Senbazuru In the Making

Would you believe this was supposed to be a V-day artwork? :)

Valentine's Day 2013, admittedly, was the first time I awoke on that holiday not as a single lady. Since I was not exactly experienced when it came to giving presents to a significant other, I just decided to play by my strengths and go creative. What I decided on? Senbazuru. One thousand paper cranes to you and me.

Know your enemy. Prepare ammo.

Instead of buying pre-cut square post-its, I opted to just cut the squares myself. Dimensions: slightly smaller than 3x3 in (fitted 12 squares on standard size). Why sacrifice the convenience of using pre-cut paper? Two reasons:

1. Post-it would cost more than double the price of using non-cut paper
2. The available post-it colors are in neon shades (I saw pink, yellow, green, orange, and blue variants). I wanted to be in control of the colors I'm using, and honestly, I am not too fond of neon colors -- and neither is my significant other.

Trivia: I based the color scheme on the actual colors of the red-crowned crane, and it was only later that I noticed they were t'nalak colors (sans the blue). I love those textiles, really.

Multiply each by 25

There are lots of online instructions on how to fold a traditional paper crane, so I won't elaborate on it here. Of course, I would end up killing my hands and my sanity (among others) if I attempted to fold 1000 cranes in one day, so I distributed their making into a 50-day period with 20 cranes per day. Stringing them together, give-or-take less than one week.

Skewering them together, 40 cranes per string

Man, this step hurt my fingers and eyes more than the crane folding. I have no callouses to guard against needles, so I had to pad my digits with cloth if the needle became too difficult to pull. And I made the mistake of not using a threader, so I crossed my eyes more than once trying to make the crochet thread go through the tiny needle hole. I love arts and crafts, but needlework is something I still have difficulty doing.

Prior to bunching them together

Close up

If only I got to maintain the straightness of the pattern when I knotted the threads together. Alas, I ended up getting zigzags in the final version. I also wasn't able to take a picture of the threaded cranes hanging, so pardon me. At least I finished them before my scheduled deadline, and they have already changed ownership as of a few hours ago.

Did I wish for anything after completing the project? Yes, I did. But no way am I divulging my wish here. ;)

Magnolia Metamorphosis

Well, I finally finished the only pending artwork I have at the moment. Since I don't want to upload a duplicate of the PNG file here, I'll just use this embedding link generated by DA:


Magnolia Metamorphosis by ~Antarel on deviantART

Pardon the ugly resize. It looks a lot better when you see the actual link, trust me. Hmmm, at this rate, I can already see a trend in the feedback: the figures themselves are good, but the background could use more improvement. I can see where they are coming from, because I ended up using a stock image for the background. On the brighter side, since the purpose of this artwork was to gauge as to whether I could already draw semi-realistic people, I can say that I am very happy with the outcome.

At least, I now know what I have to work on. I plan to return to my landscape-drawing roots, but this time I'm doing it digitally. I already have something in my mind for a start, but I am not broadcasting it yet. Hopefully I will get to merge good background and good figures once I have recovered my original forte. (I was more of a landscape artist before I went digital, ya know?)

Thanks once again, to all who gave feedback and stuck with my slow progress from start to finish!

Dark-robed Dragon updates 02

Our internet service turned wonky last evening, and who knows when it will be restored. I am not too keen on posting updates via public terminals, so expect any artwork progress work to be uploaded in long intervals. Gomen ne.

Those who are familiar with my devART account will most likely recognize the character (if you don't, shame on you!). But this was the first time I drew her wearing a dark color scheme. Different, yes. But I am loving it. I actually based her outfit on the Coorgi style of draping a sari, although since I drew the borders of the cloth a little too narrow, I just let the palla hang unpleated over her right shoulder. Here's a video on how to do it:

The original headdress design was radically different from the one I ended up rendering. It was supposed to be more crown-like, but I had a hell of a time doing it, so I scrapped it in favor of a simple circlet. I am quite happy with how it turned out, though. Now for a detail shot and some of the patterns used:

The middle pattern may not be seen easily, but it's on the lower part of the shoulder drape. I have actually posted a Photoshop tutorial in devART on how to capture that glittering brocade effect here. I will try to post another version online for the non-devART users, but since my internet is... yeah, it may not happen soon.

Dark-robed Dragon updates 01

I finally got my lazy ass moving and compiled a set of images showing some artwork progress. "Dark-robed Dragon" isn't going to be the final title of this piece, but for the sake of this preliminary report I will use it. So here's the work so far (or at the part involving him at least -- he's supposed to have a companion):

Kouseikei - my first major male OC in about four years

For those who are unfamiliar with my characters, the guy was actually a humanized version of Salamence. But since he hardly looks like a Salamence anymore (apart from the headdress and the wings -- which are not yet rendered, by the way), I am counting this artwork as my first major original semi-realistic piece. Yes, that's a step to lessen the amount of fan art I am drawing.

The outfit is considerably less "robe-y" than most of the ones I have designed before (like this, this, and this), but then again, that's for practical reasons. ATLA fans may point out a similarity with Fire Nation guard uniforms (and I'll admit that I am also a fan of that series), but I guess the parallelism came out because the producers and I drew inspiration from a similar source:

That picture on the right, ladies and gentlemen, is the basic male costume of the Khmer Royal Ballet (Khmer = Cambodia from SE Asia, for those who don't know). However, I did modify plenty of aspects in the costume, as seen on the sketch on the left. Noticeably, the heavily decorated brocade panel dangling down the middle of the dancer's body was moved to drape diagonally across the torso. Ironically, it became closer to the style of the female costume in the end (see a picture of it here). Even then, I deviated from my original design sketch when I got to drawing. Instead of just letting the brocade fall freely down the back, I pulled it over the right shoulder as seen in the actual artwork preview (akin to a style of draping sari).

Note that it's actually a girl donning that costume in the picture; females often (if not almost always) take on male roles in the Khmer Royal Ballet. A drastically different case from Kabuki, if you'd ask me.

Yup, that's the pattern I used for the red borders. It's nothing more than the same rectangle being rotated and scattered semi-randomly over a 200x200 pixel canvas. I emphasize semi-randomly, because I also had to make sure the image tiled properly.

Ah, my favorite part of the costume (although whether much of it can still be seen in the final version, I don't know)! Those who have followed me in devART may be familiar with how obsessed I am with fabric textures and patterns. The last image is the basic warp-weft pattern (rotated 90 degrees) I used for the brocade. It is a rough replication of an actual t'nalak design. T'nalak is a special cloth woven by T'boli women (the T'boli are an ethnic group based in our southern island of Mindanao), and authentic t'nalak patterns are either handed down from generation to generation or are dreamed. Yes, dreamed. Down to the number of threads to be used. I will expound on this in a future blog entry, since I have been dying to replicate t'nalak patterns digitally ever since my Sociology and Anthropology teacher introduced me to them.