Weekly Inks!

New drawings today!

A typical Sunday includes brunch with my family and checking out books at the bookstore. Browsing through the Art and Lifestyle section, I came across this book called "New Yorker Lookbook: A Gallery of Street Fashion" whose photos were shot by Jake Chessum. I loved the images contained in this book, specially the expression of the girl in the green coat. I decided to make a quick sketch of her and did the same with the two other girls. When I got home later that day, i proceeded with inking them then added color with felt tip pens.

Check out the book here

*****

Since most of my drawings are colorful, I decided to experiment with just a small bunch of hues for this drawing. Inspired by The Sartorialist's photo of this lady. Although I made a change with the shirt design, I just had to include the contrast of the red clutch against her entire outfit.

Read more

Art Stalking: Krisatomic and Garance Doré

It's 3 am in Manila and I am still up, overwhelmed by so many inspirations for my drawings. I talked about acrylic on my previous post, and I cannot wait to give it another go. Unfortunately, time does not allow me to have a good sit down and paint away. Painting takes time, so I only get to paint on weekends. On weekdays when I am busy with work (I am a software programmer by the way), I do pencil and ink drawings. The latest ones were inspired by photos from The Sartorialist. Will post them soon, but in the meantime, check out these wonderful illustrations by Krisatomic and French illustrator Garance Doré. Looking at their drawings makes me want to delve into fashion-related subjects.


illustration by Krisatomic


Illustration by Garance Doré


Don't you want to go shopping now?

Read more

Who Loves Acrylics?

One sunny day, I took an impromptu trip to a second hand book store and bought myself The DK Art School's Introduction To Acrylics. I haven't had a real go at acrylics since highschool, and that was 9 years ago, so I figured it was a good time to get myself familiarized with the medium. I immediately bought the book and an acrylic paint set..

Until a while ago when I tried the paint for the first time in a long time, I was a gouache zealot. For one thing, I am more inclined to use water soluble paints so that clean up is easy. Another thing is that I especially enjoy playing with a painting medium's opacity, which I can utilize using gouache. The disadvantage of gouache is that i can only use it on limited supports; the most obvious is paper. With acrylic, however, different sorts of surfaces can be used for painting since the paint has a characteristic of permanence since it is no longer soluble by water once it is dry. Because of this, when I apply a second layer on a wash, the the underpainting does not mix with the new layer. I'd like to be able to broaden the possibilities with different surfaces such as wood, canvas, or even tiles or flat stones. I've forgotten how fun it is to paint with acrylics, and it looks like I'm going to take a break from gouache and get well acquainted with my new favorite medium. Who loves acrylics? I do!


In search of a subject to paint, I came across a magazine that shows facts about poverty and food scarcity. This subject is quite serious unlike my usual subjects, but I was inspired to make a drawing out of this topic. According to www.thehungersite.com:

It is estimated that one billion people in the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition. That's roughly 100 times as many as those who actually die from these causes each year.

About 24,000 people die every day from hunger or hunger-related causes. This is down from 35,000 ten years ago, and 41,000 twenty years ago. Three-fourths of the deaths are children under the age of five.

Famine and wars cause about 10% of hunger deaths, although these tend to be the ones you hear about most often. The majority of hunger deaths are caused by chronic malnutrition. Families facing extreme poverty are simply unable to get enough food to eat.

The Hunger Site was founded to focus the power of the Internet on a specific humanitarian need: the eradication of world hunger. Since its launch in June 1999, the site has established itself as a leader in online activism, helping to feed the world's hungry. On average, over 220,000 individuals from around the world visit the site each day to click the yellow "Click Here to Give - it's FREE" button. To date, more than 300 million visitors have given more than 500 million cups of staple food.

The staple food funded by clicks at The Hunger Site is paid for by site sponsors and distributed to those in need by Mercy Corps and Feeding America (formerly America's Second Harvest) . 100% of sponsor advertising fees goes to our charitable partners. Funds are split between these organizations and go to the aid of hungry people in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and North America.

Click here to help end hunger!

Read more

The Daily Pill

Here's a new batch of drawings that I did over the last couple of weeks. A lot of them are simple sketches that I did during transit or in between breaks at my office. I recently got myself a small inexpensive drawing notebook for my daily doodles and sketches. I used to carry around a 9" X 12" sketchpad and for someone who has a 9 to 5 job, it can be such a hassle bringing such a big pad of paper at work when there isn't any guarantee that i can find time to draw anyway. At the same time, I felt like I was wasting a good deal of good paper on half done drawings and doodles. So what I did was get myself a really cheap notebook in which I can doodle, take notes, sketch and pretty much document random stuff on paper, then have a proper sit down and draw with proper tools on my big proper sketchpad. I think it works., coz I've been drawing everyday without having to worry about whether or not I'm wasting paper.

What I love about a drawing diary is that not only do I get to put images and ideas on paper, I get to document what I could be feeling or thinking at the time. With the drawing shown here, I was feeling a little nostalgic about a certain song, and missing someone who was as passionate about music as I am. In this drawing, I made use of watercolor pencils for the first time, and I had so much fun experimenting with the medium.

I'm also starting a new handmade card project with the concept of using different greetings around the world. The first one that I did was this French greeting "Bonjour" with girls peeping back at the receiver. I made this with a certain person in mind while I was drawing it, but I've got tons of ideas about this project and I'm really excited to make them happen! Stay tuned!

Read more

Flickr Friday!

It's 4 AM in Manila and I am still up because I just simply cannot sleep. I've been browsing through Flickr since I sat in front of the computer at around 12 midnight to scan a drawing. I've been looking at photos of lotuses and water lilies as subject references and ended up researching about them in Wikipedia.com. After feeding my mind with semi-useless scientific information, I ended just looking through groups and sets of different random photographers and artists in Flickr. I can go hours on end doing this and never getting bored.

I have my own set of drawings and photos but I most often update my Drawings and Doodles set whenever I complete a new sketch or painting. Hopefully I can get a Pro Account soon. This counts as my online portfolio already, but I'm planning to build a website as well.

In the meantime, here are my favorite illustrators and photographers in Flickr. These artists and photographers just amaze me to the core and I check out their sets for updates regularly.

• Krisatomic

• Thad Lawrence

• Olivia Bee

• Chrissie White

Read more

Magazine Stints Anyone?

I got another stint as an illustrator last week and I was so psyched to get in touch with YOU Magazine's editorial coordinator again. I remember getting so worked up the first time I got a text message from one of the magazine's editors who asked me to become a contributing illustrator for their November-December 2008 issue. A writer friend referred me to him and I immediately pulled a bunch of works from my Flickr account for my portfolio. I was simply doing a Project 365 then, and never thought about the idea of getting my work published. But since the opportunity came up, I was definitely up for the challenge.

I was assigned for work in Syracuse, New York in early September 2008 and had managed to make the illustration despite my lack of tools. I lived in a hotel and they didn't have a scanner! I had to drive for 4 miles to the nearest Fed Ex Kinko's on Erie Boulevard to have my drawings scanned. When I checked the file in my flash drive, half of it was ruined (remind me to curse that lady. I paid 2 dollars for that!). I used my friend's high megapixel camera and edited them in photoshop. My raw drawings were not even scanned properly, but they didn't seem to notice. Thank God!

I went back to Manila in December and as I was browsing through a rack of magazines in a bookshop one day, I saw my drawing right there on page 86 of YOU magazine. I grabbed it immediately and bought myself a copy. It was the best feeling.

Doing something for fun is one thing, but to have it become a part of something that is way bigger than you are gives you that sense of accomplishment.

For the record, none of my exes ever stalked me.

Read more