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

WIP T&B: Kaburagi Kotetsu

I tried so hard to fix my sleep schedule, and it lasted about three days...  I decided it was time to attempt a drawing of Kotetsu from Tiger & Bunny to go with Barnaby. I just couldn't get into drawing Kotetsu's hair - not curly/layered enough for my tastes! ;) 

I was discussing with some friends about drawing speed and I think I'm a really slow artist. This is where I'm at five hours in (from blank canvas)... I expected this to be done in less than three hours. :(

That hand/arm is giving me a lot of grief (and just noticed the strange colour difference from his face haha...)!

Shall continue at a more reasonable hour! 

WIP: new shark card

The details are taking a while! But I wanted it to be clear the people are the bride and groom this time around. :)
Still some ways to go...

I'm going to apologize in advance to whoever uses this for their wedding cards - the reds are not CMYK-friendly at all. B-but I really enjoy painting in RGB mode. Yay for screen displays?!

WIPs & doodles

Doodle sketch for new shark card that will be freely available to couples getting married who are against shark fin soup! I plan on fleshing it out this Sunday. :)

Tiger & Bunny has hit the point of being an addiction lol. The show's just too good and they keep ramping it up with each episode! I must admit I first liked Barnaby's character design for jokes (I mean, look at that hair!), but it's really grown on me. Barnaby's hair is so time consuming but it is my favourite thing to draw right now. :D

I had all these test render times of like a minute or two during the last couple months, and I never figured out what I should be doing during those short intermittent periods. This is what happens when I'm left to my own devices... 99% of the drawings are really bad but I thought I'd share more evidence of my obsession lol! ;) 23 pages and counting hahaha!

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Teddy bear wedding :)

I'm happy I had a bit of time to draw a card for my dear high school friend's wedding! I haven't drawn much - let alone paint - lately. So I made quite a few blunders in the process and the illustration ended up a lot tighter than I would've liked. I've forgotten how unforgiving water media is!

Congrats to Kitty & Danny!

watercolours, watercolour pencils, white gouache & Copic multiliner on W&N hp watercolour paper

(sorry for poor photo quality, didn't have access to a scanner D: )

I always make cards without thinking about the envelope... so I had to make a sketchy one out of a generic brown envelope. I tried to make up for it by adding some decorations. :)

1. I tried out different bear drawings - was trying to find the most charming one. :)
2. I got carried away and ended up drawing everything with watercolour pencils (Steadtler)...
3. ...which was a big mistake lol! The colours got a bit dirty as a result of all the mixing and that brown pencil looked fine when I tested a small patch, but looked horrible in the real deal! I ended up adding a lot of watercolour to balance out the colours.
4. I often add a warm glaze over the painting to unify the colours a bit more.
5. This is the point at which the painting started getting too tight. Is this what medical illustration has trained me to do? :P
6. I often find myself asking the same question at this point in the process (aka I never plan properly beforehand...). Should I line it with markers or leave it as is? Looking back at this shot, I probably should've left it alone and lined it with brown col-erase. I have this bottle of brown ink that would've worked really nicely, but I haven't been able to open it with my weak hands/arms for several months now. :(

small preview!

I am currently working on an 8 second interstitial animation depicting actin filament assembly. Here's a preview image for now! I'm using Autodesk Maya 2011 for modeling and animation. I did a pretty hack job in After Effects - need to render out the depth map properly...

Ahhh the next two weeks are going to be craaazy! But I have quite a few things to share from this term. :)

quadruple dose of animu

I've developed a bad habit of not finishing what I started (when it comes to non-school work anyway)! So here's a batch of not-so-refined works and WIPs:

I generally tend to avoid fanart (unless for anime convention purposes...) but somehow that's all I've been drawing recently! B-but Gintama is just so goooood!

ginpachi-sensei~
PaintTool SAI + adjustments in Adobe Photoshop CS4

WIP: (Does Professor Layton count as animu?) I definitely plan on finishing this...eventually! I can't wait until the next game - Professor Layton and The Lost Future was so incredibly epic! I had the Curious Village in mind when I was drawing this, though. :)

PaintTool SAI 1.01

WIP: I haven't decided whether to fully render this in colour, or go for flat b&w.

PaintTool SAI 1.01

And finally, a quick chibi doodle for a friend! And yes, I enjoy super blinding yellow backgrounds.

Adobe Photoshop CS4

I must admit, I've been running away from reality (read: school) a bit recently. I need to get back on track starting tomorrow! I also need to retroactively add all those projects I finished in February here...

Nephron forests...in colour!

For pathology illustration class, we were asked to come up with a couple of different colour palettes for our midterm sketches in preparation for our final illustrations. I actually really enjoy colour studies, but this was during a period of tight deadlines and stress. Feeling pressed for time and rather uninspired, I turned to some of my favourite artists for inspiration (aka raided DeviantArt, a site I no longer frequent, but remains chock full of eye-candy!)

