Omg… I spent so long readjusting this image and I still really want to fix it up. But I also need to leave it alone because I think I’ve reedited it too many times, and there is this other idea I need to get working on for a NEW LAYOUT for this site!! I know I’ve said that since the start of this year but I seriously want to get something started. I think this next layout may take a while though – I have a pretty awesome idea for the layout, I just need to draw the graphics!

Anyway, for this drawing I spent ages trying to figure out how to do this. Because it’s a combination of cloudy clouds and straight edge vectors, it was really hard to seamlessly weave in both elements. The depth in this is a bit off I know, but hey it just adds to the cartoony, illustrative feel of it like the rest of the stuff I do ;D

The idea behind this is that instead of hoisting flags up everywhere on conquered land, there are growing flagpoles and unfurled hearts and other metaphorical cutesy stuffs :D:D You have no idea how much I recoloured the sky either. And you’d think that would be the easiest thing to do… =_=

Anyhow, back to the massive number of projects I have to start… It just never ends!

I need to learn how to use Photoshop and my tablet somehow. So, to practice, I used an idea from my 365 project to create Astronomical Cotton Candy B)

Well, the idea is that the cotton candy is actually clouds with planets orbiting around them… I know the orbs don’t really look like planets, more like glass marbles LOL, but oh well. I kinda like it like that anyway.

Progress shots to come soon… Once Photoshop finally finishes saving everything… ~_~

You might remember an illustration I did a while back for the shit blog. Well I found another illustration I could clean up and here it is.

Yep more cloudy clouds. And more smokey smoke. The idea behind this is that the dinosaur wanted to go forward in time but the time machine malfunctioned, and now he is at the ‘beginning of time’.

So I drew this literally years ago – I was going through my old drawings and found it. Then I found this horrific illustration I did 1-2 years ago, in the second picture.

I decided to clean it up a bit so after a lot of line adjusting and deleting, I came up with this new illustration which I’m still not 100% happy with:

I like how the flowers turned out though. I just had so much trouble picking the right background colour!! Should it be lighter? Darker? Should I get rid of the blue veins? I dont really know at the moment x__x I realise this is not exactly as ‘cute’ as my other drawings, maybe that’s why I’m having so much trouble LOL.

Progress shots below.

Oh my God. You would not believe how much time I spent messing around with this. You might have noticed that I’ve moved to using Photoshop to create ‘clouds’. This is because I have found that using vector clouds with shading doesn’t really sit well with me… It just looked… Weird. I wanted to create a soft dreamy feel, while maintaining the clean lines of the vectors so I drew the clouds in Photoshop instead, and cleaned up the rest of the colour a bit.

Ehh, there are a few things I could probably still mess around with on this, ESPECIALLY the clouds but right now I think I’ve done enough manipulation on this for a month at least! I really wasn’t that happy with the waterfall either… Sigh. Photoshop has done some weird things to me.

So if you’ve been following this blog for a while, you might recognise the illustration above. Well, I was going through all my old drawings today as I decided to have a bit of a cleanout of my files… Yeah, that didn’t actually go so well (let’s just say I’ll leave that for another day…).

Instead, I got distracted by making this illustration better. I mean, who uses myriad for copyright watermarks anyway?

So I whipped out Photoshop and voila – end result below.

Hope you like it, there will be an original drawing soon… I hope.

(AND YES, I KNOW I STILL NEED TO DO A EUROPE BLOG. It is coming… soon) Gosh I’m a horrible blogger.

And so here we have another drawing! I think my goal of updating this website once a week is going pretty well so far. As you might know I like drawing deserts and vast landscapes. I was really tempted to draw a penguin in this, but I decided that was just too cliché for me. In case you didn’t already realise, the flying turtles were supposed to be a pun on turtle doves. Now that I look at it, they don’t really very turtle dov-ey, but when I was in the middle of doing this, I may have decieded to focus more on flying turtles than turtle doves… if you know what I mean.

I think the colours in this were kind of hard for me to get around, mainly because I had so many elements with different colour schemes. Picking colours for the sky was the worst – at one point it looked like the molten lava of Mt Doom. I think the 360 project I did last year was good in the sense that it made me think of so many ideas – some good, some horrible *cough* smores *cough* but man it feels so good to just be able to work on something without the time constraints.

