The two good friends

Once more I’m at my macbook slaving away with my precious Wacom Bamboo and Corel Painter Essentials 4. A bit of a side note, but Corel Painter Essentials 4 has been acting up since I upgraded to Snow Leopard. Every time I switch to other applications and then switch back, I’d lose the “choose media” pull-out tab, which means I’d be stuck with the last media I was using (pencil, round watercolor brush, chalk etc). To get that tab back I have to quit and relaunch the app, gah!

This time the original drawing I used was the little poster that came with All Color But The Black. As you can see the original has all 13 squad Vice Captains.

I picked out the two good friends who happen to be at the very front in the poster, Hisagi Shuuhei and Kira Izuru.

The hardest part about drawing Shuuhei was to make him look badass enough while looking calm at the same time. Kira, on the other hand, the most difficult part about drawing him was his arms! Since I didn’t have enough space to draw him in his original pose (plus it looked really confusing and people might mistake Kira’s hand as Shuuhei’s), I tried various different hand poses before deciding not to draw his hands at all. Everytime I drew his hands they either look unnatural or looked too cluttered along with Shuuhei’s hand and sword.

I’ll hopefully have time to color this over the weekend… UPDATE: Well, I did finish coloring this on Saturday evening, so I decided to replace the sketch with the colored version in this post.

Happy moment

OK call me a narcissist, but I feel really happy when people praise or compliment me. So I’m really happy now because my drawing of Byakuya and Renji is listed in the top-rated fan art section on Bleachexile.com!

I don’t know how long this will last, so I immediately took a screenshot of the “moment of glory” while it lasted. And, yes, I know it’s lame, but my Bleachexile user name is tonistark. :p

Renji and Byakuya

I’ve been working on this Renji and Byakuya drawing for a few days now. For some reason it was much harder to draw this, and it took me much, much longer to sketch and color this, compared to the Ichigo and Rukia drawing. I suspect it was because I set the line width to be too thin in Corel Painter Essentials 4, so I ended up drawing more details.

This is the original art in All Color But The Black that I referred to. I took Renji from the right and Byakuya from the left and combined them to have Renji overlap Byakuya.

Here’s the end result:

 

The hardest part to draw was Renji’s left palm. It took me more than 5 minutes to get that palm right. After messing up the palm a few times, I ended up referring to my own left palm instead. The hardest part to color, on the other hand, were Renji’s shinigami clothes and Byakuya’s right sleeve. I didn’t want to color them the same way the original art was, so I colored it according to my own imagination. Renji’s back came out lighter than I would’ve liked, but it took me a loooong time to put in all that detail, so I left it at that. :p

Drawing this had been really fun! My next project will be Shuuhei and Kira/Renji…I’m still deciding if I should draw Renji again or try Kira. I have a feeling Kira’s hair is going to be a bitch to draw, so I’m hesitating…

Listen to SunSet Swish

I do enjoy listening to music, be it instrumental pieces or songs. I tend to not remember what I listen to, however. I call myself a Celine Dion fan, but I can hardly list a handful of her songs by name even though I can recognize them when I hear them. It’s the same, sadly, for my other favorites like Jay Chou, Elton John, Westlife, etc. Heck, I don’t even know the names of the guys in Westlife. Another bad habit of mine is not remembering lyrics, no matter what language the song is in. I usually don’t pay attention to the lyrics unless it’s very unusual, so it’s typical for me to listen to a bunch of songs without knowing what the lyrics meant.

So guess what, I’ve been enjoying Japanese songs lately even though I have no clue what the songs are about. Of course I was influenced by the anime that I’ve been watching lately. Bleach, for example, has a great collection of opening and ending theme songs. Asterisk, by Orange Range, is one of my first favorites, and is currently being used my iPhone ringtone. Another one that I began to like a lot recently, is Sakurabito, by SunSet Swish. I liked the song so much that I started looking for other songs by SunSet Swish, and came across this awesome playlist on imeem.com. It has 38 songs by SunSet Swish, with songs ranging from their first album Anata no Machi de Aimashou to various singles. If you have time, do check them out. Times like that makes me wish that I know the Japanese language, sigh.

2012…do you believe?

Do you believe that the Mayans saw the end of the world coming? Do you believe that the end of the world will happen in your lifetime? No matter what you believe, 2012 is a must-see in 2009!

I caught it over the weekend, and I have to say…I was very entertained throughout the movie. There was not one dull moment, from start to the end. Storyline-wise, of course it’s over the top and it’s ridiculously unrealistic, but hey, disaster film fans like me generally don’t really give a shit about realism. What I really liked about this movie was the epic computer graphics along with pulse-racing suspense as the main characters dodge one disaster after another. Statistically their luck don’t make sense, but the movie successfully convinced me to root for them all the way.

