HDB Foodcourt

Doodled around in my Iphone, on the way back from work today. I came up with a scene of a Foodcourt - you know, the usual ones below the HDB flats. I think the dappled shadows on the walls made the image more interesting than it really is.

Snow peaks again

I've revisited the snow peaks iPhone art again; this time adding more details to the lake and the mountain peaks, and increasing the overall brightness of the image. The previous image was far too cloudy for my liking.

Snow peaks and pine trees

Yeah, I like painting trees and snow. Hopefully one of these days I can go on a vacation to the wilderness, so to speak. There are two versions; I like the one with less snow on the peaks.

My childhood neighbourhood

When I was young, I used to cycle to my friend's house on the weekends. If I'm not mistaken, the roads outside his house looks something like my iPhone art below. There are always cars parked outside the houses, along the roads. What do you think, Ivan?

Valley at dusk

Few months back, I saw a documentary showing elephants crossing a valley in Africa. The scene was really epic, and with huge cliffs at the sides and a wide open plain in the middle. So today I tried to remember how the scene looked like in this iPhone art.

Still here

Last year I went to New York on a vacation. I remember being overwhelmed by the size of those skyscrapers and how the city has preserved many smaller historical buildings, especially the churches. So here in this iPhone art, I painted a scene of a church existing alongside its huge neighbors.

Rain rain rain

Painted a rainy day scene today (on my iphone), showing a bus stop and a guy with an umbrella at the back. I think I captured the mood that I wanted quite well, and didn't have to labor to get it looking right :)
The "auto-enhance" edit didn't make it look better - it blew up the colors until it didn't look gloomy at all. My original colors win this time!

Auto-enhance wins again

Today I've painted a garden scene, which has a big flower arch.
I kept reworking on the sky to get the colors right. At first I had a bright blue sky with white puffy clouds, but that didn't look right.
In the end, I realized I had to add a gradient white as I get nearer to the horizon. I think the bright blue type of sky only appears when you look up, which has less dust and haze.
Later, I turned on the "auto-enhance" edit in Photos to see how could I improve on the colors and values. It seems I could still add alot more saturated colors to the flowers and greens. I gotta be braver next time to put those stronger colors! (the duller image is the original image, the more vibrant one is the auto-enhanced image).

Painting with my SketchBook MobileX

Well, it's been a long time since my last entry. The past few months has been a life changing experience for me - I'm a new dad now! My baby boy Isaac, is now 4 months old, and he's bringing so much joy into our life. (along with the lack of sleep)

Since I can hardly find enough time to sit down and paint (on my pc), the only long stretch of time I have is when I journey back and forth, to work everyday. So recently I've played around with a painting App on my iPhone - SketchBook MobileX.

It was quite hard at first because I was so used to painting with pressure sensitivity (in my Wacom), and here I didnt have that control. I didn't have a stylus as well and just had to get used to painting with my fat fingers.

However, I thought what the heck, I shouldn't use that as an excuse - instead I can just treat it as painting with thick paints. And painting without level controls or color adjustments (as in Photoshop) helped me to realize that all these years I actually know very little about colors because I had been relying too much on Photoshop's capabilities to help me adjust my wrong colors.

So here below are my little paintings done when I travel to and back from work. Most of them are so more like color sketches, really rough.