Happy holidays 2012!

Wishing everyone a wonderful holiday this winter! :)

Sorry for my inactivity - will catch up on my posts before the year ends!

flora

I have been art blocking like crazy lately, so I've been mostly focusing on practicing anatomy and technical things. I might post some of them eventually, but they tend to be incredibly messy and undecipherable. :'D

So for now, here are some watercolour studies of plants I did during a weekend getaway. :)

water media + Pilot frixion pen on paper

I'm pleasantly surprised by how well my sketchbook holds up with water media. It's a really cheap Canson sketchbook, but the paper doesn't pill or wrinkle that much (provided you control the amount of water and how many times you go over an area). Canson has really improved the paper quality of this line. Since I'm the type who gets nervous when drawing in a nice sketchbook (e.g. moleskin that is still collecting dust on my shelf), these suit me well. I'm on my fourth one now!

Happy Mother's Day!

This year's card features my mom with a group of dogs. Although we don't have a pet, my mom loves dogs and pet-sitting for friends!

Hope all the moms out there had a wonderful day. :)

the doggie treats are coming
watercolour, watercolour pencils, and col-erase pencil on paper

My drawing process below :) 

junk

I'm trying to get back into the habit of drawing, so doodling a bit before bed!

because i don't believe in fur
PaintTool SAI 1.01

the ladies

Scrappy paintings and doodles everywhere! I haven't drawn nearly as many females since the advent of my Tiger & Bunny craze, so I'm trying to fill my quota. :'D

I find I'm a lot less patient than I was a year ago for personal projects. My sketchbook is filled with plans and ideas, but I just don't have the willpower to carry them through right now... :(

Scrappy paintings

Sometimes I feel like doing art but not drawing... so I've been painting random old doodles in my sketchbook. I should really continue with the Hunger Games art before I go watch the movie tomorrow, but I am avoiding... :'D

boku wa bani ja nai, barnaby desu.
ballpoint pen + watercolours on really crappy Canson paper :'D

curves come when the mind is blank
pilot frixion pen + watercolours

Instagram is on Android now, woo! But weeping because my camera phone is pretty crappy. /abuses and misuses anyway! 8D;;

WIP: The girl who was on fire

One thing I really want to try drawing before watching the Hunger Games movie is the District Twelve costume from the opening ceremonies. I'm very curious to see how the movie will handle it!

I'm really feeling how rusty I've gotten... it's been redraw after redraw.  D:

Current iteration (sadly, the anatomy doesn't get any better with each iteration lol)! After thinking of nothing but David Bowie from the Labyrinth and the King of All Cosmos from Katamari, I added more definition in some areas than I intended to. :'D

I drew a one-minute chibi version at the height of my frustration...

Earliest iteration...  I repainted Katniss' face at least five times until I realized the only answer was to completely redraw her.

Will see if this painting actually gets done... :'D

jumping on the hunger games bandwagon...

With so much hype surrounding the release of the Hunger Games movie, I grew curious about the story. The result: I finished the three books in five days. Aside from the fact that I have a tendency to marathon things, I think Suzanne Collins created a very intriguing world with underlying issues that are not completely unlike those of our own society. Anyway, this is an art blog so I'll spare you from a book review. ;)

I wanted to get some Hunger Games art out of my system before watching the movie next week and getting influenced by it!

the hunger games

PaintTool SAI 1.01

I started off just doodling headshots, so the lack of planning really shows in the poor composition lol. I seem to have lost the patience/ability to do anything beyond a rough sketch lately... :'D

sharkbanananana

A quick comic I drew for my sister's birthday (she is a huge fan of Doraemon, a robot cat that has all sorts of futuristic gadgets he pulls out of his belly pocket):

My gift to her was a sharkbanana! These charming plushies are sold on Amazon.com, but only ship within the US, so I had a friend bring a bunch of them across the border. :'D

Man, I have been art blocking hard. Will try to draw more soon. :'(

single stranded binding protein

I got a friend to build me a pretty awesome computer back in December, but I've only been Photoshop-ing and surfing the net. It's been difficult for me to get into Maya outside of work, but I finally installed it today out of sheer guilt over my seemingly unjustified purchase... I wasn't feeling up to modelling, so I just grabbed a protein to play with using the Molecular Maya plugin. :)

I still struggle a lot with lighting and shaders, and rely way too much on compositing to fix everything. One of my profs noted at one point how my lighting fails to bring out the full form of the objects, resulting in a flattened look. I think this is still often the case in my work. I recently purchased Digital Lighting & Rendering by Jeremy Birn, so hopefully I will be able improve on this point!

SSB protein in two rendering styles / pdb ID: 1EQQ

Autodesk Maya 2011, Adobe After Effects CS5.5

Technical stuff: In the top image, I used a strong backlight and a simple subsurface scattering (SSS) shader, The bottom image is a tweaked ambient occlusion pass. 

A bit of background on the protein: As implied by their name, single stranded binding (SSB) proteins bind and stabilize DNA in its single stranded, unwound state name in events such as DNA replication. Depending on the conditions, SSB proteins can operate in two modes: (1) (SSB)35: ssDNA wraps around two SSB subunits so that ~35 nucleotides are occluded, and (2) (SSB)65: ssDNA interacts with all four subunits, resulting in the occlusion of ~65 nucleotides.

Perhaps it's time to build that DNA model...

lazy valentine's

I joined a valentine's art exchange group with my friends. :)

take it off 8D

PaintTool SAI 1.01

This was drawn for ok-yc on DeviantArt. She wanted something steamy! ;)

Characters © ok-yc

BBC Sherlock

I am a very big fan of the BBC Sherlock series! Realism isn't really my thing, but I like Benedict Cumberbatch enough to give it a shot. :)

Reference photo / testing this SAI brush setting / texture 

As always, sorry for the lack of updates! I think I need to give this blog layout a face-lift soon...

Happy Lunar New Year!

Wishing you health and happiness! :)