My first attempt was based on OeffeO's beautiful piece Dream State


My second study resulted from a sad attempt to colourize my grayscale midterm sketch...


My last study was based on loish's whimsical illustration, glow

Pathology colour studies
Graphite + Adobe Photoshop CS4

I'm not sure which colour palette I'm going to go with for my final. I'm leaning towards either the first or third option!

Return to the (now cystic) nephron forest

For pathology class, I didn't enjoy the tissue cube study very much, so I decided to return to the nephron forest idea for my final illustration depicting autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD)! Because the target audience is the educated layperson (who would read Scientific American), I wanted to create a lush, immersive forest for the viewer to step into. I think cinematic design class is influencing me - I plan on using some pretty dramatic lighting and atmospheric perspective for this piece!

Autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD)
graphite + Adobe Photoshop CS4 + Adobe Illustrator CS4 for layout, 11x17" double-page spread

The clean lineart is going to be a real pain... Oh vasa recta, how I dislike drawing you...

EDIT: Just received some feedback today, I will be adding a timeline at the bottom and making the right side more "jungle-y"!

Making babies (part II)!

It's midterm critique week which means drafts everywhere! Here are my final sketches for medical-legal class. I've been working on a medical malpractice case. The physician is accused of negligence for his allegedly premature decision to perform a forceps delivery, which may have led to a skull fracture and cerebral palsy. The position of the fetus' head during labour is highly relevant to this case. However, the maternal-fetal relationships present serious challenges to understanding and viewers not familiar with anatomy can get easily disoriented. My solution: contextualize everything by relating the anatomy of the fetal head, maternal pelvis, and maternal body to situate the viewer. I did these illustrations with the defendant (physician) in mind, so I wanted everything to look objective and to conform to medical conventions (e.g. obstetrical view).

Illustration board 1:

Illustration board 2:

Maternal-fetal relationships during labour

Adobe Photoshop CS4, illustration boards 4x3' each

Next steps: redo the lines in pencil and fully render everything...

Storyboard!

If I had to pick the most intense course of the year so far, it would have to be my cinematic design class. With deadlines every week, I was forced to sit down and really think about my Master's Research Project (In a nutshell: Over the next eight months or so, I will create a short 3D animated film to explain how pain sensitivity increases in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. The film will target pharmacology/pharmacy students to both educate and inspire). After weeks of racking my brain and sleep deprivation, I finally have something (somewhat decent) to show

Perpetuating Pain storyboard

Adobe Photoshop CS4 + compiled in MS Powerpoint 2003

I was pretty proud of my accomplishments in the past two months. It felt really good to see my story come together. That good feeling didn't last very long, however... I met with my committee members this past week and there are many changes to be made - both in terms of visualization and scientific content. Well, the storyboard is meant to be a very fluid thing, so changes are to be expected! So back to the drawing board...literally!

Hopefully the next thing I post from this class will be my 2D animatic with narration (Adobe AfterEffects, here I come)! :)

pseudo-update... 8D

Hello all! Here is my sad excuse the reason for my lack of updates recently:

i've been working on a number of different things, but i'm at the point where nothing has really come together yet. i'll be off to Jamaica soon though, and will be bringing art supplies with me!
And you know it's time for more catgirls in vinyl personal drawings when you start seeing talking faces in incised aortas...

Fish! process part 3/3

After finishing sketching in part 1 and modelling in part 2...

Step 6: Putting the scene together
Here's what my final scene looked like before rendering:

i used a Free Form Deformer (FFD) to bend the fish body and fins (i couldn't get good results with the Bend Deformer) and added a Stick Texture Tag so the texture matches up with the deformed body.

i added random ice chunks by first modelling a single ice chunk, putting it into an Emitter, applying Current State to Object, and manually tweaking the positions of the ice chunks.

Here are a few of the scenes i tested out. With the help of my professor, i settled on a strong red light in the back to bring out the effects of Subsurface Scattering at the fins. My professor also advised be to add a cool light on one side and a softer, warm light to offset the cold one. A weak environment fog and depth of field were also used to soften the background elements a bit:

Step 6: Final image
In Photoshop, i tweaked the contrast and added a glow to the proteins. I also did the mock journal cover layout in Photoshop (yes, i probably should've used Illustrator, i know :P)
Only AFP was rendered separately and brought into Photoshop because using C4D's depth of field killed the (not very attractive anyway) glow.

Here is the final product!

Will be doing process posts for my surgical and neuro illustrations soon!

Fish! process part 1/3

Hello! Sorry I've been a bit MIA this month - been bogged down with watching too many kdramas school work and other unplanned things! Anyway, here is something i've been meaning to put up - a break down of how i created my mock journal cover.

Disclaimer: Since i'm very much a novice at 3D, i created this more for myself and it's not intended to be a how-to or anything lol! i felt the need to document how i did some things before i forgot! ;)

Project objectives: To create a mock journal/science magazine cover about antifreeze proteins found in Atlantic Herring.
Target audience: General public

Step 1: Find an interesting protein
Unable to let go of my fishy past, i looked up proteins found in fish species in the Protein Data Bank. i settled on an antifreeze protein in Atlantic herring.



