Haikyuu Cookies

In my decade plus of cookie-ing, I couldn’t recall ever making anime/manga cookies…which is both surprising and sad. But then I remembered these Pokemon cookies I made ages ago. In any case, I hadn’t stretched my manga/anime muscles for a while, so thank goodness a friend asked for these Haikyuu cookies for her daughter’s birthday!

Trust the Process

It’s hard to tell from the video, but there were definitely some rough moments. In the video, it’s just one seamless line of work. But in real life, there are hours of drying between layers…plenty of time to walk past, inspect your work, feel doubtful, worry that you’ve just spent hours of your life on a complete disaster…in short, many moments of general pain. When I was a rookie, I just expected that a certain amount would be “mess ups” and my kids would get to eat them. Now it’s the opposite. I rarely plan on any going south, so I really put the pressure on myself for making them perfect the first time.

Shall we look at some of my most concerning moments? Why not?!

This mouth did NOT look like it was going to work out. And even though there was a bit of color bleeding, I think it ended up working with that final black outline.

Tsukishima was looking a little rough, because his head to hair ratio was looking a little off. But once I added the glasses and neck details, I think things turned out okay.

And the most nerve-wracking of all, Kageyama was looking straight up SCARY! It’s amazing what a little piping icing can do to define the details.

Possible Improvements

Any decent manga artist knows that the magic is in the textures. Hashes, dots, stars, lines…it’s really arguably of the most important characteristics of manga that really sets it apart from general graphic art. When I started down this path, I wasn’t even sure that I could pull off the characters. Now that I know that I can, I’d love to take it next level and play around with some “screentones” on my cookies. Gradients are hard without an airbrush, but maybe this is finally the excuse that I need to buy one.