Another week, another challenge. This time our challenge type is material. We polled for the material we were going to use; guess what won?

Pencils

Still the same rules apply, one hour execution time.The topic was decided a week ago; for us be able to have time to think of a concept, but I ended up empty handed. Thus, here’s my half-decent entry for the challenge. I was aiming to have the proper perspective on the strokes, but I had no time left.

View the rest of the challenge entries »

Finally, the project I’m working on has been named! Games and Bytes is the name my friend decided to use for her website; bought the domain name just today and instantly set up a coming soon image (this isn’t the logo yet).

On the development side, I finished setting up FTP accounts, mail, and all other stuff this website will need. Tested out Kohana on DreamHost, and it works perfectly fine. I was able to install the framework perfectly without encountering any errors at all. By far, this is the framework with the easiest installation process I was able to install on DreamHost. Now that my development environment has been set up, now all I need is to finish the design phase to proceed on programming.

I’m currently involved in a web development project; having both the roles of the designer as well as the programmer. My search for a lightweight framework I could use on this project has ended, and I’ve decided on using Kohana. Kohana was based on CodeIgniter (CI), which I have been able to play with already, so I’m quite familiar on how it works already.

By viewing the documentation of Kohana, I could say I love it! The way Kohana handles views is perfect, compared with CodeIgniter which I found to be quite limiting. I’m very excited on using this framework on this project, may this be another good learning experience for me. I’ll be posting the progress of this project on every milestone I reach.

Changing rules/themes for the wallpaper challenges is the current fad of the designers’ at my workplace to keep it from being stale and boring. For today’s challenge, we decided to go for Style as our chosen challenge type; Pop Art was the winner on our votations, and the style used for our pieces.  Though I find the actual pop art’s description as confusing, I decided to use this definition:

A genre of art that uses elements of popular culture; often uses techniques from commercial art and advertising

Popular culture, specially on my case would revolve around no other thing than Anime. Darker than Black was my chosen Anime since it really is cool, and I always wanted to create a wallpaper for the series. I’m not really impressed with my work; though Hei is really making my desktop sexy, so I’m still happy. Hope you guys would like my little Darker than Black tribute as well.

Click here to view all the entries of ′Pop Art′ Wallpaper Challenge »

My promised updates are here, nothing much done since I’m too frustrated with myself. Digital painting is really quite hard, and having a complicated artwork to paint digitally makes me go crazy. I also gave up on using Corel Painter on this artwork, since my computer’s performance with the application actually crawls even with its above average speed (the canvas size of this artwork is 4961×3508 though).
On this update, I was able to:

1. find the appropriate color palette to use
2. changed the way on how to color the hair, looks more anime-ish, but is really better compared to the last one
3. redid the lines, the faces changed a bit.

To-do on next update:

1. color the skin
2. fix and clean up the line art
3. make the horns bigger

Also, I’m wondering, should I give the Aries girl a bra? Since I’m out of ideas on its design. Maybe you can help me out =p Also, comments and suggestions are appreciated… more like awaited this time. I sure hope I’ll be able to finish this piece before March 1 though.

Solo, I need your help on this one. I can’t find you online lately.

Each of us were given the chance to state on what the material to use; we had votation afterwards. The material that won and used on our wallpapers was:

An ampersand ( & )

Girls & Curls is the name of my entry, using the ampersand as the base of the character’s hair. Font used on this piece is Bickham Script Pro, a font pretty enough perfect to create some lovely curls. I also used the letter “e” of the font for her eyes and lashes. Hope you like it.

Here’s my work in progress, hopefully will be finished by the end of February. I know the coloring is really bad, and looks completely amateurish. I hope I can do better workarounds for it, and the painting need to look sharper. I’ll post more pictures of this painting as I progresses.

Comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

I do know my websites aren’t that popular to be able to earn monthly from it, but I’m happy to have some extra cash without doing anything but placing advertisements on my site.

Maybe in another two years again, Google! Cheers!

The order of designers in this challenge was:
Wayne -> Michael -> Me -> Clyde -> Dominique -> Eman -> Lance -> Wayne

Wayne was the one who gave the subject, while Lance was the last designer in order and the one who gave the ending back to Wayne. We didn’t know what happened to the story with the other designers until the challenge ended, and we got to see all the wallpapers.

Our subject was “Juan Tamad”, a Filipino character named as “Lazy John”. Juan is so lazy that he would sleep under a tree with his mouth open to wait for a fruit to fall on his mouth. For more information about him you can read this Wikipedia article.

The task that was given by Michael to me was:

Juan Tamad is being held as a hostage by the ALIENS because he ate the special bayabas (guava fruit).

This was really fun compared to our normal challenges. I’d surely love to do this again. Oh yeah, the green stuff that’s on the Juan Tamad’s mouth is actually the bayabas that ended up looking like a ball, I know it lacks details.

I’ll place the link about this challenge; featuring all the designers’ work plus the story once we post it on DFC.

December 2009, I won the Spirit Animals Book Giveaway on Abduzeedo. I only posted about this now, since I got the package just today. And boy I’m happy! Besides the reason of getting the book for free, it really is beautifully inspiring, with artworks from nine talented artists.

Even if I don’t seem like it, I am actually a believer about spirits, zodiacs and astrology, so this book really is very interesting for me. I’m so glad that this ended up being mine. Big thanks to Hannah Stouffer, for the book. She’s my favorite illustrator in this lovely book, and she was also the one who sent this to me. Also, thank you to Abduzeedo for helding a wonderful contest!