Step 2: Sketching
Here are some quick sketches i did. i envisioned this dynamic illustration with a fish breaking out of ice. Looking back, i think my illustration would have had more impact with a whole school of herring.


ballpoint pen + col-erase pencils

Step 3: Final sketch
This was my final sketch from the planning stage. In hindsight i really shouldn't have worked this up so much, in order to encourage more feedback and changes at this point! i got really carried away because well, i like fish. :) Comparing my sketch and my final model, i was sad to realize how many drawing errors exist in this sketch haha...


Adobe Photoshop CS4

So that pretty much concludes the planning stage. Part 2, modelling...

Fish! process part 2/3

Continuing from the final sketch...

Steps 4 & 5: Modelling & texturing
To get a more accurate structure for the fish, I used some illustrations as references to build off of.



Click to see my attempts at modelling the fish and ice...


After completing the fish model, i tried to use BodyPaint to texture the fish, but i wasn't able to achieve very good results. Since the fish structure is pretty simple, i just painted a texture in Photoshop without bothering with UV mapping. The image was added to the color channel and projected flat onto the fish model. A bump map was also created for the fish scales.


Lastly, the protein structure data from the Protein Data Bank was opened up in Chimera. I chose to go with a ribbon representation in the end (the surface representation was too reminiscent of fish eggs according to my classmates). I then brought the protein model into C4D and applied a simple material.



That wraps up modelling! Now to build the scene...

neuro illustration

Here is the final coloured sketch for the textbook illustration component of my neuroanatomy course - now to vector this in Illustrator and do a final render in Photoshop...!


sympathetic control of blood flow in capillary beds
graphite + Photoshop CS4

Death by gradient mesh...

i have yet to do any personal art! Studying for our anatomy exam pretty much consumed my life towards the end of term. Now it's Adobe Illustrator... i am basically doing a pure Illustrator version of this Photoshop rendition i posted back in November.

As i have no posts for December, i figured i'd better throw in a work in progress (aka i'm not slacking off on art, i swear!)
There is still tons to be done and refined! :(



i have no idea why i'm gradient meshing the entire thing...
And yes, i like my palettes messy. :)

T cell migration

i noticed i only have one blog post for November, so i am here to throw in some school work before the month ends!

We've been working with immunology researchers and developing illustrations based on their research. After many iterations, i've completed the Photoshop sketch. i am currently working on an Illustrator version (which will be the final product). i've never used Adobe Illustrator before so it's been a real uphill battle. It's been especially difficult because i tend to shy away from clean, crisp, and smooth rendering/lines when i work. Deadline is on Dec. 11, so we'll see how it goes! D:


T cell migration
pencil + photoshop CS2

lungs and such

i'm currently in a human anatomy illustration course, and it's definitely a lot more challenging than i imagined! We have been drawing from specimens in Grant's Museum. At first i thought the observational sketching was going pretty smoothly, but there was a catch... We have to make the material look life-like, though we are drawing from cadaver material. i find this to be the most difficult aspect (so far). i've been consulting textbooks, professors, and harrassing medical students and colleagues. They've been of great help, but i still haven't found solutions to all of my problems...

But i did manage to solve one problem today! Since i am taking anatomy with the first year medical students, i also have the enormous privilege of having cadavers to learn from. i was struggling a lot with the lungs (see below), as the preserved material in Grant's Museum hasn't exactly aged well... Coincidentally, we did our lab on lungs today and i was able to reference from an actual lung in my hand. It was pretty amazing! Being able to see the lungs in real life was extremely helpful, and i think i've worked out how the lungs should look when pulled back to show the hili...

Here is the preliminary sketch i did in Grant's Museum (we weren't supposed to shade, but i cheated a little :D)

observational sketch
graphite on bond paper, 11x14"

The clean, line drawing with lots of anatomical errors! (i have a hand-labelled version, will scan that eventually)

clean lines
0.5B mechanical pencil on bond paper, 11x14"

Finally, this is my rough plan for my tonal rendering. i found it rather difficult to figure out where the light/shadows would be on all the vessels and such. There are still some anatomical errors i haven't quite figured out yet...

tonal test
SAI 1.01 + Photoshop CS2
Credit also needs to be given to a number of my friends who helped critique this (you know who you are 8D;;;)

i also have at least two other versions lying around, so not used to redrawing stuff so many times! But i guess i'd better get used to it. :P Now i have to render this using carbon dust... i will be attempting to do so tomorrow...

filler WIP!

This CG has taken me quite a while and I'm still not close to completion! It's a commissioned piece, but I had tons of freedom and fun while designing this modern priestess outfit. :)

I will be posting my last life drawing/anatomy pieces soon. Classes have ended and unfortunately, I couldn't enroll in the Spring term. However, this means that I will be focusing my energy into other projects - hopefully more acrylic/watercolour paintings? :D