Stepping Out

Was listening to the song by Dong Li Huo Che a few days back and went digging for the video again. It's one of those songs that is best for times like these.... makes you feel that whatever situation you think you're in deep shit is actually not that bad after all (at least for me...)....yea, not that bad after all, haha.

Ah yea, found the whole 30 ep drama on tudou, something to watch when the sem ends. :)

Snow White and the 7 Dwarves

Apart from my library trip yesterday, I came across a DVD sale in West Mall. Since I'm now doing 2D animations for 20 hours per week, I might as well get into the habit of watching more animations. After a lunch discussion over animations with my 'colleagues', I realised there is a lot that I have yet to watch. Indeed, anime is not for the animation, but its ideas and poses. One will have to look to the west for basics, and life for the logic of it. Anyways, back to West mall.... there wasn't a large collection of animation dvds there, maybe cos it's the last two days of the sale. The animations were going at a price of $20 for two, relatively cheap, I think, for the original english version. So naturally, Snow White comes first on my list of 'to watch and study' animation. I haven't watch 'Finding Nemo' (not kidding there), but having seen the pastel color layouts for the show in the recent Pixar exhibition, I thought it'll be good for me to see how that was translated to the screen.

Just finished watching Snow White. And yea, fairy tale indeed.... One can get away with a house intrusion crime if you clean up the place for them. Lightning doesn't always strike the highest places too. (Maybe 'evil' alone is a lightning rod itself.) The most realistic thing was probably: Never say 'don't' if one is wishing against something from happening. (which is quite true cos your mind with concentrate on the words after 'don't'.)

While watching the show, I came to realised how much it had affected the shows after it.

Check out the behaviour of the witch:



And then take a look at this guy:
Video of Gollum talking to himself.

I was amazed at how similar the 'speaking to yourself into the camera' worked for villians, even after 60+ years. And yea, the one character that stood out the most was Grumpy. Keeping the stubborn front but the body says otherwise (another formula that worked). The prince was quite an extra, but he is needed to give the story a happily ever after.

The one thing I was quite disappointed in was the turtle. A lot of cameos was given to this little guy, most probably to show its slow pace and mind to everything that's happening around it. I was hoping he'll do some awesome job for the gang maybe towards the end, but it never happened. Other than it's efforts always going down the drain, it didn't do anything else significant. The building up of it's slow character and the attention that went into it somehow just vanished, unjustified, with the ending of the film. Maybe I'm asking too much out of something made so long ago, but even the deers that got less individual camera time had an important role in the plot. Why can't this turtle be more than a gag?

Aye, I went quite off-track. Hehe, hopefully there will be more dvd sales. XD

The New Gen of Priests....

Just something that my aunt sent me and I thought was cute... Still can't believe a priest did it. -_- Hmmm.... I wonder if Singapore is less strict on the religion issue, would these have surfaced too? Quirky ideas though, still can't believe it. A priest is doing this...... Nice by the way.

Idle...

Flipped trough the LotR book and tried drawing that picture of Galadriel.



Turned out bad. Overdid the face again... and the bg is just wierd and undefined, should have referred to some photos of trees. Ann was pointing to the picture in the book, saying she looks like Mother Mary... And when I was painting it, it sort of reminded me of this old picture I painted way back...



Ah well... Wrote down all that I need to do by the end of the semester... Judging from the time I have in my hands... yes, things can be done by then... but the two that pose more of a problem are none other than that sociology course and the coming art history exam.....

Xiu said she might be going for the honours in Australia... Guess it's gonna be another year to seeing her again... Nvm, gogogo! Study one more year, I get another year of bursary since you ain't working. Weeee~~ $1600! (Jia you! ;D)

House Portrait

Original picture here

Yeap, finished this off last night after returning from Huiying's home. Haha, went to her house since she welcomed me there. It's always inspiring to go there, seeing all her works hanging on the walls.... It's now starting to be covered with more oil paintings than watercolors. What I really like was the set of 4 sqaure portraits of her family, lined up in the kitchen. It's really nice to have such stuff hanging around in the house, makes you feel cosy in the occasionally empty place. Yea, her mum works in the night, her father seems to be OT-ing that night, and her sis is away, summing up to only me and her in the house. I would have felt pretty odd, but she's used to it, I guess....

The conte used in this drawing was also given by her. She told me about conte a year ago when she used it during her foundation class and gave me two sticks to try. The tutor sort of told them to cover the entire paper with conte and work backwards with an eraser. It's pretty interesting, and being sick of pencil lines, I tried that technique out with the picture of Gregory House. It was messy at first, but the technique had some allowance to mistakes. The nose was initially too long and I wanted to shorten it, so covered up the entire nose and mouth in black and started again. Later went into details with a white pencil. Pretty cool :D he's got some eye problem there.... And it took the usual 4 hours....

The Last... Operation?

Somehow, the words Bridget said about getting 'some person with interesting features, if not it'll be hard for you in the next assignment' kind of bugged me, so I went surfing the internet for some portraits to draw. I'm guessing that she might ask us to do a caricature in the weeks to come with this portrait, just a wild guess, but no harm doing another portrait. Was thinking of drawing Rowan Atkinson's Mr Bean, but it was done many times... Then came the thought of drawing Gregory House from the House Tv series (which my mom was watching every week on cable tv), and I went looking for a headshot of that guy. Came across this interesting photo of House,



which greatly resembled this other picture...



...Must have been the threes-threes-threes. I didn't watch much of the series though, wondering if the photoshoot was meant as a pun or it mean something about the series. ...Holy-man-House?

Back to piah homework!

From the movies (Memoirs of a Geisha)

Done last night while doing my unofficial weekend studies! Yea, I've been trying to get back on track by making myself draw and paint some stuff at least a once a week, and if possible, everyday. Didn't know where to start, cos there are just so many things i need to improve on. Anatomy, light and shade, anime, watercoloring ...arggghhh!! Just too many!!! So.... just dig into the pile of 'First' magazines that I borrowed from my aunt and began sketching faces. The magazine I came across first had 'Memoirs of the Geisha' in the spotlight. Ah well, nice pretty asian girls... draw! Saw a pic of Zhang Ziyi's Sayuri on the feature page.... Paint!! Kimono is such a fun challenge for painting!!(no wonder some mangakas love to feature them...)