Goodbye & Hello

Did one last artwork before the year ends!:) Happy new year everyone have a great start ahead!

Christmas Card Illustration Process

As promised here's the process for this project. This was a design for the Christmas carolers thank you card. Here in the Philippines this is a tradition. Everyone young and old will jump from house to house singing, and the house owners if they like your singing will give you money in return. When I was a kid my siblings and I will get/create musical instruments like stringing bottle crowns together, creating drums from discarded milk cans, or if there really is no time, I just get a spoon & fork and bang them together! And that was the end of my singing career. :) Okay enough flashbacks.

SKETCH
I started with a very quick sketch (I did the sketch on the first paper I got my hands on, I can't find my sketchpads anywhere so the notebook it is! ) The sketch/doodle is very rough, just to get the layout. Next I transferred it on watercolor paper here I refined the line art.

sketch

COLOR
After the detailed sketch I started blocking out the colors, I used watercolor for the sky & tree and used the gouache for the rest. I wanted a colorful opaque style for this, more like a vector feel. Okay if you are looking at my sketch & my colored piece intently like your life depended on it (which I doubt), you will see that I removed an element in the background. What you didn't notice?! I decided to remove the kid & dad in the background so the user will focus on the carolers, KISS (keep it simple stupid). :)

DETAIL

After I blocked the colors I added the details, line art, which needs a lot of concentration... and not breathing... and tongue sticking out on my part.

FINAL ART

And after a couple of hours tadaaaa! I would like to present my present! (get it!) I hope you had a blessed Christmas!

The most wonderful time of the year!

I can't believe December is almost over! I only blogged twice this month! Got caught up with so much work which unfortunately I can't post yet :(. So I did this christmas card illustration instead. This took a while since i'm juggling my office work and our xmas party preparation. Christmas is just 2 days away and i'm sooo excited to spend it with my relatives. So glad to be able to do this illustration for the holidays. Merry Christmas everyone! Will post the step by step process hopefully this December. :)

Peek watercolor process

Here is my watercolor step by step process for making my latest artwork peek!
This was inspired by studio ghibli's The Borrower Arrietty.

 I really love this animated film... anyway back to business, I started this one out with a concept in my head and directly sketched it on the watercolor paper (I know this is not the advisable way to do it, I just got so excited that I decided to directly do it on the canvas). Then I added a warm yellow wash and started painting the leaves. I got carried away and forgot to take a photo of my initial process, sorry guys. My color palette was mostly warm greens, yellow and red because I want it to have a magical glowing feel.

 Next step I painted the cute little girl peeking out of the giant mushroom. The trick with watercolor is to do the coloring with very light tones first (to do this just add copious amounts of water) and add the dark tones little by little, since the magic of watercolor lies in its transparency. :)

After that I added the details, shadows and texture on the girl, leaves, flower & the mushroom. And then I was done. Hooray!

That's all there is to it. If you find this tutorial helpful please comment or share.

Angry Birds Digital Painting Tutorial

Okay this is my second lengthy tutorial you can check out my first tut here. I will show you my step by step process on how I did my angrybirds digital painting. This was exhibited last year on a group show. Well I thought why not create a tutorial about it. :)

1 TOOLS OF THE TRADE

So first things first below is a photo of my workstation (when it was clean!)
for digital art of course you need to a laptop/DESktop :)
I use a 13"macbook pro,
wacom intuos 4 (small) and
adobe photoshop CS5 / corel painter (this actually goes to preference)
lots of patience
good music background to get in the mood :)

2 SKETCHING
either i sketch on paper or sketch directly on the computer
for this one I directly sketched it in photoshop

3 UNDERPAINTING
I start with the value first, creating shadows where the light would fall and such. Removing color from this step helps a lot since it helps me focus on the shadows.
NOTE: For quick sketches/illustrations sometimes I remove this step or interchange step 3 & 4. (Maybe I will post a tut with the interchanged process next time.)

4 COLOR
When i'm happy with the value, then and only then will I add the colors.

5 DETAILS
Remember the saying "start with a broom & end with a needle" well this is true, I add the details last since they are the most taxing, but my main reason is the details get erased when I add them on first. Adding details depends on how realistic you want it to be.

So there you have it! Stitched them together :)

I hope you learned something from this tut. Drop a comment or share this if you do! :)

Cheers!

wordless wednesday 11.14.12

Old & new

Created these fun illustrated calling cards. It was a challenge getting my officemates character & quirks some more prominent than others. This is not the full set yet. (Whaaaa I still need to finish the rest.)

Mon the Monkey

Mon the Monkey is smart and has a big heart.
He is amazed with mazes and likes making faces.
He wears glasses and loves math problems.
But his favorite part is eating bananas! 

Okay the last part doesn't rhyme but I want to insert bananas in there!
Anyway I did this character for an educational game, created 2 other monkey versions of this one.

And here is the digital version of Mon, did a few tweaks on the final study.

Jonah Commish

Got a commish from a friend. Finished this fashion illustration project last month. This is Jonah Brocka our stylish senior copywriter at the agency! (everybody is stylish at the office, except maybe for me, haha) Anyway back to the artwork, this was done using watercolor on paper, my timeframe for this are a couple of days since I only get to do this on weekends. :(

Jonah's work station

Took a few before & after shots, I always do a light base color, very watery at this point, then I wait for it to dry, then added the darker shades using a fine brush. I added yellow and pinkish accent at the background to make it pop. :)

Final artwork

And here's the artwork with the handsome copywriter! :) 

Yay it's done! Comments and suggestions are very welcome, let me know what you think?! :)

Cheers!

Mermaid

Hello,

I'm back! Posting my entry for Illustration Friday (the theme is "water"). :) It's my first time to participate in IF. Just finished doing the final touches on the mermaid scales. Created the girl a few months ago, just didn't have the feel to finish it yet,  and then I saw the IF theme and voila! The girl became a mermaid! :) Really love the way it turned out, i've been itching to do a mermaid illustration for a while now!

Giffy the giraffe & Zenny the zebra :)

Hello just a quick post :) this is a character design for an educational game I did early this year. I used gouache and pen & ink, I remember doing the inking in a fastfood while waiting for my friend to finish eating! See I bring my sketchbook with me all the time so I don't get bored while waiting. :) Will post the rest of the animals soon. :)This is Giffy & Zenny, watch out for the rest of the gang!

Listen to the Silence Exhibit

Was able to attend Lynyrd's opening exhibit last Thursday! (Thank God the Gallery is adjacent to our office) It was fun seeing old friends and acquaintances. Lynyrd's work is so awesome, there are lots of details in every artwork, its like a layer of images faded into one another, more like what we do in photoshop! The tones are a bit muted compared to his other works. I like his style here better, everything blends perfectly well. The exhibit will run until October 30, do check it out when you have the time. 

The Puzzles

Created a band logo and gig poster for a friend. The concept for the logo is the brain twister puzzle, you know the yellow different angled pieces of plastic. :)

This is the poster for their Gig. Too bad I was not able to see them perform. :(