Youth Olympics

I will have to keep this entry short cuz I am truly exhausted and my right shoulder and the right part of my neck is killing me. I have been playing too much table tennis recently and played for like 3 hours almost non stop on saturday.

I just wanted to make a note in the blog that I had gone to watch the Youth Olympics table tennis matches at the Singapore Indoor Stadium yesterday .  Singapore's representatives were Isabelle Li and Clarence Chew.  It was really fun and the atmosphere was pretty good especially when the Singaporeans played. I really enjoyed it.  Too bad I can't attend the semis and finals today. Isabelle Li made it to the last 4 and I think it would be fun to watch her game.  The stardard isn't bad too and I think the other matches would be fun too.

K, I gotta go. In pain and v tired.

UPDATE 9:22pm
Isabelle Li won Singapore's second silver medal of the games. Yay!!!! She made it to the finals but was beaten by the Under-15 World No.1 from China Gu Yuting. Good job. :)

Portraits 5

As I wait for my comp to run through some maintenance software, I thought I would take the opportunity of some downtime to blog a little.

So here you go, a portrait of Horikita Maki. It doesn't look anything like her but it is a marked improvement over my failed Frank Lampard.  I began using a mix of the grid system and judging-by-proportion for this portrait.  But I realise after several hours of trying to get it right that I needed to convert to a full grid system and I needed to make the grid even tighter if I wanted more accuracy.

Unlike most of my classmates, I have absolutely no art background and was never very good at drawing.  I know that some of the reasons why we needed to learn portrait drawing was to train our powers of observation, our understanding of proportions in a face and nuances in lighting so I was determined to get as good as I possibly could before the end of our 3 month term.

The next portrait that I put up in a later post represents one of my proudest moments in portrait drawing. I'll put that up another day.  Going to go check on my comp and watch more video tutorials.  :)

Final project - wip

One of the things my lecturer for vfx said we should do was keeo a blog tracking our progress. Actually, all my lecturers said the same thing but I never got around to doing it cuz the foundation section and software section of the course was really killing us. Now that we are in our final months, I have a little more time which is partly why I have returned to blogging.

The above is just a little jpg showing some of the models I will use later when I try and incorporate them with live footage in the final project. They have not been properly textured and I have not finished rigging them.  The model on the right is supposed to be made up from sheets of newspapers.  After a few days of experimentation, I decided to use a bend deformer to get the shape. I am currently setting up the rig using "set driven key" and will experiment with both a "lattice deformer" and "ncloth" later to try and make it look softer and less uniform.

I have been slacking a lot lately and am feeling kind of guilty about it. Will have to really focus now as I am a little behind schedule. Can't start being complacent now.  Perhaps blogging is a good thing.  If I want to keep updating the blog, I gotta have stuff for it. :)

That's it for now. Will sleep a little earlier today. Will have to do family stuff tomorrow and work more on the project late into the night tomorrow. Good night.

Portraits 4

Okay this portrait was a complete failure and I was depressed about it for a while.  But this portrait of Frank Lampard is an important portrait because it represents a turning point for me.  After struggling with it and even receiving help from my teacher, I still failed to render any semblance of a good portrait. It was then that I decided that I HAD to find a better way to do this.

So I asked my Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts trained classmates and got some very useful advice. I decided that since I was so inexperienced in portrait drawing, the grid method was probably the best method for me. Anyway, here is "Frank Lampard" for now. :) You'll see a marked improvement in the next portrait which still has problems but none quite as horrible as this Frank Lampard.

Portraits 3

Before I go to bed, I think I'll just post my portrait of Atilla the Hun, I mean Jack Black. :) I did this at the same time as I did harry potter. Not terribly good at all.  There is a method to portrait drawing but as you'll soon discover, I did not know or understand it till many portraits later. K, that's it from me, good night.

Retro Camera - android

Gosh, I really can't get enough of my new favourite camera app on my milestone.  Am currently in love with this app called Retro Camera.  The interface takes some getting used to and some may consider it a little clunky but I actually like it that they put pictures of the cameras and place your viewfinder in the middle. Kind of cute and gives you a more retro photographing feel in this age of digital cameras and their full screen previews.

This is an ad supported free app so since it's free, you can't ask for too much more.  But what I do hope the developers would do in the future, if they ever update this app, is to make their options and settings more responsive.  Each time I try to turn the flash option to "off", it always takes me several minutes and me tapping furiously on my touchscreen as I try to get the software to respond. 

