Re energize Wednesdays

Office project, Re-energize Wednesdays basically the rule is to be done with office work by 6pm so we could enjoy the rest of the night. I wish we could apply it everyday! :) Anyone who breaks this rule will be sentenced to wash the dishes on Free Lunch Fridays! :)

What does the fox say?

Doing foxy sketches! :) This exercise is for you to develop your skill to create different characters using a single reference. I tried to do this by creating varying shapes for the head and body and adding other elements to differentiate the characters. After the pencil sketch, I inked these using speedball ink (Since I'm saving up the ink of my brushpen for our comic). So there you have it a foxy musician. A hungry swinging fox. A sexy female fox. A cute innocent baby fox. :) Which one do you like best? :)

Invest in Yourself

One of my goal this year is to improve my skill, especially in children's book illustration. So I looked at classes online and found SVS (School of Visual Storytelling) class. Although it took a bit of my savings (ouch!) $320 is a lot here in the Philippines (Same price to get that 3 days and 2 nights vacation trip to Bangkok!). Spending for my education is one of the best decisions I've made (...or that's what I tell myself, really that trip to Bangkok is really nice haha). ;)

I just finished part 1 of the video and I'm doing the workbook exercises. First task is to design a simplified character. I did a few sketches and decided to render one of them. :) And the winner is this cute pudgy-fied baby bear! :)

Took a photo from my sketch and did the rendered illustration digitally using photoshop. You can see the steps below. As always I started with getting the sketch done, and blocking out the colors using one color to get the values right, then adding color overlays to finish it off. :)

I'm looking forward to do the rest of the exercises in the workbook, will be posting them so stay tuned. :) 

How about you how do you invest in yourself?

Taking the leap into the year of the sheep!

Jan 1, 2015 How time flies! To celebrate the new year I made an illustration of a fluffy sheep! :) 2014 has been awesome and I'm looking forward to 2015, this year I have bigger and better goals. One of them is to improve my skill, so I will be making time to enroll at an online course, read more art books, create more art, and share my learnings in this blog. :) I have made a learning fund from my budget. I really wanted to get Imaginism studios' classes & SVS online course on children's book illustration, I'm still looking on how to afford them both but from my current income I can only afford one per year.

I want to improve my character poses making them more dynamic and relatable and also the character expression (I think I need to look at the mirror more often). And do a lot of drawing from life, and outdoor sketching. :)

Below are the steps on how I made this illustration. Start off with the usual grayscale illustration to get the values right. Then slowly adding colors by adding another layer of color overlay and build up the colors from there.

I hope this new year brings more blessings and learnings to you. And I want to thank you for reading my posts through the years! :) 

Christmas is in the air

Christmas is in the air most of the houses I pass by already have parols, and the music I hear on the radio are christmas songs. Even the guards at our office are wearing santa hats or reindeer headbands. :) The people at the office are all talking about how to spend their 13th month and if we have bonus this year (fingers crossed!). And also don't forget the list of people that you will be giving gifts! I'm hoping that I saved enough money to buy christmas presents! >_<

Since it's christmas is near, an artists job is to christma-fy every design he-she is doing, it's the season of santa hats, christmas trees, reindeers and snow! So here are some Christmas designs I made. :) The first one is for project guard this is in collaboration with my friend's passion project which I'm really excited about! (will talk about this on my next post) :)

And also some new year posts for "The Adventures of Pepot and Dora" and for my fb page. :) I wasn't able to create new sets of postcards this christmas, but will definitely make one for next year, I already added it on my 2015 goals! :) 

What happened

Well I was promoted at work as a senior art director. I'm still adjusting to the work hours and finding time to juggle my work, life, advocacies, passion projects and add christmas parties to that! (I really don't know how to juggle in real life!)

So I always try to incorporate my illustrations on my projects at the office here's another poster for our December incitement talk. I was really excited about this talk but I wasn't able to attend since I have the deadliest deadline before lunch! :(

Peacocking

Jizz Jazz artwork. Used watercolor & watercolor pencils. Took me about a week to finish each piece, doing most of the work on weekends.