definitely I'll have to improve on that.

Here's something I wished I did earlier: a mockup. It doesn't look like a masterpiece, and what I'm working on doesn't look too much like it either. But there's only so much you can hold in your head. To go ahead and actually sketch out those ideas is the best way to see if they are going to look crap or not. Sometimes, ideas that seem brilliant in the head end up being awfully impractical when you actually do it. Note to self: make sketches, make mockups.

Here's another thing I wish I did earlier: a colour guide. A lot of the really good projects I see use the same colours over and over again. I think this achieves two things. First, a consistent palette ties different elements of the project together. So in my project, I've tried making the orange parts correspond with the Honoka parts, and so forth. 

And second, a consistent palette stops one from putting too much colour in a project. Too much colour is confusing. For Love Live I think it's easy because the girls are 'colour-coded' to begin with. But eventually I'll have to learn how to put together complementary colours.

Finally, I've learnt that it's super important to keep things organized. A PSD file can get very messy very quickly. So it's important to label all the layers and keep things organized (I'm lazy, and that laziness can bite you in the ass more often than you think!) Keeping things organized also helps with your workflow. 

For those character profile/report cards, it's really convenient to start out with a template then just copy-paste. The on the top is about halfway to the real thing. I think it needs some more rendering. The general rule, I think, is that big elements should be 'mass produced' as much as possible. Small tweaks and rendering should be tackled on an individual basis.

That's about it. I spent half the day looking at idol pictures and now I feel like a creep.

P.S. despite what critics apparently think of it, I really like this song by Sayuri Sugawara. You can easily put it into something like Kimi ni Todoke and it won't sound weird.