Other than the above mentioned fix, more retro cameras besides the four provided would be cool.  The four current cameras are already very cool and mostly provide excellent photos given the limitations of digital and cel phone photography. That said, it doesn't hurt to have more choices. :)

The one thing I also like about the app is the parallax error I get when I use the Barbl and the Little Orange Camera.  Now it may be a bug, I honestly don't know, but if it is a bug, I love it.  Part of the fun and experience of shooting with plastic cameras is the happy accidents.  Except for Retro Camera, no other camera app has given me the feeling of shooting on film on my plastic camera with sand papered lens.  I like not knowing, I like the feeling of experimenting, I like the old retro feel this app gives.

Of course, the viewfinder issue and the not super quick processing time does mean that this is probably not the most appropriate app for some shooting situations. I certainly won't even suggest using this camera app for casual snap shots let  alone weddings, events etc.  But if you have time and are in the mood for some experimentation and, if you want to have a little taste of old school photography, it is very hard to go wrong with this app.  The results are some of the best I've seen for a cell phone app.  Anyway, it is free, so why not give it a shot? :)

Portraits 2

Since I'm out for lunch now, it's a good time to continue updating the blog with more not very skilled portrait drawings.:) I'm really loving this motorola milestone, mobile blogging in Singapore has become so much easier and cheaper for me. :)

Anyway, back on topic, here is the second portrait that I drew. It wasn't a difficult one to do, so I think I did a decent job with the resemblance but did a poor job with the shading. :)

I drew this portrait and a portrait of Jack Black at the same time.  But this android blogging software doesn't allow me to upload more than one photo to one entry so I'll put that up another day. 

Portraits

Hi hi... in an earlier post, I wrote that I would like to start posting some of my school work to track my progression, so here is the very first portrait that I have ever drawn in my whole entire life.  I put in a lot of effort to try and get it right but in the end, my portrait of Leonardo DiCaprio stii looks like John Travolta. Ha ha ha... :) I found the Foundation Drawing classes very interesting and helpful. And drawing better is really one of the things that I wanted to get better at.  In the end, as you will see as I slowly put the artwork up, I did get much better :) but I stii have a very long way to go before I become even marginally good at it.

Momentum

I was going to post a longer post but time just slipped by and it's once again the wee hours of the morning and I'm really feeling the effects of too many late nights. Anyway, now that i have retuned and just so that I can keep the momentum going, the above is another photo of my continued fascination with cell phone photography. :)

Motorola milestone photos

I will be the first to admit that I am no fan of Apple's products and I really don't much care for the iPhone at all. But to be fair, there is one thing I do like about the iPhone and that's apps. These apps have changed the way most of us use our phones. Although using your phone to do more isn't in anyway a new concept and is a concept that Japan probably popularize better than any country before the iPhone, still it was the iPhone which popularized it worldwide.

The best thing about the iPhone is the apps and the apps store. How smart of Apple to be able to make money from apps they did not think up or create. The apps that I liked best were the photo apps which were brilliant because these apps added funky effects, like hipstamatic and lomo, to change the iPhone's pathetic photo quality to become cool and hip. So even though the song erricsson phones still shoot some of the best quality photos on a cel phone, more and more people were being attracted to these lesser quality photos.

While I still use my sony e phone because I like my photos to look nice, I was also happy to see the emergence of these funky camera apps appear in the android market. I have been a long time fan of the use of the lomo cameras and plastic cameras so being able to shoot photos using these effects to replicate traditional in-camera effects is interesting, fun and cheap. Moreover, the photo quality on the milestone isn't very good at all so these apps actually help enhance these poorer quality photos.

Anyway, I do need to go work on my project. When I have more time, I will post pictures of my school work. While I am not proficient yet, it would be nice to track my progress. :)

I leave you now with one of those photos shot and processed using one of the funky apps in my milestone. Oh, and thank god for physical keyboards cuz if I had to type all this out using just my finger on a touchscreen phone, I think I would have given up a long time ago. K, later y'all. :)

Mobile blog test - motorola milestone

A couple of months ago I picked up the motorola milestone. This is a test to see if I can upload photos using this app. Will sleep after this test. :)
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Kalafina

It's been a while since i've blogged and I kind of miss it. :) any way will keep it very short cuz it's almost 5am and am tired. Here is a photo of a dvd of a fictionjunction concert. Recently I have fallen in love with this group called kalafina and two of the members appear in this dvd. :) this is 2009 release and I was pleasantly surprise that the edition I received in the mail today is the limited edition. Happy. :)