Tama's New Eyes?

 

This was one of the pairs of resin eyes I was testing out (still has many flaws) but was curious to see what the 'Katsumi' style of eyes would look like on Tama.

 

The only adjustments I made to the photos was to lighten it (it was under exposed), removed the overly yellow cast from my photo lights, and added a mild vignette. This is not a sepia photo with a color pop for his eyes. They really are that bright and vibrant.

 

I am very quickly falling in love with 'animetic' eye Tama. For a long time I've really been struggling with photographing him with his glass eyes. Since I'm consistently using my photo lights, his glass eyes are always over lit, making him look shocked, scared, or startled all the time and it really began to upset me. I never really thought I'd find anime style eyes that would even remotely look right, so I'm additionally stunned (especially since it is from my own artwork and not remaking it from someone else's like Kyoya's & Bea's eyes were.)

 

I'm already tweaking the Katsumi eyes in my mind to be more Tama-like (rounder pupils for one, and cutting down the vibrancy a bit I think) but having the blue to black gradient is already making a huge difference to me. I won't have to fight anymore to get his expressions to look right when looking at the photos up close. I simply can't believe that he has such drastically different eyes than he's had for 4.5 years, and yet he still looks 100% Tama if not a bit more. I can't resist cracking up in my mind of how much of a CARTOON he looks like! I just expect to see him blinking his eyes and start asking me questions, seeing what I'm up to, if there's anything he can help with... just being the lovely little boy that he is.

 

~Sister Kyoya

I actually like these a lot more than the glass eyes! They definitely give him more personality - they make him look really curious.

I actually like these a lot more than the glass eyes! They definitely give him more personality - they make him look really curious.

 

I'm the opposite ands like how he looked with his old eyes. This is likely because I am just so used to him that way. Mind you these aren't bad on him. I think Tama looks cute with any type of eyes and these do look okay with him but I'm wondering if they were narrower with more of the white showing if that would work better too? Either way, great job with the eyes SK!

I was going to work on the Tama eyes today along with some others I need to do (like remaking Lucas' because the Parabox animetic eyes are shitty print quality. Did they use a dot matrix printer??) and then order a new batch of all of them on metallic paper. The change in how I use and do lighting for photos is pretty much the reason why I needed to do something different for his eyes. Simply the lack of the 'shadow gradient' at the top of the iris on the glass eyes was making him look SO MUCH not like Tama too much of the time. He looked constantly frightened and upset when there was no reason for it (other than the lighting.)

 

Torino- One of the things that bugs me about these eyes on Tama is the iris is oval, giving him a mild 'snake eyed' look like Naiomi's original eyes did. It doesn't stand out so much in this photo as being wrong because he's looking up, but when he's looking right at me it gets to be slightly uncofortable because the wrongness seems to scream in my head.

 

Katnaper- I totally understand about the old eyes vs the new feeling, I only swapped his eyes last night because I told Raven I'd kick myself for not trying it. These eyes were designed for a completely different and non-MDD character. After trying a Volks pair of eyes clossest to the glass ones, and completely hating them, I thught I'd never like Tama with animetic eyes. I'm kinda mentally snickering about the 'narrower and more white showing' suggestion, because it would make him look even less like Tama. These eyes already show more white than the previous ones, and my overriding complaint about these eyes is how oval they are when Tama's need to be more round. I do have to say that I like the little extra bit of white showing on the sides because when I bout his glass eyes I accidently ordered them a size too large. I was having to guess from a Volks pic and was off a little bit. Plus even though I like his glass eyes, rarely did they appear blue enough for what fits his character.

 

This is what they often look like:

 

 

And this is more what the should be:

 

 

 

And the anime Tama eyes were going to be made from this drawing I did:

 

 

So it's a little more than mildly frustrating that to get Tama to have the right expressions he has to be photographed in low light. Even under the best cirbleepstances it's aggrivating and it's becoming more and more common that I have to fix his eyes in Photoshop so it doesn't ruin a completely wonderful photo otherwise.

 

~Sister Kyoya

I LOVE the new color! I do agree a larger, rounder pupil will suit Tama's innocence more, but man, that color. I'd say if you want to "tone it down", maybe try a paler, desaturated blue in a streak under the pupil? That'll lessen the overall sense of blue, while a) still keeping some of that awesome bright color and b) making them seem shinier/more jewel-like.

Beautiful blue eyes.