Dr. Sketchy #11

Again, Xu Hui

I've talked about her many times before. The way I feel used after a session with her. During break, she'll walk up to my easel, nod, sometime smile and simply walk away. She speak moslty mandarin, and I'm not really able to converse with her. So I don't really know what's on her mind when she see render of her thru my eyes. She might actually learn more about me than herself. I'm the one being really naked there. My sight stop at her skin, she must see far beyond mine. For this session I used Red Cadmium &  Phtalo Blue. I really like this combination and the range of grey in-between.

Cloudy Sunday by the pool

I don't know how to name this entry.

Thursday afternoon, the sun was playing hide and seek with me. I wanted to go out but a menacing cloud was hovering constantly. Stubborn as usual, I went out and took a cab. Apparently, the cloud was just above my condo, the rest of Singapore was bright and shiny. I sat down near Arab Street, ordered a lemonade, and start painting furiously. After an hour and 2 glasses, I wasn't happy at all with the result. I finished it the next morning, darkening and cooling the shadowed area. I also added some figures, they could have been done better.

This one was inspired by a photo I saw on fffffffound. It was a CCTV camera, with a big square on top of it, with two holes. The picture lingered in my mind for days... so I put down my version of CCTV Robot.

1938 -Progress

I like the progress I did with this project, I'm getting looser, unlike the previous one I showed. I really wanna keep the properties of the watercolors. Fresh, spontaneous, suggesting rather than depicting. I added Phtalo blue in my palette. Ultramarine wasn't enough, too warm. It needed a cold blue.

Char Dev #4

Few research today on this project, I find it too stiff and not fluid enough. I will try something more misty, blurred and moody.

Practice, practice and pratice.

To train my ability to see clearly and also pigments mixture reflexes, I bought few blocks, painted them with poster colors. I put them in different lighting situation and try to reproduce them. I am ashamed to say that my actual difficulty was to draw those cube solidly. They always end up being skewed, different size, or floating around. I really like the exercices, the simplicity of it make mistakes much more visible. Another good point is you dont spent too much time drawing, but more time is spent focusing on colors and mixing them. I went back to the store to get donut, cones and cylinder, I will paint them with secondary colors.

Happy Chinese New Year

Happy Chinese New Year! I used to hate the process of digital painting, the total opposite of watercolors. The safety net of unlimited undo render me simply unable to progress. Deleting, and redoing, to arrive at my starting point, a blank file. But lately I gave it a more serious try, there is so many possibilities.

Anyway, I'll make this new year mine. Sorry for being egocentric here, but 2010 for me is a do or die kind of thing. I have a burning passion for where I wanna go. It will happen this year. We can call this a a serious commitment, a pledge. I crawled, I walked, I'm running... it's time to jump and soar.

Zhao Li with Ink

It was good to see her again, simply yet gracious, she posed with ease. At time candid. I hesitated to go in with colors or just black. I haven't done pure value study in a while so the question was, why not?

After the 1 minute pose warming session, we did 15min studies. There was few uninspiring poses from my point of view, I just did some hands\feets studies.

Marlene Inspired

Still in my mood for Hooks and McGinnis, I tried to reproduce a Marlene Dietrich b&w photo. I didnt try to go for the likeness. Gotta find another cheesy title for this one. For my next exercise I should try to tell a story within the frame.

Pulpish Mae West

I always been attracted to old master from the impressionist era, but i'm getting more and more attracted to the american illustrators of the 40's to 60's. Like Robert McGinnis or Mitchell Hooks. They were giants in the business of mystery books. I wouldnt be surprised if Sienkewicz or Ashley Wood were both inspired by these two. Especially Hooks, with his more graphic style. So I was fooling around in my studio. Nujabes was playing loud, and I decided to try something in that genre. I used a black and white photo of Mae West as reference.Now i need a bold super long cheesy title, like... "Don't wait for me, i'll be dead by then." or "Kiss me twice then die."

Session with Rachel

This session started quite hard, but in the end I manage to do some. Near the end of the session, I realize actually that I was bored only trying to draw the model, and I suddenly got excited when I choose to include the background in the process, I should've started this long time ago.