Saturday, April 19, 2008

Animaniamania!





Wowzers, I just managed to crawl out of stupor and put something up!

Work is piling up and I have been on the go for the past few days. I'm barely at home as it is, seeing as there's social obligations. Never really got the time to sit down and nut out some sketches. Really don't have time for colouring at present!

Anyway, asides from being swamped, things aren't too bad. Went to see Superhero movie... kinda funny but not award winning material.

Animania's tomorrow! I have to get some sketches out to practice but I was tired out today. Nevertheless, there are some older ones I did involving Zetsubou Sensei (still loving it) characters. I reckon it'll be my goal to finish them all. I reckon that shouldn't be too many provided they don't keep introducing more (well, no complaints really).

Pic (1) is a random drawing of a girl with a wooden sword, based on mine. Pic (2) is heavily influenced by the Caramelldansen craze (even VG Cats got hit with it) and all the Youtube madness. Pictured are the insane Kafuka (I wanted to use her in a more sadistic way.. but Caramelldansen is pretty sadistic) and Maria (wanted to get her out of the way). Pic (3)... Kobushi in her 50-50 semi-nude pose. Thank goodness for Chiri's fan service! I really wanted to colour this in to get the differentiation between bandage and skin. Pic (4) is my trial design for the Animania sketch theme this year: Fire and Water. Hopefully not tired out by tomorrow to think about it.

Alright, need to recuperate. Hopefully can get some coloured stuff out eventually.

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

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!