Hi there people, sorry for the disappearing act for the last few weeks. I been distracted away from my artblogging for the last month of so. You could say things are afoot currently in my life. For one thing, for those who didn’t know, I have quit my job and have been officially a bum for the last 3 weeks. I have decided to go back to freelancing so that I can cope with my night classes in 3D modelling better. So…that’s pretty much how my life is gonna be for the next 6 months or so. If any of ya people have any freelance gigs both inhouse or project bases, please do let me know and we can discuss how to work out the details.
Meanwhile, I have to get back into doing up my blog projects and continue to up my kungfu level. Here are a couple of abstract artworks that I did up with the same techniques in photoshop, but I varied the colors and put in different elements to give the 2 artwork a bipolar totally opposite mood and feel. Have a look see!
PS: It’s good to be back! Miss ya all.
Here a little something to all ya decaying zombies, evil serial killers, bloodsucking vamps and all the other creatures of the night roaming Halloween this year. Enjoy my visuals! GROWL…
Last weekend, me and a bunch of friends were just dancing and partying the night away at St James Powerhouse. I am un-ashame to admit that I totally miss clubbing sometimes. It is quite liberating once in a while whereby you can cut loose and party the night away with good company and some booze to buzz up your senses. I wanna thanks my friends, old and new, who went down and boogie with me for my post birthday celebration. I hoped that you all havd fun too. Remember we still have half a bottle of booze left, so let’s not forget to have a round 2 sometimes soon ok.
Anyway, back to the post. I decided to use some of my past ‘night out’ random shots to do up something quirky and cheeky. Using self created dialogue from my damage brain, I helped bring more life and wits into just a static boring photo. Have fun reading the dialogue. 
Logo designing to many graphic designers is like a 2nd nature pursuit of sort, like breathing or making out. Open any one of us creative folk’s sketch book and I will wager that you will find plenty of doodles of logos and identity concepts. Whether they are drawn letterform, powerful abstract shapes or elaborate illustrations, these ‘creative created representation’ can be the all the difference in making or breaking for any brand. No matter if you are a multi-zillion dollar corporation or just a name of 2 piece garage band, a logo is the face of what your brand is all about and usually consumers first point of contact to what your brand is all about. Needless to say , logo designing is a very big deal .
I personally feel that identity design/branding is such an abused and neglected lost cause sometimes in Singapore. Most clients themselves don’t not see the long term prospect in building up and investing in a brand. Worst, plenty of clients think that it is a piece of cake to come up with a logo and be over and done with. Sure, on one level, it is rather easy come up with any piece of logo, but to get the right logo which encapsulate what the brand wants to communicate… Now that is hard. Simply put, logo designing requires all the creative mojos the designer can muster up to get them right, as well as a solid understanding of the client’s business objectives, the world out there and last but not least, us the human target audiences.
For the next couple of posts, I will showcase some of my identity/logo design creations for everyones’ viewing. They might not represent anything now but who knows in the future, one of them logo might be a Nike or a Starbucks in the making.
Gals and more gals!
Here are 3 images I spent the last couple of weeks doing up. Using a woman image as a main focus, I slowly build layers upon layers of details to each of the images. Hope everyone like the visuals.
On the flip side, I think I been doing a truckload of women visuals for the last couple of months. Wonder if it is my subconscious mind yelling at me to get laid more often. -_-’ Think I am gonna take a little wee break on that and do up some cutesy illustrations for the upcoming post or 2.
Filed under: graphic design
Just feeling abit cheeky when I cooked up this graphic piece of work …Hope everyone like it!
Filed under: Uncategorized
(500) Days of Summer is not your typical hollywood romantic-comedy (Rom-com for short). It was billed as an anti romantic comedy, one which didn’t end with a happy ending. Shot as a small indie flick (just $8millions to make), it is fast becoming a stealth hit throughout the world.
Armed with impressive reviews, I went to watch the movie the last weekend and I totally enjoyed myself. The movie itself is quirky, offbeat and sometimes so out of the norm that it rejects most of the cliches rom-com giving the gene a fresh intake of O2 that I find oh so refreshing and down-to-earth real. So what is this movie about? Basically it is about the 500 days of a boy who fell in love with the wrong girl
In short the break down of movie can be summed up as: boy(Tom) meets girl(Summer), boy fell in love but girl wants to stay ‘friends’, girl breaks boy heart sending him to the pit of hell, boy trying to get back on his feet again. If ever there a a chick flick for blokes, ladies and gentleman, this will be ‘The One!’ Kind of an irony that considering that most failed relationship in the movies is always the guy fault. It is good to finally have a movie that scores one for the guys. Yes, we are human! Yes, we have feeling! Yes, we hurt too when love don’t go our way! Yes, we are GUYS
I especially loved the non linear narrative story telling of the movie, where the days will jump backward and forward with the help of a simple illustrated title card of the city skyline. This made the movie move effortlessly along a back-fro jumble up timeline with hilariously gritty detail, allowing us to feel Tom in before breakup and after breakup roller coster moments that alternate between sweet to bitter and everything else in between.
