New site…

Hey guys, a quick update, you may have noticed a lack of blog updates lately and the rea­son is that I’ve been busy learn­ing how to build my own site in Word­Press with help from Lynda.com training.

It’s been years since I’ve tried to cre­ate my own page, but I thought it was time I learnt how to, and with Word­Press and other CMS soft­ware it’s never been eas­ier, espe­cially for some­one like myself who is pri­mar­ily a cre­ative con­tent devel­oper. Hav­ing a CMS is a big depar­ture from my Com­puter Sci­ence days when we were cod­ing crappy sites from notepad. Word­Press is a fan­tas­tic frame­work that lets peo­ple like me con­cen­trate on using my core skills — ie. cre­at­ing art­work and writ­ing, rather than half ass­ing code and markup.

My pre­vi­ous site was fine for my first pro­fes­sional web­site and WeCan­Cre­ate did a great job, but it did have lim­i­ta­tions that I wasn’t happy with. Cre­at­ing my own site was the only way I could have the func­tion­al­ity and flex­i­bil­ity I required / wanted.

If you’re think­ing about going this route with your own site / blog, I rec­om­mend sign­ing up to Lynda.com and going through the Word­Press 3 Essen­tial Train­ing with Morten Rand-Hendriksen, he takes his time to explain things to noobs such as myself and there is a lot of wel­come hand holding.

I’m still in the process of get­ting con­tent up-to-date, espe­cially the gallery which has a slightly dif­fer­ent for­mat, focus­ing on projects, allow­ing me more space to explain the processes I have gone through to arrive at a final design / illus­tra­tion choice. I’m lean­ing towards also incor­po­rat­ing light­box func­tion­al­ity for those who are only inter­ested in flick­ing through the images. Please excuse the bro­ken image links, I’m still updat­ing them

One big addi­tion, is that I have added a FAQ sec­tion, this part of the site holds a bunch of infor­ma­tion from my per­sonal expe­ri­ence. It con­tains excerpts from blog posts, inter­views I have done with mag­a­zines, and some have been writ­ten from scratch. I cre­ated this sec­tion pri­mar­ily because these ques­tions seem to crop up pretty often. Check it out and let me know what you think or let me know if there are errors I need to fix.

In other news my lit­tle sis­ter is get­ting mar­ried at the end of the year! Very excit­ing news! I’ve vol­un­teered to be her wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher in return for a new lens to shoot with, and I’m really excited to do it. I’ll be get­ting the lens shortly, a Canon f/2.8L 70-200mm with no IS, an awe­some zoom lens for those pho­to­jour­nal­ist shots. I’ll be tak­ing it through it’s paces when I get it, and when I visit Cambobia’s Angkor Wat later in the year with Kellie.

One other quick blip, I just reg­is­tered a new busi­ness domain. Excit­ing times ahead.

Hope your times have been pro­duc­tive, peace out.

D-giggidy.

Some new sketches =)

I did a cou­ple of sketches today, one was for a stu­dent, the other just to record the process and prac­tice some tonal work.

Enjoy!

Here is the YouTube video of the last one:

Ideation Process: Part 2

Now, up to this point, we’ve been think­ing of the sketches as a per­sonal tool, that is, an exter­nal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a myr­iad of inter­nal ideas in an attempt to organ­ise free flow­ing thoughts into a struc­tured pat­tern for our own per­sonal use.

We have part of the design in our minds and this can often cause us to stop short of cre­at­ing sketches that mean any­thing to any­one but ourselves.

This sit­u­a­tion would be fine if the work we are doing is only for our­selves, how­ever, most often the art we doing isn’t just for fun, it’s because some­one is pay­ing us to deliver.

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Ideation Process: Part 1

Cre­at­ing art­work is a won­der­ful gift, a plea­sure that I cher­ish and indulge in on a daily basis because it is both my favourite past time and because it is also my profession.

For myself (and undoubt­edly many of you read­ing this) there is no com­pa­ra­ble expe­ri­ence of div­ing sty­lus first into an alter­nate real­ity, indulging our coolest ideas and danc­ing the tango with plain old creativity.

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So…why “Stylus Monkey”?!

Behind every name, there has to be a good story right? Wrong! I chose this name because those pesky peo­ple who reg­is­ter ONE THOUSAND NAMES A DAY in the hope of sell­ing one of them off at some future point for a humon­gous profit had not already reg­is­tered Sty­lus Mon­key. There, end of story.

Just kid­ding =)

You know the old say­ings where you can “train a mon­key” to do some­thing? You can train a mon­key to bang on a type writer. You can train a mon­key to blow holes in walls. You can train a mon­key to do that job. You can train a mon­key to…DRAW!?

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Making something look good…Part 2 (Links & Resources)

Alright, thanks for com­ing back, this is the sec­ond part of the a two part blog post, the first can be found here: Mak­ing Some­thing Look Good…Part 1

As promised, here is a list of var­i­ous skills and asso­ci­ated resources that have helped me to improve my art­work over the span of 4–5 years and will prob­a­bly do the same for you.

If you have any queries, addi­tions or just want to say hi, you’re encour­aged to hit up the com­ments sec­tion of this post. I also wrote this a while ago, so if there are errors, gram­mat­i­cal or oth­er­wise let me know and I’ll edit. Remember…caring, is sharing =)

& Resources)">Read more

Making something look good…Part 1

So…how do I make some­thing look ‘good’ in art?

I have been asked this so many times that if I had 5c for every time that ques­tion was raised I’d…actually, I’d prob­a­bly only have about 35c or some­thing, so I guess that point goes out the win­dow as a valid rea­son for me writ­ing this post.

Dif­fer­ent angle then…I know that as a young artist, it was a ques­tion that per­vaded my devel­op­ing mind every time I tried to illus­trate some­thing vaguely awe­some like Venom totally kick­ing Spiderman’s skinny-gaudy-leotard-laden butt.

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So…what is a concept artist?

“I am a con­cept artist for video games…” is the answer I gen­er­ally give when asked the oblig­a­tory “So what do you do for a liv­ing?” when I meet some­one for the first time.

Other times, I will answer “I am a ven­tril­o­quist in a trav­el­ing cir­cus who uses dead ani­mals instead of wooden pup­pets to put across cau­tion­ary tales about the evils of pre­scrip­tion drugs…” if I don’t really want to talk to someone.

Assum­ing I answered con­cept artist, their eye­brows usu­ally raise as if I just told them I ride to work on a uni­corn bare­back “Hey! That sounds kinda cool!” and “My kids would LOVE you!” are typ­i­cal responses which always make think “Do you think I get to play video games all day for work!?” We really don’t, but I tell them I do any­way just to per­pet­u­ate the fan­tasy for giggles.

So then the ques­tion arises, what DO we really do?

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The only famous artists…are DEAD! (Art Shenanigans)

I come from a very tra­di­tional Asian fam­ily, you know the type, full of accoun­tants, com­puter sci­ence types (cough! cough!), psy­chol­o­gists, lawyers and the like — respectable peo­ple with respectable jobs I guess. I sup­pose I was never one to fit that mould and I think even from an early age I knew I wanted to do some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent, trou­ble was I didn’t know what that some­thing was…despite it sit­ting in front of my damn eyes since I was a kid. So here goes a bunch of child­hood memories…

I loved draw­ing! Appar­ently I started when I was around 3 years old, that’s what my Ma tells me any­way. I drew on bits of scrap paper and those hotel paper pads they have in hotel rooms, which my dad made a habit of pil­fer­ing (amongst other things, such as hotel slip­pers, tow­els and the like). My first rec­ol­lec­tion was

DEAD! (Art Shenanigans)">Read more