I should stop staying up till dawn.

yeah, i don't know either

On the left: watercolor on moleskine.
On the right: digital colors.

The one on the left was done after the one on the right. A lot of people couldn't figure out exactly what was happening when I was working on this, and to be honest, now I can see why. It was intended to be a final rendering for a conceptual illustration class last year; and this scene tried to capture the climax of the story I had come up with at the time.

End result: meh.

I did learn some nifty tricks in the digital version, however.

Digital Love

So I was hard-drive rummaging this past weekend and I found two unfinished digital coloring sketches that gave me painting bug. One of them became the new header for the blog... do you like it?

I put up the old header here for nostalgia's sake.
There's also this really old rendering of Jett fighting some weird insect rock monsters or something. I don't know.
Slapped on some color and well.. that's it.

watercolor splash!

So! After finally picking up the watercolor sketchbook and dabbling in color after a summer-long hiatus, I also ended up scanning the thing and much to my dismay this is all I have... it's not even one picture for each month I've had the sketchbook! In order to rectify this, I'm gonna... start drawing in the watercolor book!

The oldest picture is last with the most recent one right below.

rakugaki gawker

This next sequence of pictures is going to be rather boring...
I kinda hit a funk, so I tried drawing through it, and this was the result.
Still feeling inept at drawing clothes on... women... Hmm..
Oh well, back to drawing!

shin rakugaki mangaka

For today's rakugaki installment... well I wish I'd not post the trashy sketches (it only gets trashier from here) but a post is a post!

The Zangief drawing is a copy of Bengus's MVC2 art and most of the SF characters there are copies as well. Man.. drawing the gief was tough... since I try not to do any underdrawings in this sketchbook and just sight everything, copying Bengus's fantastic proportions was quite the ordeal.

There's something that's been bothering me as of late. I've been reading a lot of One Piece lately. And I do mean a lot. I've managed to see 1200 dpi scans of some pages and the amount of detail in it is astounding. I know it sounds wierd but seeing a stroke as big as my finger on the monitor makes me feel like I'm understanding Oda's process better. With seeing how he constructs his characters and world, I've taken in some of his stylistic choices to see how they would work out.
The one thing I have an IMMENSE respect and admiration for is Oda's ability to take a stock emotion/face such as shock and implement it into ANY character. The characters emotion is not only clear but one can recognize the character even though there might be up to 5 people exhibiting the same emotion. Or his animals! The all have the same face, but they all read as individual! I guess this is what you call... mastery.

Oda's ability to model the human body from any direction is also astounding. I've started leaning more towards his approach to character creation, both in face and body, but I feel as though its made me lose whatever originality I had. I feel like I can't create women anymore, or work off whatever ideas I might have had in the past.

I guess what I'm trying to communicate here are my feelings of ineptitude and the experience I'm gaining as I work towards a cohesive drawing style. I feel like it's time to start settling into something. It's time... TO HENSHIN!!!! FLLAAAAASSSSH~!!!! GYAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH~!!!!!!!

Rakugaki BEAT

Whoa... it's been a long time....

Everything is like spiral for me. If I don't draw one day... my ability to put pencil to paper weakens and then before I know it, a month goes by without a single sketch getting drawn.

That'll be put to an end hopefully now that I've got my Rakugaki BEAT sketchbook.
In reality, it's just an ordinary moleskine, but with the flame of spontaneously combusting imagination, it becomes my tool of drawing destruction!
My aim was to do 2 pages a day, but I've been getting ahead of that, so I'll stick to drawing 2 pages as a minimum.

Here's what I've gotten scanned so far.