Body chan For Manga Artists, Is It Worth Buying?

livingtheindie body-chan header

When it comes to drawing characters, I usually have a hard time getting their poses right. It’s either the body proportion is off or the outcome just look unnatural.  Imagine my surprise when I came across Body-chan by SH Figuarts for the first time while browsing around my local game & figurine store.

For those who are unfamiliar with this product, body-chan is a poseable figure released by Bandai. The one that I have here is the female Pale Orange DX version, which comes with more accessories (17 different hand poses, laptop, tablet, flip phone, touch phone, pen, gun and a katana sword). This is definitely a better choice compared to the none DX version which only includes 10 interchangeable hands and no other accessories. There is also a male variation called Body-kun.

The build quality of the figurine is excellent and as you can see from the pictures above, the joints are pretty flexible. There are of course, a limit to how much you can bend the arms and legs which may make certain poses difficult to pull off. However I find those limitations to be few and far between.

To demonstrate the usage of body chan, here’s a short video of me using one of the poses as a template to draw Vicky, a character from my game Def-Op: Codename I.R.I.S.

 

If you are looking to improve your character drawings, body-chan by Bandai SH Figuarts is definitely worth buying. Before this I had to do a lot of re-sketching because I couldn’t get the pose I wanted, leading to some stressful moments. With body-chan, I can just set it up, snap a picture and off I go to my iPad (that’s where I do most of my artwork).

You can purchase SH Figurarts Body-chan DX over at Amazon [affiliate link]

Updates And A New Web Game In Development

For the past few of months I have been working on a new project (none gaming related), which explains the lack of updates between July and now. Thankfully that other project has since settled down a little, allowing me put some focus back onto game development.

 

I recently purchased Gamemaker Studio 1.4 from Humble Bundle and decided to give it a try. Starting off fresh on a new SDK is tough and I struggled at the beginning. As always, going through the tutorials is the easy the part. The hard part is when you try to implement your own gameplay elements into your game. To be honest, there were times I wanted to just give up and go back to things I’m familiar with but thankfully I managed to hang on and continued working on it.

 

I don’t have much to show at the moment but it’s basically another twist to the defense game genre. Hoping to get this up and running around next month November. Here’s a very early screenshot of the game with placeholder graphics.

 

My very early WIP game

 

On another note, I have also uploaded my previous game DefOp: Codename I.R.I.S Dual Blaster on this site. It was originally submitted to Scirra Arcade (the folks that made Construct2 ) with over 4000 plays, which is pretty awesome. Check it out if you are interested.