A Princess of Mars Art Order Challenge (Final)

I said I wouldn't work on this anymore, but I didn't want to put all of that effort to waste so I finished it up as best as I could within the timeframe I had.  This piece was especially tough for me.  I don't know if it's just the scope of the piece, or if it's because I haven't done enough vehicle or environment designs yet, but I struggled with this piece throughout the process.  There were days that I was putting off working on it by doing anything else I could think of, which is obviously not healthy.  If I ever do figure it out I'll let you guys know.

In any case, I added colors using two "soft light" layers on top of each other and also used Jason Chan's cheat of copying the final art as a layer, blurring it, then erasing (in the blurred layer) all the parts that you want to stay in focus.  In this case I wanted to blur out the city in the background and really focus on the lead ship and the characters in the foreground.  I think the effect works and it's a good cheat to use every now and again to salvage a weak piece.

Check out WIPnation to see the other contest entrants (click on teh "ao princess" tag to bring them up)!

A Princess of Mars Art Order Challenge (Update)

It's been a rough couple of weeks.  I know I've been slow to update this week, and a lot of that is because I've been busy with my current project (which I'm itching to announce) and also because my sister has just arrived with her family after a decade away from the Philippines so I'm hanging out with her and my niece and nephew, whom I've never met in real life before.

But I've also been battling a strange emotional roller coaster with my art career.  It's too long and involved for me to go into detail right now but I know it's been affecting my motivation to create new artwork, which really sucks.  One casualty may be my "A Princess of Mars" Art Order challenge entry.  The image above is what I've gotten so far, and is likely about as far as I'll go with it.  I'm going to be in Batangas for the next few days relaxing on the beach with my family, so that cuts heavily into any more time that I could spend on this.  Even if I weren't going, I haven't exactly been jumping at the opportunity to work on this like my previous artworks, often I'll make a few desultory brush strokes and then walk of or surf the net for a bit.  It's a very unsettling feeling, and I'm hopeful my beach trip will help recharge me a bit.

Urban Sketching : Tagaytay and THouse

Last weekend Aissa and I stayed at the T-House boutique hotel in Tagaytay. The T-house has a special place in our hearts because it was the first place we ever spent a weekend together, and it was also the place that I proposed to her.  It's still a terrific hotel, though it's showing it's age.  The above is one of the little reading areas they've set up around the hotel for you to just sit down and relax in their beautiful gardens.  I was actually rained out and had to finish this sketch indoors.

This sketch was taken while in the Picnic Grove in Tagaytay.  It's not the most conducive place for sketching, what with the hordes of local tourists and hawkers selling you treats, ut we did manage to find a spot where I could sketch and Aissa could read.

These are really rough sketches, and I'm launching into this not really knowing a lot about watercolors and just basically going on instinct.  At the very least I know I'm going to need a much bigger brush to lay down the basic colors, since my #2 brush is just way too small, even for these tiny sketches.  We're going to be at a beach resort next week for 3 days, so I'm looking to purchase or borrow some watercolor books so I can study them while I'm there.

Watercolor Salamander

I was commissioned to draw a D&D salamander for a client recently.  He requested it be done in black and white but since I'd been wanting to experiment with watercolor I played around with the image after submitting the B&W piece.  This is me just attampting to do mixed medi on my own, so I made a lot of mistakes that can't be fixed with ctrl+z.  For one thing, I'd forgotten to keep the areas I wanted to highlight free of color.  I didn't have any white watercolor on me at the time but maybe when I find some I can experiment with putting in some highlights.

Animahenasyon 2011

Animahenasyon is the biggest local animation conference in the Philippines, and has been going strong for the past 5 years.  This year's event brings quite a few interesting talks for anyone interested in entering the animation industry.  I must admit I don't know all of the people who will be speaking at this year's conference, but there will be speakers from countries like Japan (Jun Awazu) and companies like Cartoon Network ( Silas Hickey ).  The talk I'm most interested in attending is the one by Caravan Studio, since they create concept art and CCG art, which are the things that I'd like to eventually be doing in the future.  Unfortunately it turns out they'll be speaking at about the same time that my sister's family and I will be at the beach (She's visiting fro the US and I'm seeing my niece and nephew for the first time).  It's a shame, but I'm sure there'll be even better speakers next year.

To get more info about Animahenasyon you can check out their website or download this pdf.