Sora @ Work

So here we go: Today Sora begins a three day stint in the first ever Singapore Toy and Comic Convention, forming team Pulp*Friction at Booth F03 with Gilamon in a partnership which also includes Zemotion from Booth 09 *waves*.

One thing I learnt from compiling our works for display: I’m hanging out with some pretty neat people in Sora. Seriously, looking back with a little distance in between makes me appreciate more than ever the thought and effort that each individual artist put into their work, especially our graphic novel series, Azure. I am humbled and grateful to be growing and working with such dedicated and passionate individuals..Thanks guys!

Also: minor achievement for me this time round- I’ve actually managed to finish preparations on schedule! While still aways from the ideal image of me calmly sitting with a drink in hand watching everyone else rush madly around, it comes close enough for the time being, I think ^_^

For the whole of this month, I was completely occupied. I signed myself up for several weekend of art classes. The result was productive weekends creating drawings after drawings from morning till night, and a very messy bedroom at the end of the month, from the lack of cleaning.

The local art school was offering classes in the weekend as ‘tasters’ for their summer and autumn classes. The classes I’ve signed up for are Life Drawing, Anatomy & Momentum, and Illustration. It was a fruitful experience, being able to learn new techniques of drawing as well as how different people have a different approach to drawings. It was definitely more interesting than the so-called ‘art classes’ that I’ve had in primary and secondary school.

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For the next few days, I will be illustrating my experience at the classes.

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When I first wanted to signed up for the Life Drawing Class, I was not yet completely aware of what it involved, thought it might be one of the still life drawings. I figured it out by the time I signed up for it though, the administrator specifically said its drawing of the male & female form. Initially, I thought that I might freak out during the class so had to mentally prepare myself. I was quite surprise at how calm I was during the lesson.

I couldn’t seem to get what the tutor wanted from me when he made comments on my drawings until he demonstrated what he was talking about for me.

SUMMARY

Class :              Life Drawing

Description :     Drawing of the Male and Female Form

Medium :          Charcoal, Chalk

Paper :             A1 / A2 Cartridge Paper, Dark Coloured Paper

What I learnt:To abandon lines and draw in tone.

In detail :     Initially, my approached to drawing was to draw an approximate outline of the form, then add details. The new approach is to observe areas of light and shadow on the human form and breaking them down into a series of simple geometrical shapes, then drawing them.

Experience :  I really enjoyed the series of short exercises that the tutor had us perform. Basically, we were to sketch out the form in a series of 1 min, 2 min, 10min exercises. This trains us to quickly observe and find the points of interest on the human body and putting them down on paper as accurately as possible.

Charcoal was also an enjoyable and easy medium to work with. Messy though.

For Future :   I do find several problems with my drawing techniques that I need to work on;

-               The strength with which I use to draw a line is often too heavy.

-               The size of my drawings & their layout on the paper. I tend to fit most of the figure onto the paper, when I have seen great results in other people’s work, where they choose to fill the page with the torso, or where the layout is such that there is as little left over space as possible.

Next on:          ANATOMY & MOMENTUM

Hai nekochan desu. Ohisashiburi ne…. Gosh I haven’t been posting for _quite some time_ ne? Gomen.. with a PC that has multiple organ failure and keeps collapsing and going into cardiac arrest every now and then, I couldn’t be bothered typing blogs. I haven’t been writing my own blog either.

Anyway, what’s news… I’m starting to write the screens for A Heart That Shines chapter 3. I put it off for a while cos I got a little bored with the story. But when I started writing the screen I got all excited again, it’s hard to keep the number of pages down.

This time around I want to put more effort into drawing the background and landscape, in which I’m very.. heta (lousy). But I’ll work on it. Yakusoku desu. Gambarimasu!

Hopefully I’ll get my PC done up, or buy a new one soon. What’s life without our own PC, rite?

Aaaand…that’s my new set of Copic Markers. An addition to nekochan’s treasures!

Happy Chinese New Year! The title for today’s post is the name of a tune that’s been running through my head. Roughly translates as “The Spring comes” (someone correct me if I’m wrong ^^;)- rather fitting for the season, no? 

It’s from the Kaze Hikaru Sound Collection- which, for a manga spin-off product, turned out to be a pretty good buy- some lovely tracks in there, “Haru” is my favorite out of them.

Since according to the chinese zodiac it’s the year of the Rat, the ole cat and mouse duo (see the post dated 2006-08-16) popped into my head again and a few videos of old Taiwanese period drama serials on youtube completed the mood.

Might as well get some other pictures out now I’m in Chinois mode again.. there are worse ways to spend a week long new year break, I think

Click on the thumbnails to view it in full size

So called because I stuck at thinking up names and titles. Oh well…

I watched a programme on Discovery Channel some time late last year. A scene from the programme caught my eye. It was an aerial view of a wind turbine farm off the coast of Denmark. There was something so cool and majestic about seeing pure white wind turbine towers rising out of a deep blue sea. I liked it so much that I decided to draw a wind turbine picture.

