Kicks, punches and fireworks

These three things have more in common than most people could possibly hope to ever imagine.

That’s not saying much, of course, considering most peoples’ imagination could be compared to that of a black hole. Thank goodness that there are some of us left who do not suffer this disability, this disease that seems to be spreading around the artistic community these days, showing itself to be most prevalent within the Singapore army.

Yes, that was a terribly random statement. That does not make it any less false.

Anyway, I’ve neglected to update as of recent times, owing to the fact that I’ve been working on a couple of projects, some of which are still currently undergoing (I’m quite the busy man here, ain’t I?), some of which have been ongoing since the beginning of time and probably won’t be finished even when the end rolls around and one project which is finally nearing completion.

I kind of like the way they look like flowers growing into the sky.

There certainly was a lot more variety to these.

Before I delve entirely into my techno-wizardry babble, though, I’d like to elaborate more on the Singapore Fireworks Festival which I had the pleasure of attending before having to run 21 fucking kilometres the following morning.

I attended the final day of the fireworks festival, which was pretty much a first for me, as I’ve been limiting my fireworks captures to much more publicized events such as the End of Year celebrations, or most recently, the National Day celebrations. The crowd turnout wasn’t as insane as it was for either of the other two events, which, I suppose, comes with the fact that the Fireworks Festival isn’t exactly advertised as a party event, not to mention the relatively heavy rain that accompanied the event. There were quite a number of tripods set up all around me, though, when I arrived.

This was, incidentally, my first time shooting in really wet weather, and I learned a couple of things from the experience. More importantly, I got some pretty shots out of it, which is kind of the point of any event in which a camera is involved.

Also, that you can never have enough plastic bags to act as insulators from watery death.

The kind of trails that only a long exposure can produce.

Fireworks! It was raining, hence the nice blurry spots on the shot.

I was pretty pleased with the display, which isn’t saying much, seeing as I’m not really a fireworks connoisseur of sorts. In fact, I think I’ve probably witnessed less than ten live fireworks demonstrations in my life to date. I know, I need to get out more, go fuck yourselves, et cetera.

At any rate, the display was a lot better than our National Day fireworks managed to offer, which got me to thinking: if the fucking French can overcome their le suck and put on a show better than what the entire of the Ministry of Defence can manage with their ginormous amount of funds, why the hell are we even still dumping so much of our public funds into this colossal maw of wastage?

I suppose that wastage of funds on my country’s National Day celebrations is kind of chipping off the top of the iceberg, but it still grates away at my soul whenever I hear someone gushing over how fucking awesome National Day was and how they wish they could go again just to view the fireworks over the Marina Bay floating platform because oh they are so goddamn pretty.

It makes me feel like planting roundhouses into their mouths. Such as illustrated below, as a design for a T-shirt.

An initial test design for the shirt which was rejected.

Long story short, I recently met some guy in the army through another friend of mine who needs a new design for his organization’s T-shirt, and, if I have my way with him, a new design for their website as well.

For those of you who actually know what I’m talking about, this guy is pretty serious. He’s pretty much a kickboxer, being formally trained in Wushu Shanshou, Muay Thai and oddly, enough, Taekwondo (he’s actually a black belt in that last one), not to mention including weapons training such as nunchaku, guan dao and the traditional Chinese sword, jian.

I’ve had the opportunity to talk to him about various philosophies of martial arts on more than a couple of occasions, and it’s pretty refreshing to hear his perspective on games that warp realistic combat into something that involves a mere joystick and a couple of face buttons.

Anyway, his reaction to the first design (which I had actually based on his reaction to an image I showed him) was pretty positive, but he wanted the design to fit his organization’s style of fighting more, which, in artistic terms, meant less clothing, more muscle. Additionally, he wanted something a little less about flashy kicks and more about unforgiving knees.

I aim to please.

The almost-finished design.

Yes, by the way, both designs are 100% vector brushwork using standard stock Illustrator brushes, and I have to say, I’m really starting to like working with vectors more in Illustrator than with pixels in Photoshop, even with the added flexibility that Photoshop provides. The feel of getting a brush stroke right with the Wacom tablet in Illustrator is something that Photoshop can’t even come close to emulating. It’s something, I’ll tell you that.

A close up of the detail of the vector brushwork.

I have to add a couple of things that will make it more identifiable to be affiliated with his organization, but for all intents and purposes, this will be the finalized version of the design. It actually started out as just that guy on the right, but he wanted an opposing character to help the shirt look more ‘cool’.

Personally, I prefer just having the guy on the right without the sparring partner, but it’s his call. Also, I’m pretty happy that I managed to keep the colour palette down to six colours, which should help immensely should he choose to silkscreen print the shirts, as they’re going to be worn while they conduct their relentless sparring against each other.

I’m planning to do a ‘making of’ write-up on the design in the future, so watch for that soon. In the meantime, I’m going to wrap this up and get working on some other stuff which I’ve been puting off for a while.

I’ll be back with more delicious content as soon as I can get my hands off my PS3 controller, I swear.

Entries: Marathons — Inexcusable indulgences

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