Jeisa Chiminazzo

Painted in Photoshop CS3. The idea of this exercise is to paint realistically using solely photoshop brushes. Adding texture & realism to it.

Orig reference from Vogue ( Brasil) August 2004:
EDITORIAL: Mil folhas
MODEL: Jeisa Chiminazzo
PHOTOGRAPHER: Gui Paganini

The last 4 days I’ve been experimenting in painting realistically. & reading tons and tons of tutorials. My sleeping time has gone haywired. Daytime I would go out but night time I’ll read any existing tutorial available. Also discovered a lot of really helpful tips along the way that would speed up painting by 3x. Happy that I understood nearly everything on how to use Painter. Between photoshop and painter, painter has a broader variety of things to play with, plus an added paint masking if I wanna airbrush something. But I really don’t like working back and forth in painter and photoshop. I experiment solely using one and using both together. Discovered that there’s not much of a difference. It’s just what works best for you.

The picture doesn’t look exacly alike cause I didn’t trace. Use eye judgement good enough d. Aren’t we train so well for that? I discovered something when I was watching tutorials. The tablet is super super chunted in helping you paint way more fast:

I was always wondering whether there is ever a quicker way to change brush sizes other than pressing [/]. A bit annoying to shift your hand from left to right all the time. Am I just plain dumb to not realize or have you guys ever discovered it?

Instead of pressing Ctrl Alt-Z to undo/step backward (which I dislike about photoshop), just key in the functions using the keystroke in the wacom properties. So now I can just click once. Tadah!

I messed up with nearly all the properties of my brushes. I find it better if I’d had the power to tweak each brush according to how I like it. But sometimes it’s better to create custom brushes. The only thing that I can’t do with the brush is to change the “fatness” of each little dot. But I played around with everything from the Jitter, Shape Dynamics, Spacing, Opacity, the modes like Screening and Darker color for light and shadow area.

There’s also a tool called ‘Liquify’ found in filters which is excellent in cheating and editing if you discovered you drew one eye bigger than the other, or your nose too long or whatever.

Progress work:

click to enlarge yea?

The best tutorials comes from D-artise Digital Painting 2. Tip and step by step guide by Martha Dahlig and Melanie Delon, Youtube ‘Hanagumori’ by Dianae + PDF file, ‘The making of Judith’ by Martha Dahlig + PDF file, Imagine fX downloadable PDF files in painting lips and hair.
Been spending too many days learning this stuff. Wonder whether I should start learning 3D Max tomorrow.

A little bit more salt.

It’s been quite a while since I wrote a decent post about my life updates. 5 of my previous post were pretty crappy, like I never took some decency to type something far more worthwhile.

So far the break has been going well. Half enjoying and half learning. I actually wanted to take my time to pick up digital painting, learn Painter, 3D Max, and Adobe after Effects. I even want to work on my own pencil drawn lip sync. But seems that I’ve been spending loads of time experimenting with painter and photoshop. It’s fun because 1)there’s no one here to teach me, and 2)I’m making tons and tons of mistakes but improving as well. :p I remember reading the back cover of a book in Kinokuniya about 5 months ago, something about Walt Disney encouraging the animators to keep on drawing and experimenting because they needed to draw out all their mistakes in order not to repeat it. Somehow from where I am right now, I seem to love what I’m doing. Passion seems to be the most obvious when I’m doing something without anyone asking me to do it.

Other than that, I’ve been calling some old friends lately. 3 of them share with me little ‘insights’ that is only between us 2. Somehow it’s feels like the reminence of what you can take only at present – is through reviving your past with people who shared the past together with you. And boy, you’ll learn a lot on how your past has shaped you.

I won’t narrate anything much about my birthday. I’d just like to thank the people who left messages on my wall in Facebook. I didn’t even open Facebook on my birthday!! The most expensive(& practical) gift comes from my father – a RM600 pair of glasses for my terrible sight? haha. Yes. I like practical gifts but better yet, I prefer if people don’t buy me gifts. Because I pretty much have everything I need.

