Of belts and gis
Some would say that I perhaps have an unhealthy fascination with such apparel. It is apparent, especially if you look at my various doodles (and doodads) around my hard drive, my desktop, my tabletop and even my sketchbook.
I say, though, that the gi, though overused, is absolutely perfect for people who have little to no knowledge of how to best portray the human body, and instead opt to hide it beneath swaths of cotton fibre. All while making your character automatically look badass.
All this, of course, at the cost of making your masterpiece look like yet another of those Ryu-inspired deviations.
Vrooooom
Yes, the month of May has sadly been spent on beer and booze. Which are actually more or less sort of the same thing, come to think of it.
I’ve been working on something over the past month, and instead of hiding it behind veiled curtains until it inevitably dies off like I always do, today, I’ve decided to throw in something that should abate my singeing conscience for now. You should, in fact, be looking at it right now: it’s the post thumbnail of the day!
It’s my first time actually attempting to completely vector-ize something I’ve inked in pixels, and I’m finding that the effort required definitely isn’t as minor as I’ve once thought. Oh no.
The title of my post then, seems misleading, though. Vrooom, an onomatopoeia, is not generally associated with inks or vectors, is it?
Inking under fir...
Is not a situation that most artists would imagine, let alone dream of even experiencing. As I type these mere strings of text, know that such a situation has transpired, of sorts. More importantly, it is actually survivable, proof of which now resides to the left of this post.
Unless, of course, you’re actually reading the RSS feed, in which case I kindly suggest you read the unabated version instead.
The obvious content of this post, therefore, outlines my adventures with traditional inking techniques, all done while under the watchful eyes of prowling sarges, warrant officers and even left-enants.
Santa
Is a lie.
There. I said it. And you if even so much as beg to differ, I’ll have you turned into nothing more than a smoked ham faster than you can even think about candy canes.
Speaking of food, honestly speaking, there’s nothing better than a good turkey with the right kind of sauce to go along with it when it comes to fulfilling hunger pangs. It’s too bad then, that my aunt chose to go on a trip to China this year; our family usually heads over to her home, along with my extended relatives during Christmas on the pretext of enjoying each other’s company and reminiscing aud lang syne. In reality, all we want is that turkey.
And ham. Smoked, no less.
Concept art
Is getting harder and harder to actually visualize these days, let alone actually execute. I mean, I used to be able to at least churn out a piece of crap in about an hour or so; it’s hard to stomach the fact that I actually spent about 3 hours working on this current piece of work.
And I’m not even sure what I want to do with it in the first place. Honestly, right now it’s just yet another of those generic forest-slash-stream paintings that could be done by a monkey with a Wacom and a couple of custom brushes in a couple of minutes. I did use only the default Photoshop brush sets, and mostly limited myself to making each individual stroke, which was especially a pain in the ass when working on the ground texture. Behold!
Whoops
Ok, so maybe getting accepted into somewhere like DigiPen isn’t going to be as easy as I thought it was going to be.
Well, maybe I should rephrase that a little. I didn’t think an institution focused on teaching skills focused mainly on computer graphics design placed such high importance on these things called testimonials. Which, considering I’m not exactly the friendly type when it comes to teachers, I am highly unlikely to acquire. Oh well.
Maybe I should actually get back in contact with my contact at A*STAR Exploit Technologies when I did that internship with them, even if it was actually kind of pointless.