Monster Reborn

Alright, besides the cheap anime reference... I'm back! Yes, on April Fool's day too... what with all of Australia reeling from computers not being able to update themselves to extended Daylight Savings.

But yes... I'm back. With ADSL 2+. Apprently, the downloads are so fast I can finish up my quota in a few days. Shocking. Still, there's much to love about it. Work is pretty good. I've never appreciated the numerous holidays around Easter quite as much as I have this year. However, the lack of internet during a few of them was a bit of a downer. Anyway, had some big pow-wow as well and managed to fit 10 people into the new apartment (yes, that's right... I've moved). Now I just got to manage in a schedule of regular maintenance and so on into my daily schedule.

Events? Just recently visited Supanova. To be honest as an anime fan it was a bit dull because it didn't really cater to us. I did see Greg Horn (really realistic digital artist) and Arthur Suydam (does Marvel Zombies! Fantastic artist!). It was nice to see them go about explaining their work... but generally it wasn't in depth enough. I bought me a nice wooden sword and a few other comics.

Oh, I did buy 'Hollow Fields' by Madeleine Rosca. I was utterly surprised to find out that she won one of the International Manga awards and is recognised among the Japanese mangaka. Even more surprising was the fact that she shares this honour only 3 others and one of them is Malaysia's very own Benny Wong aka Ben who drew Le Gardenie. I was and am seriously infatuated with his work and his bio is interesting to read.

I did try to enter the art competition in Supanova, though. I came up with drawing (2). At first the characters didn't look too ugly and I did refer to '50 Robots to Draw and Paint' by Keith Thompson to get the guns right. Then I added the background. Things went downhill there. I remembered seeing coloured pictures (as in digitally coloured ones) and I thought I'd get mine coloured to stand a chance. I dug out an old set of cheap colour pencils. THAT was my biggest mistake. After a few seconds I realised I had made a horrible mistake but it was too late to go back and at the end of it the picture looked like the most grotesque thing you've ever seen vomitted. Needless to say, I did not win. Nevertheless, I'll try to pick myself up for Animania next on 16th April. The theme is 'Fire and Water' and since it's just pencils I think I'll be able to get a bit of a homeground advantage.

Other drawings: (1) is an early (and very risque... I know) drawing I made trying to see if I could get the 'wet' look to it. (3) is influenced by the robot book I mentioned and watching 'Dukes of Hazzard' (whoo... Daisy Duke). I was thinking how cool if instead of using the General Lee, we had one of those hot pants'd girls in a mecha of some sort. (4) is just anothed random doodle that popped up one of these days.

Anyway that's all I have to say for my return. Will need to bunker down for Animania!