Unfinished Lenten Project

Now that Easter’s over, I’ve decided to currently suspend my personal project for the past Lent where I attempted to draw all the Stations of the Cross as a form of penance. That’s eight out of the fourteen Stations I’ve finished pencilling so far. I had intended to add in a bit of colouring and/or shading in Painter or Photoshop after I scanned the drawings on to my PC. Instead, I’ll just leave things where they are now and add the finishing touches to the eight drawings and complete the remaining Stations next Lent.

Meantime, you can look at what I’ve finished pencilling so far. Note that these are basically the basic drawings for the stations, lacking any additional effects (such as additional blood) which I intend to add later. Click on the thumbnails to zoom in.

Station 1 – Jesus Is Condemned to Death

Station 2 – Jesus Carries His Cross

Station 3 – Jesus Falls the First Time

Station 4 – Jesus Meets His Blessed Mother

Station 5 – Simon of Cyrene Helps Jesus Carry His Cross

Station 6 – Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus

Station 7 – Jesus Falls the Second Time

Station 13 – Jesus Is Taken Down From the Cross

Meanwhile, I can go back to drawing other things. Raquel suggested I draw more fairy tale images and/or Filipino myth images. I’ll probably be doing those in the coming weeks. That is, if I don’t get distracted by my other hobbies.

Christmas greeting cards

In my earlier post [Vintage Christmas art contest], I mentioned that the artwork I made which depicted a Christmasy living room scene was for two things. One is for the contest, which I already mentioned. The second reason, which was actually the main reason for my drawing the artwork was to use it as covers for our home-made greeting cards.

I didn’t want to mention this in the blog earlier because I wanted there to be time for some of the actual greeting cards we sent out to reach the intended recepients first before they learn about it from my blog. Since some of our friends have confirmed that they have already received our cards, it is probably safe to post about it now.

I haven’t made my own greeting card since I was in elementary school when the teachers forced us to make them for our homeroom classes. Raquel and I figured that making one instead of buying one would make our greeting card more personalised and heart-felt. Since, I can draw a thing or two, I decided to give it a go.

Here is a photo of the cards as taken by Raquel:

Click on photo to zoom

Art and printed text was by me. Raquel did the handwritten greetings, the folding, the home-made envelopes (couldn’t find ones that would fit our cards anywhere) and the cut-out snowflakes you see in the photo.

Geeky Pursuits

I’ve finally finished my sketch submission for my new company’s annual art contest. This year’s theme is “Passion is…?” so I drew up something filled with characters and things related to my geeky hobbies.

Geeky Pursuits

Click here to Enlarge

We were also required to describe our work in 25 words or less and here is the best I can come up with:

“Being passionate about several geeky pursuits such as technology, speculative fiction, computer games and comics meant that each one is constantly vying for my attention.”

A submission can be a sketch, a sculpture, a painting or a photograph. Sketching is what I feel I do best so I went with that. I’m just hoping that nobody else has passed anything (or at least nothing better than mine) to increase my chances of winning the first prize, an 80Gb iPod. The winner will be announced on October 12 so that’s a month of anxious waiting. Wish me luck.

More Sketching in the Train

I’ve been doing some more quick sketching while on the train to work. I’m not sure if these are any better than the ones I previously posted but here they are anyway. The first three were sketches of actual people on board the train.

Meanwhile, the violinist sketch isn’t a sketch of an actual person. Although, I still sketched that whilst in the train. She is Faith, the lead character in a short comic story I’m developing for an anthology (I know I kept on mentioning this in past posts already). I should draw more of this character as the second deadline for the comics is already drawing near (no pun intended).

As for this last one, well, it’s not exactly a sketch nor is it drawn inside the train. But, I don’t want to add a whole new blog post just for it so I just included it below. It’s a cave scene I used for the first panel of the latest page in my fantasy webcomics serial – Lovarian Adventures. The heroes are trapped in the cave and this narrow cavernous passage way may be their only way out.

I’m Sketching in the Train

I admit that I’m not the kind of person who sketches real-life stuff a lot. I’m more of a cartoonist than a fine-artist. I occassionally draw stuff from the real world though when I don’t have a camera and I needed it for reference in future comic projects. Anyway, I have this small A6-sized sketch pad with me always so that I can sketch anytime I feel like it.

I’ve been doing a lot of sketching while on the train ride to or from work. But just for kicks, I tried drawing the people around me inside the train. The first person I tried was a (possibly Asian) lady two seats away to the left of me reading a newspaper. She was pretty still so I whipped out my mechanical pencil and started sketching. The result is the thumbnail on the right. Click it for a larger view.

I wasn’t too satisfied with the first try so I looked around for somebody else to sketch. One seat in front of me was an old lady doing some crossword puzzles, if I recall correctly. Like the other lady, she was pretty still, too. Probably too intent on the crossword puzzles. I had to rubber neck a bit because the person in front of me kept blocking my view of the old lady. The result is the thumbnail on the left. Click it for a larger view.

All the time, I was just afraid that I’d get caught. I know that what I’m doing isn’t bad but people may not take too nicely to being stared at. Then there’s this old bloke sitting across the aisle on my left that might be looking at what I’m doing. I was also afraid he’d dob me in.

Anyway, when I got home, I also added some colour to the old lady sketch using Photoshop 7. I usually use Painter for colouring nowadays but I decided to try Photoshop this time after reading about another way to utilise the brush tools on the Internet. The result is the thumbnail on the right. Click it for a larger view.

There you go. Some sketches. I should sketch outdoors more often. Theses sketches gave me a different kind of satisfaction after I finished sketching the subjects.