Acting-wise, John Cusack was his usual great self of course. The two children were darlings, especially the little girl. Danny Glover as the US president was dignified and heroic till the last moment. HOWEVER, I do have one major gripe. It seemed that the whole purpose of the character named Gordon being in the movie was simply to provide transportation for Cusack’s family. Gordon is the plastic surgeon-boyfriend of Cusack’s ex-wife. He flew a couple of planes like a seasoned fighter pilot despite only having had a few lessons and what, an hour of practice or something. In the end, he died a most painful death and it only took a whole 2 minutes for his girlfriend to completely forget about him and get back together with Cusack’s character. How romantic. It also struck me as odd that it took only 27 days for the two other main characters, Dr. Heinsley and the first daughter, to finish grieving (wait, did they even grieve at all?) the deaths of their fathers and start flirting.

All in all, despite my gripes, I still think 2012 was a great movie. Probably one of the best movies I’ve seen in 2009, definitely worth the $10.75 I spent at AMC.

Next, I’m looking forward to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson!

Digital Chinese Calligraphy

After coloring Ichigo and Rukia, I thought, “Hmm…I wonder if I can write Chinese Calligraphy with my Bamboo…?” So I tried with my Chinese name:

Sure feels weird, and doesn’t look like it was written with Chinese ink, but here it is…digital Chinese calligraphy!

Bleach…with color

I felt extra lazy today…originally today was supposed to be spent cleaning the apartment, but instead I spent a lot of time just moping around, doing laundry, napping, whining about having to clean the apartment etc more than actually cleaning the apartment.

But after dinner I had the mood to do some drawing/coloring, so I decided to color the sketch of Ichigo and Rukia that I drew last week. And here’s the end result:

There’s something about Rukia’s eyes that I just couldn’t get right. I tried and tried, made modifications again and again, and still I felt like something is amiss. I just can’t put my finger on what’s wrong, but anyhow, this was the best I could do with this drawing today.

Bleach

Anyone who has talked to me in the past couple of months probably knows that I’m hopelessly addicted to manga lately, especially to Tite Kubo’s Bleach.

The thing that attracts me to Bleach, besides the awesome sword fights, is Tite Kubo’s drawing style. I’m really really impressed by how he is able to portray emotions on his characters’ faces and body gestures/poses. He apparently also likes fashion, because he drew a lot of his characters in different types of clothes (that don’t appear in the actual manga) that he “designed” himself.

Some examples (taken from the Bleach art book, All Color But The Black):

Since I enjoyed looking at his drawings so much, I decided to draw based on one of his drawings. Here’s my attempt using my Wacom Bamboo and Corel Painter Essentials 4:

Looking at the two drawings side-by-side, they look very different, but I’m pretty happy with it, LOL! When I have more time and the mood for it, I want to color my sketch. Will update when that happens!

Finally got my gmail account back!

Hopefully I won’t end up jinxing myself by celebrating this on my blog. On Sept 22, I finally got back my gmail account thanks to someone on the gmail team. I know security is strict and there’s reason why they make it super hard for people to “claim” that they own an account, but the process I went through since losing my account on Sept 1 had been ridiculous.

But anyhow, I’m thankful that I got my account back. One of the first things I did was to back up my emails using an email client so that if the account ever decides to take a walk again, at least I would still have all my old emails with me. Even though I have my account back now, I know I will never trust gmail 100% ever again.

Final Destination 3D

The thing I find ironic about the Final Destination movies is, well, it’s never final. When will movie producers learn that they shouldn’t take a good movie and make a freaking series out of it? First they did it with Jurassic Park, then the Matrix, Indiana Jones, Saw…the list goes on.

When I saw the first Final Destination movie, I thought it was the most awesome thriller ever. At the time there weren’t as many sick gore movies as there are now…it was the pre-Saw, pre-Hostel era, so it wasn’t often you get to see people’s head abruptly chopped off half way through a conversation. Then the second and third FD movies came out and they were bleh.

So when I learned that a fourth one came out, it was the last thing on my mind to go see it. But it had a selling point. Seeing people killed in 3D? Even Beng wanted to see it!

Rest in pieces

I’ve never seen an actual movie in 3D…not counting the ones in Disneyland and Universal Studios. I actually didn’t have high expectation regarding the picture quality because I always had this preconception about 3D images being rather blur and grainy, I’m not quite sure why. Maybe it’s the lousy 3D glasses provided at theme parks.

Anyway, Final Destination 3D actually was pretty entertaining! I lost count of the times I flinched when random sharp things like wooden sticks, concrete pieces, and nails burst from the screen and appeared to be flying towards me. 3D-experience-wise, it was great, and added a whole new dimension (duh) to a horror movie.

The storyline was pretty expected…every FD movie follows a template, so no surprises there. It sure made me really miss the first Final Destination movie though. In the first one, there were so many elements going on at the same time that you can never be sure how the character is going to die (the kettle? the knife? the train??) until he/she finally died. Final Destination 3D, however, was more to the point. Everything that happened simply contributed to a single cause of death. It was, how should I say it…well, boring in that sense.

But I have to say, watching something like this in 3D was an interesting experience.