Rusty Banana Forge

Before I was an anime fan, I was a Disney fan. I still am. I am still struck by just how life Disney characters showed on screen, the kind of life that most anime back in the 80s didn’t have.

Who is the darkest skinned Disney Princess you know? It’d have to be Princess Jasmine from Aladdin. (Esmeralda’s a hottie but she isn’t a Disney Princess, as far as I know.) Among the princesses, Jasmine is the most exotic, if only because her skin color gave her more presence and the appearance of more life (ie blood, which her fairer counterparts seemed to lack.)

Of course the illustration above isn’t Jasmine. It’s actually Aunt Jemimah… er… when she was young! Before she became famous and had her face on all that maple syrup!

The story behind this artwork is actually pretty eye opening for me, technique-wise. Not because it was done completely digitally or because I painted digitally into flats, but because during the process I was able to find a comfortable way of “inking”. Inking, as comic artists are familiar with, is the process of artistically rendering essential pencil lines into ink. It doesn’t feel natural for me to ink on the computer — even when I use a large graphic tablet to render the nuts out of my work in color. Furthermore, I have not invested a lot of my practice time on fine line work. During the creation of this illustration, I rough out the lines digitally, much like young animators would rough out key frames. But instead of inking over these rough lines, I erased them to form more polished lines. They were not refined enough to be fluid comic line art, but they did maintain a graffiti quality.

I could’ve let the line art just pop out and come across as grafitti art, but I wasn’t going to give that treatment to this lady. So I just proceeded to paint using various layers held in place with hastily put together flats. Typically the lineart is given its own colors AFTER rendering is done, but.here - using my own “Pixel Pintura” process I am able to color the lines concurrently with the rest of the image.

The result of using these methods is a much sharper image. Naturally less blurred from Photoshop’s anti-aliased brushes because of the flats, and for me closer to my experiences in drawing for animation.

Check out this new pinup of Jenny Bangban going into the portfolio! Inspired from a recent trip of mine to Leo Burnett Philippines (24 & 25th floor of the Enterprise Center, Makati.) There was this lady who caught my eye. (I sketched her real quick.) She was dressed in snazzy dark blue business attire, had her long hair tied into a bun behind her head, and mmm hmmm she wore glasses! The smart look, I really like the smart look.

Jenny Bangban however looks more like a sales lady in SM! Those girls almost never tie their hair into buns or wear glasses.

In preparation for my talk during Xavier School’s Golden Jubilee Activity Week, I made this one page autobiography for the students of the grade school Art Club.

Click the image for a legible version.

Rene Descartes put it “I believe therefore I am.” And since I don’t want to go on simply about HOW to become an illustrator, then I will answer the WHY I think I am, and maybe other “WHYs” in the process. Really more important than just the “HOWs”. Xavierians need to KNOW!! I wish I had that could go back in time and speak to the Joel Chua 20 years ago to tell him what I’m going to be telling these students on November 29.

With currently no major project, I’ve had more time to explore personal work. Speed painting characters is something I enjoy. Just doodling digitally without reference while excited to apply the new found understanding from the Seven Camels blog. Have you visited it yet?

>

I come up with a good number of characters, but frankly I have yet to muster the discipline of putting them to story. Perhaps I yet to have a strong enough reason why I should do so.

However, I am working on something of my own that has a story. A story you’d probably see told on a tv cartoon. It’s not a glamorous thing, but an exercise to see if I can still produce a story by my own. Please watch for it.

After all the Marvel, Disney, and anime conditioning and after visiting the Temple of the Seven Camels I realized that I do have a handful of different illustration styles. And through a bit of introspection, studying my education and experiences, I have I tend to pursue styles that can exist in 3 dimensional space and styles that used idealized realism. This is a result of animation and illustration instruction and not of a graphic design education that my peers in children’s books illustration have been fortunate enough to have 4 years of. I like keeping characters simple enough to cross multiple mediums yet detailed enough to express subtle emotion. This revelation prompted me to delve deeper into my quest for defining what “style” is and I questioned whether the goal is truly to come up with a style of one’s own.

I will remember 2006 as the year I discovered and grounded myself in the fact that drawing is design. I had previously known that 2 dimensional qualities of a drawing (composition, rhythm, etc.) take precursory importance to 3 dimensional construction of forms. But reading into the Seven Camels blog has led me to explore (graphic) design oriented decisions while drawing characters (yes it sounds so common sense now.) Something I usually overlook on the way to character gestures, poses, and facial expressions. I mean you can build a character with cylinders and prisms, but that’s not really much of design now, is it? It’s the contractor’s job to build building through various parts, it’s an architect’s job to design the building’s look. As illustrator, especially in children’s books, you want to have both jobs. If you are an illustrator, please do visit that the Temple of Seven Camels. It’s a sharp education you won’t find in the classroom quite suited for the character designer.

I’m now trying to break out of the habit of just slapping together cylinders and prisms. I have begun my exploration of caricatured versions of reality and I have faith that this will reinforce my illustration portfolio.

Xavier Alumni were treated to the extravagant Golden Jubilee Celebration at the new sports center in the Xavier School campus. In attendance were batches from the 1960s up to the 2000s. And performing to the delight of the crowd (especially celebrating batch ‘81) were the Orange & Lemons, Itchy Worms, Barbie Almalbis, Sponge Cola, Parokya ni Edgar (lots of screaming girlies!!) , and the one and only APO HIKING SOCIETY (they were awesome!!).

But I ate using a pair of fishball sticks as chopsticks. They ran out of spoons & forks.

And while I didn’t win any of the raffle items (the Toyota Vios, 1 year Gold’s Gym membership, and trips to HK and Taiwan).. I got to bring home 100 pesos in cash having been so generously given from a gentleman from the very happy and very energetic batch 1981. (He happens to be a friend of Arch. Bronne Dytoc my former professor and Animersion colleague.) I had (tried) to do a caricature of the man and did fairly well even without having him sit down and stay put. Many thanks.

Met Gary Quiec, Kingsley Tan from section D. Alemberg Ang, Jan Yang, Brian Llanos Dee, Russel Tan from the other sections. Marco Andaya also went, though I didn’t see him. So FEW!! Our 1995 batchmates have apparently gone abroad or are too occupied for XS nostalgia. I myself would probably skip the next one due to the dismal attendance of my batchmates!

The Alamat ng Butiki project was done a long time ago, so this is just about collections. I had submitted the layered files (as requested) and was paid my first half of the money. But apparently Lampara is picky about their layered files. They wanted it in Photoshop format, not as TIFFs. After ALL that time I was asking for feedback, they don’t send me anything… and now this! Yeesh.

So I basically used up another 2 hours of my time to go there and submit Photoshop versions.

One thing I learned from this, publishers need to be educated just like any other design client. Now if they STILL ask for layers of my work, I’ll simply tell them that what’s flattened is flattened and that I really don’t have any more layers for them to play around with. I suppose some publishers think that just because it’s digital work that there are SUPPOSED to be layers. Well, no. Sorry.

Ang Ilustrador ng Kabataan just finished its nomination process and elections have begun.
I am currently PRO… now I’ve been nominated to Secretary for next year, having declined the nomination for president (that’d be a real workout.)

Speaking of elections … friend Anson Yu provided me with this picture of a bit of “campaigning” going on in the Manila area.

So if people do Google for the honorable attorney, perhaps more people will visit my site! Uh… Free advertising ~ !