It’s only been eight years, but I finally managed to translate Kaneko’s interview from the spring 2003 number of Comickers.
It’s a personal favourite, to be honest, so please read (and share) a short talk with Kaneko about vintage art programmes and his view on art, its peculiarities and his own style. Also boxingman.
Evolving strategy
Kaneko Kazuma
Q: What can you tell us about your work process?
I first use pencils to draw on paper, but the A4 size is too small and a lot of details are lost, so I retrace everything on bigger paper. When you make a big poster, you combine everything you have printed, right? I do something similar here: I put together several sheets of paper, combine them on the screen and complete them as a line drawing. Some of them can end up as large as 1 meter.
Q: That sounds…like a big amount of data.
It really is. They can even get to 100-200 megabytes, and if I try to use Painter at that point, it might as well tell me ‘nope, can’t do this’ (laughs). That’s when I separate the piece into smaller parts again, so the programme actually works, and start painting. When I paint, I simply adjust the brush depending on the size I need. I only use watercolour and oil painting for brushes and don’t bother with anything too difficult. If I insert CG, I can just erase it afterwards. I start working on the details after an approximate layer of paint. This is similar to analogue painting. I change both the canvas and the textures. I may work on the computer, but uneven coating changes too, so the characters end up looking incredibly anime style. That is why I try to reach a balance between that and a realistic style. There are no useless lines in manga character designs, so trying to paint them and make them look three-dimensional or giving them light sources similar to oil painting won’t work. As a result, when I paint roughly, I combine all the parts again and check. I cut off the parts I’m not satisfied with again and paint them. The most useful thing about CG is that I can draw without leaving empty spaces even for illustrations I have to separate into pieces. Airbrushes are no different from analog though, like when you have to do masking.
Q: Have you not been using Photoshop lately?
I’m using Photoshop now for final colour adjustments. I used to change all kinds of stuff and try out various things with it, but I exaggerated a bit too much. I felt it was closely connected to the meaning of drawing on the computer, of identity, and that I had to use it in order to do what I couldn’t with other art materials. I’ve been using the computer lately, but I believe ‘drawings are drawings’. In the end, all I do is just use different materials.
Q: Drawing such large illustrations and using Painter on top of that is amazing, since the programme sacrifices smooth movement for high performance.
Other artists prioritise speed when they have deadlines, but I don’t have to draw that often and I like focusing on details. Of course, there are also techniques to hide details and make them look vague, and even though you do a quick job there, the whole ends up looking great. And then you look closely and go ‘huh?’. That’s a skill in itself, but there are also people who look at every small detail.
Q: Your recent illustrations were also done in Painter, right?
Other artists use it as their own distinctive touch, but what I wish for is different. I want it to be considered distinctive when it comes to the characters, to be considered a part of them. Others are more vague when it comes to the nature of characters, they make them charming through their atmosphere. I, for one, need to create a precise image of the characters. If the keyword is ‘twins’, then what I will put on paper is precisely my mental image of twins, which will obviously be different from other people’s mental image of twins. Vagueness leaves space for imagination, but not only will that space not exist, the twins the viewers see will only be ‘Kaneko’s twins’. There may be people who don’t like that, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Maybe welcoming people who like it and inserting more charming points instead would be the best. When I see them at the bookstore though, I’ll end up thinking I should have been more vague.
Q: What is this ‘vagueness’?
In one word: ‘flavour’. The way of drawing caricatures or the feel when creating expressions. When people look at something, they don’t look at everything. Take backgrounds for example: if they look at the characters, they aren’t likely to notice backgrounds at all. The background might as well be all black for the viewer. Black is a cool colour, but the artist put a lot of effort into the background too, so they’d like it to be seen. So what can you do here, how do you fool the viewer? CG has been a safe bet so far, but I want to try using that vagueness too. (Insert) illustrations can change depending on this touch. It is basically their worth as a product and of my nature as an artist. You need a certain degree of versatility from a business point of view, unrelated to the game itself.
Q: What is the future direction of your art?
I want to make my illustrations more simple, so they’ll be able to convey their essence directly. Anyone can draw if they put their mind to it, and the meaning of their drawing is something exclusive to them. Those can be called caricatures and so on, each artist’s peculiarity, but it’s different from the idea of whether they should be over the top, since there’s also the matter of the value of certain styles and so on.
Q: You’re right, in the end it’s a question of whether someone has technique or not or about things that should or shouldn’t be illustrated…
They’re different, so they won’t overlap. There are young people who don’t understand this and disparage certain styles which are actually the artist’s own flavour. You can’t draw well until you understand there are differences in style; you don’t even have to understand the styles themselves. It isn’t just about drawing skillfully. Even if you have the skill, you may or may not have a job, and if it’s only a matter of drawing skillfully or not, then the people drawing portraits in Ueno Park are skilled indeed. This isn’t about whether those people are artists or not. They stop at having the skill and beyond that there’s something murky inside, something along the lines of ‘identity’. I wouldn’t call it something beautiful. That’s why I’m unfair in this sense, because I have not only games, but also drawings. Drawings appeal to less senses than games.
Q: What can you tell us about the special illustration ‘Boxingman in redroom‘?
The image is overwhelmingly red, since there aren’t too many red rooms around. The folded man and the red room. Truth be told, I always plan this type of work as a series. You may see some characters hidden in the background and so on.
Q: Umm…why is the folded man in a box?
His desire to enter small places (laughs). He’s called ‘boxing man’ because of his short pants, but ‘boxing’ can also mean ‘folded’ in this context. I thought this type of dramatic association of ideas would be neat. If an illustration doesn’t have a story, I question the necessity of the illustration itself.
Birth illustration
- from A4 paper to 70cm paper
- screen split into four parts
- Kaneko drew the boy first since he’s the main point of the illustration (‘The essential points are important simply by being essential, so I draw them first’)
- next come the demons with the appropriate textures and sense of weight
- ‘I ignore what sticks out and roughly fill in. I change the brush size whenever it’s needed and paint’
- the size is big and the execution is slow, so I only single out important parts and work on them
- after some progress, he combines the parts and looks at the colour balance
- ‘The important point here is the source of light and the reflection on the other colours. The demons are colourful, so I paint here and there and have to settle on a crude and not crude way, a gaudy and not so gaudy way.’
Kaneko tools
Software: Painter 6, Photoshop 6.01
Hardware: PowerMacintosh, G4/450 Dual, memory 1024MB, external hard disk 80GB (MAXTOR), 120GB (I.O. DATA)
Printer: EPSON PM-930C
Scanner: EPSON GT-7000U
Tablet: WACOM intuos2 i-620
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