Pastor has been giving a lot of sermons in building a growing church. Somehow I feel something is poking me at the end… because every sermon has always something very important to tell that it just relates so much on what I should do. Would I consider learning as a form of service to God? Because as much as I go on with my day… I like discovering things that is not in a form of studying, but rather trying to find any scrape piece of information to get excited about. I wonder when would be the day that I would actually have the freedom to decide on which church I want to go to. Because if you know enough of me then you’ll know that I have some unneccesary ‘conflicts’ in terms of ‘denominational religion’ blahs. I don’t want to get into that but I’ll just put my foot down and clarify to you people that I am a Christian. I do not belong to ANY denomination. I am not Catholic, I am not Protestant, I am not Anglican, neither am I an Independent Christian. I’m just a Christian. I have been to many churches in different denomination but every church profess about the same God. Every denomination gives reading from the Bible. Every Sermon or homily speaks based on the bible and the spirit. But whether you like it or not every church there are good Christians and Bad Christians. It’s the same for any other religion.

I’ll be focusing more on art right now and in future.

Face

Soft airbrush + lots of tweaking with the options.
Ok, that’s something.

Mumble mmmmm….

A bit annoyed and pissed this 4 days trying to bring ms scarlet to life. This is my third time repainting it.
I finally learn how to paint skin!!!
Still messing around with painter and photoshop brushes…trying to make it look right.
But it doesn’t look right.
Nvm. at least I know I’m improving.

I’m starting to get addicted to it.

Still have to get my car service and pull of another teeth.
In the meantime, I’m thinking of converting this blog to an art blog.

Ms Scarlet WIP

Still working on it.

This is my first proper time EVER doing digital painting… My thumb hurts.

Will give it the best shot I can give. Ouch.

show ranting cont.

To squeezing some of the little time I have watching TV, TV time is normally 7pm or 1am in the morning. I donno why I have the urge to blog stuff like this. I never told people about the list of TV shows and movies I love to watch…or currently watching. The hobby is slowly growing on me.. because most of the time I’d never had much time to watch tv shows or movies, never kept to any series or dramas, never follow the time when interesting shows are on air. Who needs to remember or favourite TV shows time when you’ve got You tube?

The 2 ultimate channels I watch on ASTRO – AFC & The History Channel. Plus other bits and pieces of shows from Travel & Living, National Geographic, Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, Star World, Hallmark, even E!.

AFC channel – you gotta love:

yea well, Kylie Kwong and Anthony Bourdain belongs to Travel & Living. I don’t cook but I love to watch people cook. Depends of who la…Some of the chefs are seriously cincai. But yea, I love to watch Jamie at 7, Nigella Bites, chopped, Iron Chef, Taste New Zealand, Hells Kitchen? I mean, if you like the artistry of these kind of ‘art’ occupations, of course you would love watching these shows. I like watching people cook, speed drawing videos, sand animation, stop motion, photography, the making of movies because it’s something part of the aesthetic side of life that never gets boring. Even if I’m in front of the computer sceen more than 8 hours a day for the past 3 months doesn’t mean that my life is uninteresting.

Lately I’ve been getting hooked onto the History Channel. The main reason is that I get tired doing assignments the whole day that by 1am at night I would just come downstairs to watch TV with Stephanie. Oddly, she would always turn on the History Channel.

