Portrait Emma Watson

Doing my FYP and felt very restless. Decided to do some digital painting, but I'm just not getting the hang of it. Then thought maybe I can grab some random image and paint it as an exercise. Portraits, led to actors, leading to random female actress. Googled Emma Watson and grabbed a picture I felt happy to paint and painted it. Started out rocky and unsure but after an hour or two, felt quite at ease. However, I'm still not able to overcome that plastic-y look of painting from photos. Trying to aim for a more painterly look. Maybe next time.

6 hours, photoshop cs5

Jump again

Another old work reworked. Since it's late, I challenged myself to do as much as possible in an hour. Worked this picture another way. Instead of putting a multiplied layer on top for lines, I buried the original drawing at the botttom and painted on it with another layer, like working a gouache painting.

I'm starting to like this stuff. :3

Lunch Over colored

Taking the past pictures and coloring them in corel for a practice. Saves the time for having to think up new colors and pictures when I just want to get used the software... Somehow, managed to find a way out with the Artist Oils tool, but I see a potential blending problem... It will be hard for me to use it to paint without a layer of lineart in that case. But depending on linearts to have a brilliant cg is not what I'm looking for ultimately. Maybe for now, I'll focus on getting used to this thing before moving on to that level.

And surprise surprise, 'Dive to World' got featured as a DD. That's the first time though, and ironically, it's a picture I didn't enjoy painting... Haha. It's wierd, but come to think about it, quite happened many times throughout history; the works that the artist personally disliked but gets the most attention out of the rest of their works. Maybe I should start putting up all the past works that I rejected. Lols.

Corel Painting

A fellow schoolmatey introduced a few painting tools to me,and I decided to give it a try. The first was a jap paint tool, but somehow, it lagged on my computer and I lost all patience for it, despite how great it was said to be. Went to get a copy of corel painter after that, and there goes another Sunday.

Spent the entire afternoon trying to get it working the way I want. The brushes surprised me, and they mixed just like real paints. However... I couldn't figure out how to blend the paints and 'clean' my brush. Sat there for 4 hours throwing in my basic knowledge of painting but just couldn't get it to blend nicely. The help manual introduced the tools and their functions, but didn't give any tips about handling them. Tutorials weren't of much help. Most that I came across talked about 'how to paint this and that' instead of 'how to operate this painting tool'. And I laughed at the statement of one of it, saying how Da Vinci would be doing miracles with the software if he were alive in this time. Try throwing Michealangelo a copy of Maya then.... It's frustrating... yet digital is something one of this era has to get the hang of in this field. Eek.

Went to the library for helpbooks, but didn't churn out much in the BB library. Came back and decided to continue on that Ariel picture again.



I hate my laptop's colors....



...Cry. It's a brand new way of painting... complex way.... Urgh. Have to find a way suitable for me.

Countdown...?

T_T............

Restless..........

Oh noooooo..........

Stepping aside, it's wierd that one is feeling dreadful yet still able to draw happy people. The same energy charge but a different output. Maybe my head is chanting 'nonono' but another part of me just screams 'bring it on!'.

A very random person in a random pose, digital this time. Wanted to stop after an hour of painting, but dragged to 3. Still not complete too.

Airplane!

2nd try on this picture by jounetsu_no_akai of mangarev. Haiz.. the first attempt failed in illustrator. The idea in my head was one of a 'rendered skintone and graphical-everything-else'. Guess photoshop is still better for this job, or maybe I haven't explored combining both and finding another alternative... Anyways, set out to search online what the flower was, and with the help of mum, managed to identify it as the Red Spider Lily, in jap, Higanbana (华语：曼珠沙华). It's quite interesting, the legend behind this flower, which kind of set the mood for this entire picture. Looked up Hokusai's Ukiyo-e for the jap style, and refered to Tsukiko Amano's 'Chou' mtv for the mood and feel. Somehow, it looked more like Jigoku Shojo... (Didn't really give the series much attention...). Thinking of changing some stuff, the most erroneous maybe... a higabana themed kimono... lol... most prob would come back to this picture after sometime.

And found something interesting after finding out that there was no art class (again) this evening!


XDXDXD Talk about a childhood deprived of these simple toys... Mum never liked us buying toys. I remember seeing other children playing those styrofoam planes with cool army designs on it and wanting to buy one for myself... T_T But when mum found out I bought stuff other than food, she would deduct my pocket moneh... So I didn't quite dare to buy last time... Now those two kids too can't buy toys. Haha, mum had her reasons, but I wondered... I'm now a biggie child, and I ain't getting pocket money from her anyways, why not just buy those cheap ones I've never played before and let those kids have a chance to play too? At least when they grow up, maybe they don't own the toy, but at the very least, they played such things before?



Haha, the design was something Ann urged me to draw. I was wondering what design for the wings, and she just say 'draw rainbow lah!' Haha, guess she really fell in love with rainbows eversince that day a double rainbow appeared pretty clearly in the evening sky. So anyhow sketched a rainbow on the wings with some clouds at the tail.... XDXDXDXDXDXD Now we just gotta wait till tomorrow and we go fly the plane in the field!!! XDXDXD (Hey, it worked at home yea! XD)

Guess I won't be updating with so much artwork these days... I realised I have yet to start on any of the final year projects and there's piles of notes waiting to be read... Omigosh... I totally flung my Understanding Sg Society paper... >_< Gotta buck up... Dun wanna suffer brain damage for another semester of random philosophy...

