Sunset Allosaurs

It's been a while since I last painted any dinosaurs, and so this is my painting of a pair of Allosaurs basking in the sunset and looking of into the distance, probably at some commotion created by a herd of Diplodocus nearby. It's still a work in progress but I think I got off to a good start. However, I somewhat "cheated" because the colors and lighting of the evening setting is based on an image that I saw from the net.

The sketch below was the initial idea.

Here's the image that I referred to; my lighting and colors are heavily influenced by it. I got that image from the net, so it is copyrighted to whoever owns it.

Moogie!

A long thought to be extinct Moogie has been spotted and photographed in the deep jungles of Sarawak, Malaysia. This cute-but-huge mammal was last sighted in January, 1980, and was commonly believed to be extinct due to massive habitat loss and extensively hunted for its beautiful fluffy fur which fetches high prices in the fur trade. Biologists are now actively studying the remaining population level of Moogies in that area, and keeping fingers crossed to find a sustainable breeding population there.

How My Mind Works

Earlier last year in November, my company held a Stick-fighting martial arts demonstration, in which the arts originated from Philippines. The demonstration was primarily meant for animators to study and get real references to the complex and fast movements happening in martial arts. It was an eye opener for me as I had not seen in-person any stick fighting before. This art uses a rather short bamboo stick and has very fast movements. As I am not an animator, all I could do was to crazily sketch down gestures of the movements that was demonstrated. Very fun!



Most of the time, I like to fill up my sketchbook with small, really rough drawings similar to thumbnails. I often start by doodling some shapes and lines and playing around with composition until I see some sort of idea emerging from the doodles, or if the doodles resemble some creature or environment.
Sometimes, the composition is dictated by the available space I have on the paper, for example I usually end up with a long vertical images when I get squeezed to the edges of my paper. Anything goes!Inevitably, there will be some images that stands out from all the small rectangle doodles, and I'll select those to color them up eventually.
Below are some of the sketches:

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?)