Quick Sketch of Me

The train ride from the city to our place takes roughly 48 minutes. In that span of time, I do one or a combination of the following things: I sleep (usually from Werribee to the city in the mornings), I read the newspaper (the free variety — as in MX), I read a book, I listen to music or podcasts or I draw.

On the ride home the other last night, I was in the mood to draw. I started with the usual character designs I needed for the lead character, Faith, in my comics submission to the graphic anthology project I’m a part of. Then, I thought that maybe I needed a new avatar for the forums and blogs I frequent. So, I started sketching a cartoonish version of myself. And that means, it didn’t really look exactly like me and I had no intention of making it an accurate depiction of my physical appearance.

The end sketch was a bit rough. Now I wished I polished it up a bit more before scanning it in the PC. Anyway, I added a bit of colour to it using Painter and the thumbnail you see with this post is the end result. I’ll need to either fix this up or just draw another one — a better one.

Well, that’s it. I’m thinking of posting more of my sketches here on the blog on a more regular basis now that I’m drawing more often again.

The Ponju Comics Anthology Project

The people of the Ponju “Piggy Farm” online community of webcomic artists, writers and fans (of which I’m a member) has recently started a comic book anthology project. The end product is a book the size of most American graphic novels you’d see in Borders nowadays, but maybe thicker. Instead of one long comic book story, it’ll contain a collection of short comics each created by a different team of people who are members of the community. That includes me.

For the past few days, I was heavily preoccupied with my contribution to the project: a short comic about a violinist busker who lives in the Victorian-era Melbourne. Well, that’s the plan, at least. I’m still working out the details. Nothing is set in stone yet so the setting and the way the story flows might still change.

Now, I don’t want to spoil the story for you so I wouldn’t be saying anymore about the story. I can show you some of the sketch studies I’ve been doing though (click thumbnails to view the larger image):

Violin Studies
I don’t own a violin and I’ve never played a violin. So, I had to spend quite some time looking for violin and violinist photo references. At first, I had a hard time drawing a decent looking violin. Eventually, I figured out a technique to help me draw a passable violin from any angle easily. By passable, I mean that the violin wouldn’t look wrong even in the eyes of somebody who is not a violinist.

I’ve shown this sketch to friends of mine who play the violin and they said that, apart from the violin being a bit on the small side, it looks quite believable as a violin. But, to get some more knowledge about violins, I visited the local music shop to hold it my hands and get a feel for it. And now, I’ve also been listening to a lot of violin and fiddle music.

Dress Studies
I’ve numbered the images so that I can reference them easily here. Okay, #1 shows what the heroine of the story will look like. It’s not the final design but it’ll be something like that. #3 (yes, #3, since I drew that first) is my first try at drawing a dress for her. It wasn’t based off any reference material I have so it’s historically inaccurate. I’ve just thrown things in there that I like such as the low neckline, the outer corset and the leather arm braces. But, no, I’m not going with this design, even though my brother loves this one.

#2 was the next design I came up with based on some old photos in the books I have in my collection. I wasn’t too happy with it so I continued to look for other dresses to base the design from. #5 (yeah, I drew this before #4) was based off actual Victorian-era photos but it looks so stiff. So, “un-fun”. Like a strict teacher’s uniform, somebody told me.

That leaves design #4 which I’m actually favouring for the final dress design. This dress was based on clothes worn in towns around Melbourne during the 1800s so it should be appropriate for the ear and setting. I’m thinking of embellishing it some more with ribbons or scarves so that when she dances, there’d be something that I can draw the swishes around her to imply motion.

Anyway, this is why I haven’t been able to blog a lot lately.

Lili Unleashed

Here is a digital drawing of Lili, a sorceress-in-training from my fantasy webcomic series Lovarian Adventures. She’s flying from above the trees while using the enchanted wand passed on to her by her father, Desideratus — the most powerful sorcerer in Lovaria (according to him).

This was drawn for the cover page of chapter 7 of my series. I didn’t ordinarilly drew “cover pages” as I didn’t think my work would eventually published anyway. Still, when I moved the comics hosting to a new host, I thought that covers for each chapter to separate two different chapters while “flipping” through the pages on the system.

Jesus Carries His Cross

Last Easter season, I thought I could draw all 12 Stations of the Cross as part of my panata for Lent but couldn’t. I was only able to draw the first station of the cross: Jesus is Condemned to Death.

Well, although it’s a year later, here is the second station of the cross: Jesus Carries His Cross.

I never thought I’d draw anything at all for the Easter season. I just picked up my tablet stylus and started doodling and decided to draw the second station for kicks. Then it came to me that it was actually Holy Week again. Anyway, since I haven’t drawn anything nice for some time now, I was hoping I still know how to draw. Well, it’s finished now. Hope you like it.

Trick or Treat

It’s Halloween and one thing Raquel and I didn’t expect to see is a couple of kids knocking at the door yelling “trick or treat!” It’s probably our first ever experience of trick or treating kids. The two of them were very cute in their black witch customes. I wanted to take a picture of them but we don’t want to seem too weird so we skipped that idea.

Fortunately, we have lots of chocolate in the cupboard to give them. I wouldn’t want to find out if they’ll take the “trick” part of the threat seriously.

Anyway, since it’s Halloween, I drew something real quick for the occassion: a drawing of a Nuno sa Punso. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it is a small Philippine mythological spirit that lives in ant hills (punso) with magical powers. They typically keep to themselves unless disturbed. When angered, the offending person will likely be cursed by the Nuno in which the only cure is to visit your friendly neighborhood albularyo (witch doctor/shaman). For more info, go to the Wikipedia Nuno entry.

Click on the thumbnail to see bigger picture. In the meantime, Happy Halloween!