The gems of the movie include – a street-dancing production number for Tom after his first shag with Summer and the painful French speaking arty monolog which took place while he was dozing in the movies. - These moments are utterly brilliant, out of the blue and not to mention funny as hell too.
So go watch this movie, it is a bracingly honest story about attraction, relationships and failed expectations. Regardless the off-beatness and moment of funnies, it still tells a bittersweet odyssey of a guy’s naive falling head over heels for a gal and the heartbreak and disappointments that came with it – a process which many of us can relate to all too often. The movie tag line sums it up well: This isn’t a love story. This is a story about love.
Yes, very often many love affairs fall apart, but who says they can’t also be glorious and absolutely worth it at the same time too?
Filed under: illustration
Here another of my Photoshop Masturbation, a creation basically about ‘rebirth’, an angel is ‘freeing’ herself in the sky and spreading her wings to soar. Enjoy!
Filed under: graphic design
Let’s face it, most Singaporean don’t really give 2 hoots about our local beauty pageant these days. The once glamourous stage to showcase one’s country beauty, grace and brains have somehow lost its once lustrous glory and profile to become just byline inserts on the newspapers and webpostings. Heck… even now I don’t know who our Miss Singapore beauty representatives to the Miss Universe and Miss World contest over the last few years. And I am wagering my soul here that like me, most Singaporeans too don’t know and worst, don’t really care. In short, like any fab, our beauty scene just lost it prime and faded into old news like a discarded favourite old heels in the dark corner of the closet.
Because of that, for the past few years, our local beauty scene has become more of a close door affair, similar to cult like ritual that solo purpose is to come up with a right ‘champion’ to serve an higher purpose. We (the average singaporeans) are aware of such a happening and we are happy with such an arrangement since we don’t really have to bother much about it. We just left it to the right people to do the right job and that is it.
All hell broke loose with the crowning of this year Miss Singapore World winner. Why? It happened innocently enough, a web interview of Miss Ris Low, a contester who later became the winner of Miss Singapore World 2009. Just log onto Youtube and type ‘Ris Low, Singapore’ and you get a inking what I am talking about. Ever since that interview video came out, Miss Low has been creating headlines throughout and for the wrong reasons.
It’s wasn’t much of the bad english and OTT use of Singish that make me just cringe. Her Miss World contest interview was passable by my standard even though it is still make my skin crawl. It was her apparent lack of intellect display during the web interview PLUS together with her bad language usage that I feel made her a laughing sock and infamously the no 1 most criticised Singaporean in Singapore these days.
We all have our internal mental checklist of what a beauty queen is all about, looks aside which is pretty subjective, the rest of the checklist can be summed up to 4 standard parts – Grace, poise, intellect and eloquence. Based on the video, you can’t blame the rest of Singapore to find her seriously lacking in intellect and eloquence. Our Miss Low not only won the crowd but also 8 special awards into that night. No wonder why everyone is screaming bloody conspiracy and baying for blood.
Then came the sucker punch, Miss Low has a conviction of credit card fraud this year, five charges of using illegally obtained credit cards and using them to buy stuffs. The more the press peeled into her past, the more juice they uncover. She has a bipolar disorder that is the reason for her to steal. Instead of declaring upfront about this issue, she kept it underwrap and only after she won the contest and about to sign the contract that she told the organisers.
Naive or just plain dumb I don’t know. Anyone should know thrusting yourself in the limelight is a surefire way to open yourself to scrunity. Just goes to show, your past do come back to haunt you. Because of this issue, Miss Low felt wise to give up her crowd. (Personally, I don’t think she has any chance of keeping it even if she wants to.) If she had come clean before signing up and the organizers allow her, I would gave her a big applause citing that she a brave gal, raising up to give herself a second chance. Heck, I think the media might have love her even. Thats human nature for ya, we are funny that way too.
Chapter closed? End of story? Nope… barely the dust has settled, Miss Low is now claiming that the runner up Miss Claire Lee is the one who backstabbed her and leaking to the media about her probation. And adding fuel to fire, Miss Low is citing Miss Lee is faking her back injury to save herself from embarrassment. This is turning out to be a full blown mudslinging contest and I guessing it won’t end anytime soon.
Beauty, backstabbing, fraud and deceit. This is fast turning out to be a espisode of CSI Miami I telling ya… all that is missing is just a chalk outlined body. -_-’
So what is it? Is our 2009 stock of beauty contesters really that bad? Has our beauty scene come down to this state? There something rather tragicially funny about the whole deal. Either way, our organisers have a lot to answer for on their part. I personally said we should shoot all the organisers, Yes, it is not easy to train beauty contesters and host a beauty pageant and there is alot at stake. Fair enough, then shouldn’t ERM World Marketing do abit more to ensure this kind of circus shouldn’t happen in the first place by paying more due diligence.
One thing for sure, at the end of the day, no one gonna come clean and a winner out of this. And as typical human being, we just happy to be at the side line being slightly insensitive and enjoying the whole ‘dirty laundry’ fiasco. Why? Coz… its just plain human nature.