I don’t know how to explain to people how interesting history is because as far as I know, 80% of who I know hates history. All the history most of us remembered was dates and facts and all those kind of boring stuff. Duh! But some of the shows I’ve seen was really interesting – Who Built it First – Rome, Nostradamus & his prophecies, American Presidents – Theodore Roosevelt, The 7 Deadly Sins – Gluttony. I can be literally crazy to research about this stuff. Quite upset that I miss the episode on Napoleon and Peter the Great. This kinda learning channel always makes me feel how sparse my knowledge of world history is. MONKEY SCHOOL SEJARAH!! Maybe this holiday I’ll do tons and tons of digging on ancient civilizations…

But yet still, even if my hobby in movie watching is growing, I love oldies more than present shows. OK lah! I’m quite a broadway musical nerd. They are so wholesome…so nice to watch.. so charming. I told my father once that the difference between the actresses those days and today is that the actresses those days had charm. Its not about boobs and butt people, it’s about grace, wit, charm, appeal that I find women those day far more beautiful. and intelligent. The men are also far more uh..huskier? Manly? haha!! Chiselled structured face. Not the smooth skin pretty korean boy look. haha. No offense, but I prefer guys looking like guys.

Oldies you have to watch:

The sound of music, My fair lady, Singing in the Rain, Ben Hur, Solomon & Sheba, The King and I, The ten commandments, The world of Suzie wong, The wizard of Oz, American in Paris, Marry Poppins etc etc. At least watch it once in your lifetime. I watch sound of music more than ten times, 4 time for my fair lady, 2 times for singing in the rain, 3 times for the King and I, 3 times for Marry Poppins. Yes, get those Gene Kelly shoes kicking, classics are forever classics!

Toss ins & movie ranting

When I was done with some of my finals, I was too lazy to write a rationale or elaboration on my work. But I’ll just toss in some of the finals that is part and partial, a stepping stone in my life,  and explain to you the processes.

1. Exterior Final – Concept Art 1

Constructed on A2 size paper, retrace and rendered with markers on A3. Based on the tale of Hereward the Wake, an English 11th century hero who fought against the Normans. The era was around the end of the Byzantine period, during the Romanesque era, after the invasion of Vikings and before the Gothic era. To go into depth of European history is vast but extremely interesting. Got a lot of references on the Battle of Hastings and adopted some of the character poses in the visual. This is my first war seen ever drawn and coloured in my life. So, I’m really really proud of it? Btw, the fountain in front is actually the fountain that I’ve taken a photo of in Melaka. Adoption that people would never notice…mua haha.
The visual of the scene was suggested by jayZ. He told me to draw from an angle as though you’re lying dead on the ground while watching the war happening in front of you. Yea, it works, TQ JayZ!

2. Sands of Time

3D Modeling Final. It’s suppose to be an interior courtyard. But I’m really happy Jason approved even if it looks really exterior and a bit like the first project we did. This is a fan art concept taken from POP Sands of Time. The courtyard was design with reference to mosques in Cordova, Spain. Texturing was a pain as usual. I for one am not fond of texturing. The style of design is persian, islamic and moroccan. These 3 styles are nearly the same with only a few  variety between the styles. Since after this semester I have gone far more in love with ancient and medieval architecture – Medieval, japanese, islamic, persian, chinese, greek, whateva. They’re all so beautiful and crazily cultural.

Rendering was long as usual. Modeling was surprisingly fast and easy. It’s the texturing part that kills 3 days straight. Then rendering + raytracing would make your com go whiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrr……..(take a book our to read, it’ll take a really long long time…) But I like modeling. One of my favourite subjects this sem.

3. Aayla and Maul

Character and BG final for Marker Rendering class. This was a pretty much who cares about this final piece. I just took some star wars characters, change their post, draw the BG,  ink them neatly, and render them. No concept, no strong idea behind it. But surprisingly got some favs in DA. Weird. Well, I’m glad that I would not be touching markers for a really long time.
———————————————————————————————-

The last 2 days of my “confirm” freedom I’ve got myself watching quite a no. of movies. Some I watched before while doing my assignments. If I were to  give a proper review on a movie, it’ll take me forever to write about it. There’s so much to say from the storyline, the mood, the structure, the animation, the SFX, the concept, the music…But I’ll just give a short review on each of this.