I wanted to show the massiveness of the wind turbine so I added a human as comparison. I decided to arranged the wind turbines in a row, instead of a grid as in a real wind turbine farm, for aesthetic purposes. I looked at a few pictures of wind turbines to refresh my memory and to check the shapes of the blades. But when I started drawing, I did not refer to any pictures. I felt that it doesn’t matter if the wind turbines were not very realistic. After inking the picture, I took another look and decided that it looked boring.

So I drew another version. This is the 2nd version I came up with. I changed the perspective and the posture of the human, but otherwise all the elements remained the same as the previous picture. I’m pleased with this picture. It looked more dynamic and interesting than the previous one.

Then I ported the picture over to photoshop and started colouring. First, I added the base colours. It took me some time to find the exact shade I want. I always feel a bit lost when I had to deal with colours. The flat colours looked a bit static so it’s on to the last and most time-consuming step.

Here is the completed picture, after I’ve added shadows, highlights and more details. I’m glad that I had decided to invest in a graphics tablet. All in all, I took an estimated 1 and a half months to finish this picture.

When we decided to create a calendar for 2008, several themes were discussed. Finally we decided to pick the phrase “the calm before the storm” as the theme. The idea was to draw a picture of that split second before all the action was unleashed. All of us brainstormed together on pictures which might fit the theme and we managed to came up with a few. Not all made it into the final product though. All of us picked 1 or 2 ideas which appealed to us. It wasn’t easy and we faced a lot of problems drawing them. Fantasy drawings were still a fairly new area to us and some wondered if we had taken on more than we could chew. After 2-3 months of work, we managed to come out with 6 presentable drafts, coloured them and made them into a calendar.

It was a mad rush to get everything ready and it didn’t help that all of us were busy with our full-time jobs. Rixou designed the cover while Hotasuki helped out with the colouring. Soranoneko compiled and designed the calendar. There was a bit of a hiccup towards the crucial last few days when Soranoneko’s computer died. She had to borrow her friend’s laptop to continue working on the calendar. It was a relief after Rixou managed to get the calendar successfully printed.

We will be selling 10 copies at EOY’07 Anime @ Expo.

First of all in the News: Final Fantasy: Dissidia!

This treat is apparently part of the 20^th anniversary commemoration of the FF franchise- in fact news about it was out in May.. but I’ve only just read about it- so bit of a delayed reaction here

Now news about Dissidia-specifically the inclusion of Final Fantasy IX characters- is getting me pumped for a few reasons. 1)FF IX always seemed –undeservedly- a bit of an ‘unloved child’ to me and it’s one of my long time gaming wishes come true to see the creators finally giving it a nod by giving Zidane and Kuja an outing in Dissidia. 2)I am a Kuja fan. J 3)While having Kuja is sweet, having Zidane AND Kuja is just puts the icing on the cake. *Major FFIX plot spoiler: highlight to read.* To me those two are like the InuYasha and Sesshoumaru of Final Fantasy- just gotta love the..ahem… extremely volatile sibling rivalry thing going on there =D

Well then, what better to commerate the occasion than a celebratory picture? And I had just the image in storage too: all penciled and cleaned up,  just lacking that final burst of energy to color and spit and polish and what better time than now.

Here’s some lego bricks I decorated for my friend. I drew freehand using a permanent marker. The bricks were a $6 donation for a charity project. In return, we could decorate the bricks anyway we like.

I think the hardest part of a human body to draw is the hands. The 2nd hardest part is the feet. Luckily for most of us, the problem of drawing feet can be overcome with the use of shoes. At times like these, I wondered why I created a character that is barefooted? I’m just asking for it. Drawing feet is hard enough, drawing good looking feet is even more difficult.

I had a hard time with the feet while drawing page 20. I drew and erased 3 or 4 times before I finally gave up. The feet just did not look natural. In desperation, I took my digital camera and took a photo of my own feet. I had to take 10+ shots before I got the correct angle. Hopefully with a photo to refer to, it will be easier to draw the feet.

Note to self: Make sure all future characters wear covered shoes.

While Rixou generally likes to have some music going in the background when I work,  I’m pretty much at a loss when it comes to using ‘proper’ terms- lounge, new age, R&B, rock and whatever have you-  to describe what I listen to. With me, things tend to be just broadly separated into ’stuff I don’t like’ and ’stuff I like’. In the latter category there is a section that goes- ‘Stuff that takes me away’. And deep within that is a shadowy valley with a signboard saying ’What my inner muse would sound like if she could sing.’

 And the paragraph above is just a roundabout way of describing the arts festival performance by Yunyu. I attended the session on 3rd June, 7.30pm to 8.15 pm.

Click the album cover below for an audial - and visual- sample of her work.

I’m still finding it rather surreal that one of my ex class mates is now pursuing a musical career, cutting an album, winning accolades and giving performances at the esplanade. And maybe most surreal of all, that she is making music that makes my muse very happy. You go girl

 P.S. if anyone’s, ahem,  surprised by my choice of music, no, I havent’ ‘gone goth’ - I’ve nursed a fetish for this particular brand of music since hearing Bjork years and years back-  now you know something new about me ^__~