Rusty Banana Forge

Just finished giving 180 minutes of digital coloring and digital painting ( a little less because of lateness and technical difficulty) at the UP Cursor’s @rte Talk. This is the first time I got to discuss my process for digital coloring and painting to a group for 3 hours. It’s a totally different experience than dealing one-on-one with a student. Or when you just have to show just the basic setup.

The audience was largely from the UP Cursor itself. As many as 10 people, I think, at one time. I was hunkered down behind the PC so I couldn’t really get a good look at all of them. Students were coming in and out. After digital coloring, the digital painting talk got very quiet. Very hard to discuss the process while you’re busy painting like mad.

Next time I should have a plan on what to paint - I had an emergency coloring job and wasn’t able to plan squat. For the talk - I had just come up with a painting without prior idea what I was going to paint. Went satisfactorily… could’ve been better though.

Most of the time Iwas just slapping on paint… the few tricks that I did were explained quite succintly. This is why it’s probably much better to record the process first - then play it in front of the audience while discussing it in person and in hindsight.

At the end some questions posed were why I choose to go digital, issues about copyright, and how much I get paid (which I revealed - don’t you wish YOU knew.) I’m hoping I’ve added a bit more mileage to my workshops as well Wacom and Corel (sponsors at the event).

Visited the ArtFarm today.  ArtFarm is THE school for traditional 2D
animation in the Philippines.  It’s where I learned animation, and
first got involved producing animation with a team.

Mr. Nelson Caliguia, principal director at the ArtFarm tells me that
the school is taking on several teaching responsibilities here in
Manila and even in the provinces.  Companies and foundations are having
their employees and scholars trained at the Artfarm.  These trainees
eventually go off and do animation for local companies - perhaps even
go abroad to do work there.

But as you know, 3D is all the rage now.

Mrs. Mina Caliguia is making sure ArtFarm is relevant in the coming
years by having 3D as the next big thing for the ArtFarm.  The plans
are hush-hush but things can explode by next year, 2006.

For the INK’s Animalaya Exhibit opening, here were some fresh experiences of mine:

One would be watching the Oishi mascot have his picture taken under a cute yellow rubber-foam bird with beady black rubber-foam eyes - which looks very much like the mascot himself. I didn’t know the bird I made would illicit such a connection with our sponsor’s mascot.

Another experience would be seeing visitors point at my painting… to where the unwanted blemish of my stamped chinese name could be seen. I tried to get it out the day before but only made the digital paint rub off…. fortunately, it’s only a print - there are other copies for sale. I SO wanted to tell the visitors that!

Some shared experiences would be witnessing a short flurry of fists at the Worlds of Fun arcade right beside the exhibit area. Two gentlemen wanted to make each other black and blue. Fortunately there was a security guard there and no more children left at our exhibit area.

Besides the violence, everything went smoothly - perhaps even better if not for the rain outside. We got to eat. We got enough ambiance to make us deaf. “‘SUP?” - was the loudest word for the day - right next to “MIC TEST”.

Things I hope we at INK could do as standard operating procedure would be to:

1. Include some mention of which works are for sale - and who to contact. Last year’s exhibit had the price listed but not this year. Iinforming people our works are either for sale or not really matters - or why else even ask us to give a price? I think it further expresses that we ARE a group of professional illustrators. Plus, it makes a good conversation topic with the locals. You may actually catch someone looking at your artwork and saying “Ayyy… ang mura” (Wow so cheap) and then you can move in and close a sale!

2. The pins Haribon had done of our artworks would have been a great means for visitors to make the connection between the artwork with the artist. For the next exhibit, I’ll be making a pin of my artwork and sticking it on my shirt. Shameless perhaps to some… but I wouldn’t mind having people approach me and ask about the artwork.

3. On a more social note, (okay… not 100% social) I think the exhibit opening is the best time for INKies to actually go around and ask each other about their work. Maybe it’s just me - I like to hear the behind-the-scenes… I like to learn how my fellow artists did their work, how much it cost, how long it took. Why the price or no price. — of course it’s also the best time to connect with patrons and clients - so we should allow for both to happen at the same time!

Here’s looking forward to our exhibit at the Bookfair!

I really felt the need to paint this. I’ve attached the image. Took around 15 minutes.

Toasted!

I’ve attached my character study for Ballistic Publishing Exotique. Hope to develop this further with a friend.

Your comments and ideas would be appreciated! I intend to expand the illustration to include the upper half of the body.

For all you pro bloggers out there….

Feedster has just launced a new feature: a top 500 list of “interesting and important” blogs.

Check it out. Subscribe to a few.

To Pinoy Artists!!

Creativity Lounge is calling for Pinoy participants to contribute artistic 3D/2D creations: graphic designs, 3D models, illustrations, comics for its upcoming publication showcasing Philippine talent in the visual arts.

Please send high resolution images of your best work in JPG format (cumulative size of all pictures you send must not exceed 5 MB file maximum compression) and description about your work and yourself
(name, company, email, information).

Please send it to tridi_pinoy@yahoo.com, Entries must be submitted only for this month August 2005. Artist will be featured on the publication based on the quality of the submitted artwork (which by the way must be original and under no restrictive copyrights or print rights.)

Good luck everyone!

On our PC at home, I’ve got both MSIE and Firefox.

I prefer Firefox because it allows you to open multiple webpages and place them in TABs instead of opening them in new windows like MSIE does. Much better to organize. Firefox even comes with a link bar which loads up a list of links of thelatest world news from BBC.

I’ve been using Firefox for quite some time now, and I’ve compared how quickly pages load on Firefox and on MSIE and felt that Firefox was much quicker at it. Firefox needs no plug-in to block pop-ups.

If you like opening multiple web pages at once and hate to move all those windows around visit Spread Firefox and download a copy of it for yourself.