Footnote to our roundtable and especially Tom’s fine dissection of Helter Skelter‘s art.
I noted the lack of patterning in the book compared to other manga for women. I meant not the hand-drawn composition of Okazaki’s pages so much as large, flat areas of design. Like the pattern on the dress and tights in this image from Nana:
(Image nicked from Let’s Fall Asleep, a manga & comics blog for librarians.)
The patterns are typically screentones (though I imagine more studios are doing this with computers). Either way, they’re applied, not drawn. (Though at least one artist, Shizuka Nakano, draws with screentone specifically. ActuaBD has a couple of small samples.)
And you can get screentones for just about everything:
Limpid pool and doily patterns:
Clouds and trees:
City at night and magical feathers:
From the Beginners’ Pack at IC, Inc. Pollocky splotches, your family’s tartan, celestial fuzz of the kind that clouds your judgment when you see a really hot girl with bad morals? They’ve got it all.
You know, I love the patterning. Even if it is prefab and non-auteurish. It is pretty. If it is wrong, I don’t want to be right.