New Year's Resolution.

Why, hello there! I know it's been ages! I picked up my Col-Erase literally for the first time in 2 years or so, it feels so good to be back on the desk though. I'm still in the tropical island for those who wonder. It's been more than 4 years and counting, which surprises me more than anyone else as I myself never thought of staying here for a such a long time. Noriko and I also got our first baby in October, and my daughter has been the best thing that ever happened to our life since then. Work has been great as well. I didn't really feel that I could ever call myself as a professional animator 3 years ago as I was so fresh out of school at that time. But now, with a huge help from the company, I feel more comfortable pronouncing my title as an animator more than ever.

Though I wasn't fully happy being here for all this time. As I become more comfortable animating for the client, the job became somewhat more task-like. I started to behave like a mindless robot to accomplish whatever is asked. Don't get me wrong though, I'm not unhappy being here either. Most of the time I get excited over my shots and cannot sleep at night thinking about it. Seeing the other animator's work also never stops entertaining me. It only happens when I get tired or simply burned out. Those shots eventually turned out to be great nonetheless, thanks to the awesome lead Cedric, but I always felt that I lost my initial drive somewhere.

I reckon that's partially due to the type of the shots that I do at work. My initial motivation to get into this animation industry was more for a character driven animation, but most of the work that I did here has been a pure vfx work except for the Rango stuff. Again, I'm excited to do those vfx shots as well, it just happened to be that my affection is leaning more towards to the character piece.

Lately I've been thinking of making my personal piece more seriously than ever, for my own satisfaction and/or for the possible future job opportunities. The fact is that once you start it, it's a lot easier to keep up with it! A lot of good old memories started to come back as well. I'm a keen reader of Walt Stanchfiled's book for all the sudden again!

I thought the year end holiday was a perfect time for me to think about the plans for the next few years, and so did I. Then there's this art themed podcast thing here. I completely forgot where I picked up from but it was on my Read It Later list, so I had a listen. Quite surprisingly the host was talking about the dos and don'ts on making a new year's resolution. What a perfect timing! I believe the show is quite entertaining apart from the fact the he is recording the podcast while he drives, so there's an awkward pause here and there. But anyway give it a try while you are still in the new year's mood.

Enough of my story. I hope you got your own resolution ready to begin a year. Happy New Year to all and see you in a bit.

Winter Hat.

Doodle of the day.

I found this software called MyPaint the other day. It's quite simple and it's free! I especially like the feature of having unlimited amount of space when it comes to the paper size, so that I don't have to set up the paper size before start sketching nor adjust the paper size due to the size of the sketch ending up bigger than expected.

Me 2011

Doodle of the day.

Totem

Doodle of the day.

Spoonfed.

Doodle of the day.

Choose a cat, Draw a girl.

Howdy bloggers! Sorry I've been away for a while again. Work has been busy but I'm pretty happy to get back on track especially after 2 months of doing-nothing-but-do-not-slack-off period. Well Australia trip was ton of fun.

Anyway, believe or not I'm here to promote yet another internet meme. Great Illustrator Harvey James has a live journal blog where this art challenge sort of session is happening. I was late at the game but I thought it would be fun and gave a try. Turns out it's helluva fun! Idea is simple, you pick the cat of your choice, then draw a girl based off the design of the cat. If you have some time, I would strongly encourage you to try your version of cat girl.

Here's a link. Choose a cat, Draw a girl.

A Man

Doodle of the day.

I'm slowly catching up with my old habits.

Small Indian Dude in Progress.

It all started with small chat with my buddy. He always gives me such an exciting ideas to work on. After spending few hours drawing almost uncontrollably, I was surprised to notice it's so easy to draw when we got some inspiration going around in my head. Think about huge amount of time that I've been procrastinating...

I started to rough out the poses and tried to nail how he could be moving. Then rough ideas of faces next. I pretty much like the final result of his face design. I still have long way to go with his body tho.

Sorry for the lack of posts lately.

Doodle of the day.

Panda was awesome!!