I don’t know about other people, but sometimes I’ll just draw a block or background and stop and plan out what to draw. This would probably be left on my screen for a few days while I’d just look at it and think what to layer on. Weird process, but I think I just like taking my time with illustrating like this. I don’t think I could ever be one of those people who do speed drawings in two hours.

That said, I’m doing this sketchbook project for Propel Youth Arts, kinda like the huge Sketchbook Project in NY but on a smaller scale. Only thing is, we have to submit the books by the 11th of April. It’s already the 24th of March and I only got the sketchbook yesterday  Yeah……………… wonder what other people are going to do. At least the book is really tiny!!! Oh, this is also the first time I have tried using moleskine paper – I always just thought paper was paper, but this is so much smoother to use pens and stuff on. Maybe it’s a psychological thing. 

I feel really bad for abandoning this blog for so long, I drew this picture to make up for some of the time I spent away 

As you can tell I’ve been spending more time messing around in Photoshop with the colours and stuff, and I honestly don’t know why I didn’t do this sooner because colouring in Photoshop is AMAZING. Seriously. Here’s a few graphics showing the major difference between Illustrator and Photoshop:

You can probably tell which program I’m using in each panel. Look at the colours. The DETAILS. The only thing that annoys me about raster images is that you have to make them as big as possible to make them flexible for a variety of formats. Kind of like how filmographers have to record everything in super high quality definition.

I love the vector graphic look though so I tried to stay true to the line work as close as possible. Hence the reason why I included the clouds in its line-iest form. I dunno, I just think it’s part of my style. Either that or I just subconsciously won’t shake the vector lines any time soon.

I originally intended for this drawing to be a background for a notebook. Not that I’m publishing anytime soon, but I bought this adorable notebook from Kinokuniya the last time I went to Singapore, and felt inspired to do something a bit similar. On a sidenote, GOD I LOVE KINOKUNIYA. Not only do they have every book imaginable, their Japanese stationery section is just incredible. What I’m trying to say is, Smiggle in Australia is the equivalent to Crayola in Japan. Yep, boring. Why wouldn’t you get a flocked tiger pencil to do your homework in? Why use a boring white eraser when you can get a chocolate scented popsicle eraser complete with its own popsicle shaped plastic case?

I bought 3 of these notebooks:

I gave one to my friend. I have left my other two in pristine condition – one at work and one at home. I just can’t bear to write all over the pretty pages.

I love these style of notebooks though and I’m sure if there was a Kinokuniya in Perth I’d have so much more asian style notebooks. Ah well. Taking these pictures remind me – I need to get a new card reader >_> And a place to take prettier photos!

Hope you like my drawing, more soon 8) (I haven’t forgotten the Europe update!)

I know I promised weekly updates – here is the start of a few of them. I’ve been messing around with textures and colours with illustrations and I like the effects so far. I’m kind of a Photoshop newb when it comes to colours though so I’m just feeling my way round. One of the most annoying things about Illustrator is it’s colour handling – it really really annoys me when it renders gradients as shaded blocks of colour instead of a smooth blend like in Photoshop. I love how easy it is to use and I love vector graphics, but the gradients and issues saving files with LINES is really irritating though. Hence the reason why I am starting to colour my drawings in Photoshop.

Of course, there’s always room to improve – there are still bits which I think could use fixing, but I really just want to get started on something new right now. Apart from the pixley ‘effect’ I’m quite happy with the way this turned out, though trees are so annoying to draw! If you have any suggestions or comments, I’d love to hear them.

I used Illustrator and Photoshop to create this, mainly because I came across this Aurora tutorial earlier and wanted to try do it. Obviously it kinda failed… but oh well. I hand drew everything and used a lot of little tricks in Illustrator to cut back time making this, which I might show you guys some time down the track. I think I need to work on making the grass more grass-ey….but grass was always something difficult for me. At least I didn’t go the usual shortcut route and use the ‘roughen’ filter in Illustrator right?