Drawing people who are drawing!

Did a quick watercolor sketch of my friends in school today. They are busy drawing away, nyak nyak, and since I'm free, why not? XD Didn't manage to capture Siew Khim tho... Had some hard time figuring what colors to use too...

Went back home, hand itched to do some cg... tried to continue with a previous picture drawn by someone else, in which I tried to color pick an old master painting's colors and use it on the piece, but failed pretty badly there:



Couldn't quite get out of the problem, so closed it, and started something new. Chose a picture by Spoony of mangarev, and tried coloring it with my own colors. I was thinking about the previous cardcaptor picture I did in 2003 and used similar colors there, adding a bit of red instead. Turns out pretty well.



Thought about textures more this time... though I'm still wondering how else to use it...? Maybe I'll figure that out in the holidays when I'm free to do my own stuff... heck, I seem to be indulging in my own stuff even during school period... the schoolwork are starting to be neglected...

Truth eh...

Didn't know what to draw for my 'daily practice', so took the original picture...



and practiced some digital painting...



Yue! XD Was surfing Deviantart and saw a picture of Yue that is painted in a semi-realistic way. Wanted to try it too, but the realism didn't stick out well. End up anyhow whack a rough painting out, a study of the lighting and a practice to get used to the digital way of painting in an hour. Looks nicer when minimized to the smallest preview on photoshop... heh. Trying to get the hang of it...

School... Haiz... the lecturer Mr Lim from Understanding Singapore module was really.... >_< philosophical. Thought it was a module of *ahem* 'understanding the sg society'... but at times, he just jumped to the most extreme randomness.

"As sociologists, we're taught to question..." and talked about the job crisis of sociologists, how hard it will be for them to survive normal jobs cos they will question the hell out of their boss during office meetings...

"If you are feeling suicidal, you gotta talk it out" (targeting the current ntu situation of suicides...) "Come talk to me. I'll tell you the many better ways of dying." (cos he and his friends had thought out a list of killing themselves in the times to come when old age illnesses sets in..)

"Do you believe in reincarnation?" and goes on proving reincarnation with some maths + physics based equation and voila! "I've lived this life before."

Some of my peers quite dislike his tone of lecture, but gotta admit that I find it really interesting going through his lectures. Certain things he mentioned were pretty true for me as a Singaporean... pragmatism, apathetic... ah well... And this time, his philosophical questions hit pretty hard. From questioning about why singaporeans work so hard, to why want success, to why want to be happy? Omg.... pull hair sia... why bother about reasoning this...(there, singaporean apathetic side coming up liao...haha)

"This is similar to that movie Matrix" the blue and red pill thing. To ignore and be happy or to find the truth, 'danger ahead' kind of thing.... I really wonder about the 'seeking truth' thing... feels as though it's on the extreme opposite of being an ignorant fool and happy. (come to think of it, if they aren't extremes but just in circles, maybe they are just side by side of each other...? nargh.. random.) Had some serious thought over there... but still decided... I haven't really lived much, haven't brought the kids to the zoo before (?), and how much time do I still have left with my parents? Ann's getting heavier everyday, how much oppurtunities do I have to carry her in my arms before she grows up? If I die not knowing the Truth, it's fine with me... maybe I'll learn it in hell, or heaven, or purgatory... or maybe I'll be back for more 'life-games'(XD), but definitely not fine if I have yet to fill my life with beuatiful moments of the people around me in this life. Even if there is reincarnation or meetings in heaven or hell, I wonder if this moment will ever be the same again? Will I still be walking the same road, meeting the same people of same roles, doing the same stuff again? Am I still me?

...whatever heck la, 'just get a life'.

Lalalalalala~

复活！！ INTUOS3 启动！

A very mecha title.... lol. Anyways, went for an art history meet yesterday with the group and we ended up in funan's tcc, discussing our presentation questions. I was pretty happy when I saw where we are going, cos previously, I was thinking if I should go down to funan on friday... For? XD The wacom pen yea.... T_T I decided that I should go get it asap, sometime before the next event starts. I don't wanna trouble Dor again for that... Feels so handicapped without it when I need to amend and touch up some stuff digitally before sending them off for printing. But yea, bought one off the shelf and tested it on this old piece of drawing.



While painting this, I kept thinking about what many people had told me about handling this stuff.

Dor reminded me of form and not using too much layers, smudging, and that the 'i', '[' and ']' are friends....
Bridget taught me about the difficulty of rendering a person's mouth area, that it tends to become flat.
Tom Lynch's books talked about the spontaniety of colors, how interest could be built with using a myriad of colors.
Together with Huiying's tips of oil painting a portrait, that the face carries lots more colors that just beige. Haha, she told me something about laziness there giving the dullest colors if I just couldn't care to change the palette.

Somehow, these ideas just kept ringing back and forth while I paint this picture, half trying to keep to Hiroyuki Asada's original palette of colors for the comic. Looking back at my previous digital stuff (...yea, just a few countable attempts), it looked different. And I was quite amazed at how this methods had shortened the time I used for doing a digital picture.... It used to take me more than four hours to get something this small and simple to this level, but I took about two hours for this one... maybe I should try acrylic sometime. Might improve the digital speed when I'm tired of computers, lol.

All in all.... never abuse the tablet pen... especially if it's an intuos3..... T_T