1. Sepet

I finally got around watching this on Sunday night. For the chinese peeps who had not watched ‘Sepet‘ but has watched ‘I Not Stupid‘(too lazy to add in chinese characters :p), You’ll enjoy watching this show as much as ‘I not Stupid‘. I like this show a lot because it has so many little stuff in it that relates so much to each and everyone of us Malaysian. Yasmin Ahmad shows what a true Malaysian is like. Her stories are simple but real. It’s not a film to cover up and show what Malaysia should be like, but rather, a film to show what Malaysia is like.

Of course you would have a whole bunch of Muslims complaining about the film saying that guys and girls shouldn’t hold hands be4 they marry; Government peeps cutting 9 scenes off the movie (I really want to strangle them for that), also purposely banning the film in the beginning. It shows how amateurish these people in understanding anything of how craftiness in films work. Sepet shows such a cross cultural breed. The dialogues, especially between the Chinese guys, are so familiar that it sounded like what you and I would talk about. And of course, people were questioning Yasmin, why let the Chinese dude die instead of convert to Islam? Ish, in my opinion, if Yasmin were to make him convert, it would have ruin the whole story, pronto. The story would look like a gimmick set up to get people into conversion. Yasmin has her reasons not to do that. The story is about love and unity between races, not religion.

This film is remarkably simple, but very ingenious and sweet. So yes, watch it with your tissue papers!

2. Tekkonkinkreet

To my disbelief, the storyline actually won an award for ‘Best original storyline’. I don’t even understand the storyline!! I had to read the chinese subs, which sadly, didn’t help because of my poor chinese. But I think I was more interested in their background and the world they created. Combination of 2D and 3D elements is amazing. Would really wanna see the making. If the director Michael Bias spend more time making the story as strong as the artisty, I would have enjoyed the show. But I seriously DON’T understand! I forced myself to understand but I still don’t. It’s a bit of a waste because you get and A for artistry, so-so for animation and C for storytelling. Whether or not the story is original, sometimes it’s not about the story, it’s how you tell the story.

3. MirrorMask

One word, Surreal. But I like Coraline better!! The show looks like a photoshop world to be in. Very very very very very dreamy. It’s like I could fall into her world and dream those sort of surreal, weird, creepy yet beautiful, unreal things. But maybe too surreal for me. But it very mixed. I like it and I don’t like it. I like the art for sure!

4. Tinkerbell

To be honest, I thought I would have gave up watching this movie. But turns out to be quite entertaining. The storyline is actually not bad. And I did enjoy the show. Of course la, it’s a girly movie. But I think all us girls would dreamt to be fairies and princesses at least a few times in our childhood. Why not? Its nice to dream of worlds that doesn’t exist, places you have never been in, planets you have never step foot on…

I had also been watching tons of shows from AFC and the History Channel. Will rant bout it next time.

The race never ends does it?

My weekend was crammed tight just working on the exterior and interior of the environments. I ended up watching ‘Sepet’ while shading my artwork until I started sobbing at the last part. That explains why my interior looks like crap. haha. I’m not too bothered.

There’s still maya left. Some holiday. By Thursday it would be 6 days of our holidays dedicated to projects and deadlines. Today, I told myself I would just relax and do whatever I please. But there are tons and tons of rubbish I need to clear up. ‘moan’. Not only physical rubbish, but ’softcopy’ rubbish. My desktop is loaded with junk that i donno what to keep or what to delete. ’sighs’ The dilemma of a computer geekanoid. I also realize that I have tons of errands to run – wisdom tooth no 2, spine checkup, eye checkup, car servicing, money transfers, aiyah all those blahs lah.

Ok, I would not elaborate further. 3 weeks of holidays are still worth every second of it. I thought on talking about today, but it’s has been quite a miserable day for both my parents. There’s a cold war. So, yea…The Wan Family also got family problems wan…like any other normal family. I’ll speak my mind when I feel like it some other time. Maybe tomorrow, or Wednesday…

Am I up for a really long post as the mark of a checkpoint? maybe.