Artwork/Drawings

2016

Description	Art
So almost a year has passed by and I actually did not progress on any of my artwork. Granted that I've been travelling to a few places for work and fun but regardless, this year has been insanely busy. I wasn't able to make up for any of the lost time but here's my (probably) only contribution to my artwork section for this year. I got this from Pinterest. I love browsing through people's work and I stumbled upon this one. Very blue-ish and moody but still bright. In comparison, I think this looks like a pretty good improvement. Let's see if I can squeeze in another one before this year ends!

2015

Description	Art
This one was inspired by one of the scenes in Samurai Champloo (episode 17) to be exact (I really liked the ending song too, btw). I could not find this image online so I did a print screen from my laptop. The quality of the picture was not very clear but I did what I can to decipher the colors. Of course, these drawings will hardly be the carbon copy of the original so this is obviously my version. The original picture was darker and the colors were brighter. In general, the colors I chose were a bit pale but I think the actual drawing looks better than what I've put up here. Almost the entire picture was freehand, meaning there were almost no outlines except maybe where the trees should be. Other than that, I just eye-balled the position of the colors and how they change from one to the other.
A lot of people really liked this one. I guess I'm getting good at working with flora. I found defining the petals very difficult to do and this took me the longest to make out. I have to make sure that there's a dark and light contrast to them. There's lots that can be made to improve this but for now, I'm quite satisfied.
Here's another one for the books. This is my first drawing of a live object. I usually pick something without a face. I'm still working on blending and shading, so I'm taking it one step at a time. The best and worst for me was shading the leaves. I really didn't like the color combination that I chose but I think it turned out pretty well. The pond itself need some work, though. I'm still considering re-doing it or adding more layers.
These two did not take me long to do. To be honest, the real drawing looks better than the picture here. In the real drawing, you can really see the outlines and the detail. I am quite proud of this one. The conch took me longer to do compared to the blue shell. The conch is from a group of sea shells and I just picked the biggest one out of the bunch. The most difficult part I have to say was the inside of the shell. I had to analyse what color to use, like a red or an orange or maybe something in between. Also, the choice of using gray in between the layers was also a difficult choice to make. In the end, I had to re-shade and layer the sides of the conch in purple. That being said, I really enjoyed this one. The blue shell, though, is a very different approach to the conch. The shell is actually from an oil painting and the sand was supposed to have a really reddish tinge. I chose not to draw the entire painting and just settle on this one. The result was supposed to be whimsical than realistic.
Here's a very special one. I've been on an anime craze recently. I watched a lot of anime over the past few weeks, I think I have lost count. My most recent favorite from all the anime that I've been watching is called Ouran High School Host Club. This clock tower is part of the campus and is shown throughout the series. This particular view appeared on the second episode during the cherry blossom season. What attracted me most is definitely the colors and the fact that it was dotted with cherry blossoms. This one took me the longest to practice and to color. How long you ask? Close to 8 hours from start to finish. I had to put on several layers of blue and pink. I also practiced on drawing the cherry blossoms to not make them look too cartoon-y.
So out of what I have created so far, this one is everyone's favorite. This took me a while to shade each and every one of the petals. The combination of the orange, yellow and reds was a real treat for me. I never thought that it would work out that well. The initial reaction I got was "Wow". I think that is saying a lot considering the amount of practice that I've done to date. The most tedious part was definitely all those little dots inside the sunflower. It took me over 30 minutes just doing them one by one. My sister said that the top flowers were her favorite, especially the one on the right.
If you can't guess what this is, then I'll tell you. It's an air balloon. Imagine that you're looking at it from the ground and it is just on top of you. Yup! Now, you can see it! I think half the people that I showed this to was not able to guess what it was, but I don't blame you :) I also made a few mistakes from this one such as the shading. Just so you know, I actually copied this from a real picture. So I had to be imaginative when it comes to the shading.
This one reminds me of the movie "Up", without the house naturally. The most difficult part of this is the overlapping balloons. I realised how bad I was at overlapping the yellow with the violet. I almost threw this one out when I thought that I made a huge mistake of using the wrong colors. I think after a few tries, it's still not too bad. I still like to try and use more colors in my drawings to learn more about shading and blending.
OK. So you might notice that I use quite a lot of food as samples and for practice. I really like the very colorful drawings and pictures. It wasn't intentionally meant to be just food related but I sort of gravitated towards these for practice. I really liked the icing on this one. If you'll notice, this picture is a bit off-center. The reason for that is that the original picture is supposed to have 3 cupcakes on top of each other. I just settled on drawing the top one.
This is officially my second attempt at coloring and shading. I copied this off a tutorial on YouTube of an apple. Granted I had to pause and rewind a lot of times because the tutorial was just too fast to catch up with. A lot improvements can be made of course - from the shape of the apple to the shadow. One thing that I found really amazing here was that the tutorial used some blue color into the apple. It was pretty neat and added another layer onto the object.
This is my very first attempt at drawing. The last time I did something like this (meaning hold a colored pencil in my hand) was maybe more than 15 years ago. I think mostly it was due to being busy and trying to build up my career and social life. That said, I also spent a lot of time in the kitchen cooking and baking. Now, I managed to find a new hobby and honestly, I am loving every minute of it. This one was actually taken from an anime series called Tokyo Ghoul. It was from the very first episode, when Ken was in the hospital and discovered that he couldn't eat. This bowl of miso soup was on his tray. As you can see, my copy was, well, quite terrible! The colors were not too good but still, I think it's not too bad for my very first attempt!