Chinese Rooster

It's Christmas time again, and this year as a present for my parents, I'm attempting to paint an art depicting a rooster and his family. Basically, it represents my parents, my brother and I. My Papa has been asking me to paint something like that for sometime already (2 years back, I think), and I kept procrastinating on painting it - until now. Me lazy bum.
But on a deeper level, it's not just laziness but rather my lack of interest in spending lots of time and effort on painting a subject matter that I'm not particularly interested in. To counter this problem, I thought of using a Chinese painting style because I can paint it fast and loose, do not need to spend too much time and perhaps it may just turn out nicely. However, since I don't own any chinese ink, watercolour paper or really good brushes for that matter, I'll rely back on my old trusty pal Mr. Photoshop to supply me the digital materials.

I spent some fun time experimenting on the brush settings to paint the calligraphic watercolor effect, and the results above seems quite OK. I'm definitely going to further explore this style of painting in my quest to mimic Chinese style paintings. Woohoo!
(btw, I'm a banana, so my mandarin skills are zero, hence the lack of mandarin words on the painting)

Ogre and Gimeor

Colour! It seems that my little blog is missing some jazz, so I've got here two images that hopefully does justice to the color wheel.
The painting below was actually done a couple of weeks back, and the idea was sketched much longer back, I think 2 years ago. Just wasn't interested to flesh it out until now.
Story: "After a hard long battle, Mr. Ogre relaxes down at the local watering hole. While waiting for his roasted pheasant dinner to come, he spots a rat scurrying along the table...his free appetizer has arrived "


Here's Gimeor again; always getting himself in trouble, and this time running away from a gigantic centipede-like creature. Run..Gimy..run!

Compilation of my sketches

Here's 3 images that are cut-n-paste compilations of my previous works.

The first one below are a bunch of hands doodles I usually doodle on my notepad when attending night classes at a church. It's an automatic reaction to doodle sometimes when I listen to the speakers. it's not that I'm not listening, because I do pay attention to what's being said. Multi-tasking might explain what's happening here.


The 2nd one is a bunch of characters. Not something that I'm very proud of, so it means back to the drawing board for me.


The third one below is my favourite; a bunch of gesture sketches of my anonymous models at the MRT, and animals from the Zoo and dinosaurs from Youtube.

After a short hiatus...

I've been pretty busy lately for the past 2 months working on a short game project, and so have not been able to scan and post my accumulating sketches. That short project is over now (I hope) :)

Here's some sketches; among those usual people-at-the-MRT sketches, I particularly like the drawing of some clown faces with different expressions.








Last week, I went jungle hiking with Annie (my girlfriend) at Bukit Timah Nature Reserve. It was raining half way through our hike when we came across this particular Uncle who started to put a plastic bag onto his head to avoid the rain. We laughed so much because he looked really funny and comical. Annie said he even looked like SpongeBob. I had to agree :P (he's at the bottom left, right below)

Annie contributed some sketch of Pennywise the Clown. Can you spot him below?


Moving on...
Here's some sketch of Gimeor and some dinosaurs. I tried to shade some values in, so that they won't be so flat. I think I can develop a few in there into color sketches.
I especially liked the one titled "Food's Here" in which Gimeor looks up at a flying creature which casts a shadow on him. So who's the food? Gimeor or the creature?




Lastly, I'd like to introduce you to my latest cute character. His name is Sharkee... (predictable name isn't it?)

The Zoo!

Yesterday, Nicholas (my colleague) and his wife, and my girlfriend and I went to the Zoo. My girlfriend managed to get some cheap tickets and so it was a great opportunity for me to try and sketch as many animals that I can in the zoo. You see, ever since a few months back, I've been training myself to capture gestures of people and animals. I have only tried sketching animals from internet videos, so to be able to do it live is wonderful! And I'm lucky to have a colleague that was similarly enthusiastic about drawing animals in the zoo as well.
I managed to fill up just 10 pages of my A4 sketchbook, as I initially hoped to draw more animals. I guess it's because we entered the zoo quite late-it was already afternoon, so next time I'll go earlier.

A bunch of Sketches

Here's a bunch of sketches after being absent from my blog for quite a while. Close to a month to be exact.

The first sketch one below was done while I was sitting in a small park, and I saw this toddler running about. He has a funny way of running which he puts up his arms as if trying to balance himself. What a funny little fella.


Some sketches of people in the MRT station. Yup, I see aliens and giant rat characters there too.






These sketches below are an attempt to draw some Disney-sytle characters. A few weeks back, I saw an advertisement looking for a freelance character designer who can draw realistic cartoon characters in Disney styles, so I decided to try to apply for it. Guess I wasn't that good because it didn't hear from them at all :p
But anyhow, it's been a nice attempt and I now know that I need to concentrate more on getting expressions out of my characters.

Some new sketches

Here are two new sketches in which I managed to capture the subjects' gesture before they moved away. I'm by no means satisfied, but i think I'm improving slightly.

ehFive sketchbook

Some sketches from my ehFive book again:

I just had to draw a quick sketch of my girlfriend Annie sleeping; her palm's posture was very interesting in the way they bend inwards below her face.


A bunch of people in the MRT station:


An aimless doodle led to a Panda sketch which kinda resembles "Po" from the movie Kung-Fu panda. So, I dedicate this sketch to Po...

Breaking News: Monstrous Sea Creature discovered

Breaking News: A monstrous sea creature was discovered yesterday and captured on photographs by Malaysian scientists who were conducting research on the Sperm whales in the Pacific ocean. It was apparently a carnivore hunting a group of Sperm whales, and succeeded in killing two of the whales.

This creature does not resemble any currently known prehistoric sea reptiles, and might be be a completely new species of sea reptile altogether! It is impossible to estimate the size of this creature but it is very likely to be the largest sea dwelling creature ever, as can be plainly seen from the photographs that it dwarfs the Sperm whales.

Little Rat, Wong and the Dragon

An inquisitive little rat stumbles upon a very nice smell in the air, coming from the most unlikely sources! Could it be cheese? bacon? Belacan?...anyway, it's sure gonna be yummy!



"Wong and the Dragon: Who wins? Wong has a magical blue sword while The Dragon has its fiery breath." In this art, I wanted to capture a terrifying mood with lots of darkness and hot-red colors; like Hell.
This is my second attempt:


My first attempt below did not work for me because the lighting was weird; somehow I had unknowingly painted the scene lighted up as if there was an imaginary spotlight behind the Dragon and casted it's shadow on the floor. I knew I wanted the brightest part of the picture to be between the Dragon's face and Wong, but I didn't know how to light it up logically.
First attempt:



Here are some pages from my trusty little ehfive Sketch book. I am beginning to get the hang of drawing cartoon characters. My favorites are the laughing old man and the Tiger who hears something. See if you can spot them out.