I know. I've been completely away from blogging lately. But I'm back! with crappy sketch I've done while I was watching TV show. well, that's not what I'm going to talk about. We watched Kung Fu Panda today and that was AWESOME!! (since we have Shawn Kelly here in Singapore right now, I have to say "awesome" as he says :) I'm just happy to meet this movie. I'm sure I'll look back this movie again and again as I do for The Incredibles. Congratulations to all of who worked on this one! (obviously none of those great guys will check my post but anyways! :D

I'll be back once again when I got next crappy doodle. I already realized I need to sharpen my skills up once again. so I started to attend drawing session at work. so there will be more to come.

Alex's

Who would have guessed the first post from Singapore was not my drawing? Very talented guy at work, Alexandre Espigares had sketch of me. I liked how he exaggerated some of facial parts. This is pretty much how I look like in side profile.

The work is tough, but I love going to the office.

Big move.

So, I have a flight to catch this weekend. I'm going to Singapore to join the team of Clone Wars. Since this is not a contract job like I used to have, the move I'm making is relatively bigger than previous one. I'm coming with Illusion of Life and all that stuff. So it's tough. I packed my scanner and all the art supplies that I can have fun with, but as you probably know I will be working for Mr. Lucas as hard as I'm able to, You might not be seeing quick update anytime soon. But I can show you cool stuff when the show is out, I promise.

Paint.

Hello. I was trying to get back to the world of painting since I've noticed I haven't done any of it in last few years. I put those roughs here mainly because this could be a good chance to get some opinions from people. I'm trying to get the style that I can work with for relatively longer term, that means I don't have to worry about painting style when I'm thinking of character's detail. Anyways, my current concern is how much should I keep the original lines in final painting in order to get most pleasant look. I've tried few variations on this concern roughly, the one with the boy wearing white shirt is having a lot of lines and simple/flat colors but some brush textures. the second green sweatshirt girl is having some rendering on its form but still remains some lines from original drawing. The final one is very rendering centric and some fancy lighting included. I liked the final rendered style but this might be appropriate for illustration but not for a modelsheet. Anyways, if you had few minutes please drop me a line which version would you prefer to see more.

By the way, my previous blog entry had been terminated for several reasons. but that's true I'm still busy to pack my stuff. My flight is set in the end of this month. so there may or may not be new doodle coming up soon.

La La La.

Doodle of the day.

No, Vista didn't suck.

It's just me being lazy.

I'm a such a Mac hater, but I'm looking for to see new MacBook. Did any of you hear about new 50% thinner MacBook? Well, let's wait and see. Macworld is almost there. I'm sure it's gonna look sexy anyway.

P.S. How come there's so many sexy gadgets out there lately? Wacom 12WX is the another thing. Maybe we are living in the best era (or the worst).

Wednesday morning.

Doodle of the day.

Day of Days

Some doodles that I've done recently. First one is referenced from girl's fashion magazine, I was trying to get extreme expression of smile without getting ugly, obviously it failed. oh well, at least now I know what makes girl's face ugly. then second and third are from life drawing class. then I found cute chick in the class, so I draw her, forth one.

As someone probably know I'm working on my Katie and Ducky project. hope I can show you some progress here sometime soon.

Music week.

Doodle of the day.

So I've been taking full advantage of YouTube by using it as my time machine. I happened to looked up the band that I was listening in my high school days, named Cloudberry Jam. Their video and music flashed me back in time. I was there with my friends, family and my old CDs. The choice of my music was a bit British oriented, but probably some people get the same nostalgic feel if we live in same era. Here's some of the bands that I'm missing. Blur, Bluetones, Supergrass, Menswear, Silver Sun, Summercamp, yea sure Oasis, Ben Folds Five and good old Green Day.

sup?

been super busy.

By request.

So, I've been pretty busy for bunch of reasons. But actually my life is getting slower. I pretty much got used to my working place by now, having some good time with friends, nice food, movies and drink and stuff. Yeah having some fun. There's a tendency that we could forget the real reason why we are making some art when we are in a stressful situation. So I'm hoping this fun that I'm enjoying brings me some good inspiration for my next step.

One of my friends asked me why I didn't upload some of the characters in my sketchbook, so here it goes.