MOCHI > The Workshop > Library > Reference Books

Time and time again, Daifuku Mochi would find herself in the fabric store, oggling two different shades of the same fabric and trying to remember if the dress was more blue-green or green-blue. More often than not, she'd either end up:

1. Buying neither of them, going home, checking on the right color, and then going back to the store to find that they'd sold out of the right color, or
2. Buying both colors because she was didn't want to find herself in situation number one.

Spiky Mochi found that when he was working on a costume, he'd have to keep a stack of manga, magazines, and artbooks lying around, stuffed full of bookmarks. It was a pain for him to remember which picture was in which book, especially when he wanted to flip to a particular picture to show exactly why this particular guy in armor with a huge sword was so cool.

The solution? Create a costume reference book.

Ingredients:

• A 3-ring binder. You'll want at least one binder to start with.
• A box of plastic "page protector sheets". Each page has an opening along the top where you slide in sheets of paper and holes punched along the left-hand side.
• Access to either:
  • A few hours at a Kinko's, Office Depot, or other place that has color and/or black and white photcopiers
  • Access to a scanner and a printer (color and/or black and white)

Figure out what pictures you want to use as a reference. In an ideal world, you could find good line-drawings of the character from the front, side, and back -- especially sketches from the character model sheet used by animators to keep the character's look consistent. However, you usually have to settle for whatever pictures you can get. In general, you will also want at least one color reference picture. Some characters may look very different from one picture to the next: if you're picky, having different pictures will give you an idea of what color range you have to work with.

You should not be shy about blowing up a picture. There are often details that may be hard to make out at smaller size. If you are using a scanner and imaging software, remember that you will want to scan in your pictures at at least 300 dpi, preferably 600 dpi if you can. Most pictures on the net are usually scanned in at a much lower dpi: it reduces the flie size of the image. Unfortunately, you also lose clarity. Line drawings are a large part of anime art (and an even more essential part of manga!) and the lower resolution means more "jaggies".

Make copies or printouts of whatever pictures you want to use. Put them in the page protector sheets. Voila! There's your basic reference book! You have the pictures that you want in one, handy place, with the side benefit that your pictures now have some protection from getting splashed with water, ink, paint, wet plaster, and other stuff if you have the book open while you're working.

You may want to keep some sheets of notebook paper or blank sheets in the reference book for notes and sketches.

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