Valley Orchid

Valley Orchid

It’s not much to look at, but there’s something that barely looks like an orchid in the picture below. No, I don’t know which species it is, only that it’s yellow. And yes, there’s a water-filled valley beneath it. This is my second piece using Painter Classic, scratched out with dry media mostly. Using the program is more difficult than I thought. Oh, by the way, check out this amazing colour-based optical illusion. It’s quite amazing, especially the third one.

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New Peripheral On The Block

Arise, New Graphics Tablet!

The other cool stuff I bought the same day I bought the table is this Wacom Graphire 3 graphics tablet. In fact, I’ve been wanting it for many years now that when I finally have it in my hands, I didn’t have the heart to remove it from its box and plug it in for FOUR DAYS. This morning I finally did it. After getting the tablet up and running with my computer, I proceeded to install the bundled Painter Classic software. When I finally ran the program, my blood went cold. All the colours were screwed up! It took me about 30 minutes before I decided to increase my monitor’s setting from 16-bit to 32-bit colour. Only then did I let out a sigh of relief. I grabbed the stylus, played around with the controls a bit; then tried playing with different brushes and tool on different layers; finally […]

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It's finally assembled

Tales of the Prototype and the Table

Last week, we printed out some of the prototype pages for the first ever Hishgraphics e-book. To be honest, prior to this I do have a fair amount of doubts about the project. In my mind, I estimated that perhaps this would have a 20-30% success when it’s eventually released into the wild. But after holding these coloured printouts in my hands, looking at the storytelling from the viewpoint of sequential art, I feel like this has at least 60% chance of succeeding. The story is somewhat half-baked, in retrospect it looks to me like its influenced by a bunch of different sources such as the C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree series, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and Pixar’s Monsters Inc. Substantially more text has now been added to the short paragraphs with large typeface size that you see on the image above, so the current version […]

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Baen Free Library

There are many reasons why I love the intarweb. One of them is free cool stuff you can get from various sites, and legal too. Baen Books is a publisher of science fiction books, and it has now jumped onto the freebie net goodies bandwagon by unleashing upon its readers the Baen Free Library. Check out the free science fiction stories written by professional authors. You can read in several formats which is kind of cool. Cause if say, HTML format gives you an allergic reaction, you can always switch to RTF. I’m just gonna pick out which story to read. I’ll go get my dice now.

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The Crescent Cliffs

The Cliff In My Mind’s Eye

So after drawing a dozen or so robots and a couple of cyborgs for a freelance client, I thought I’d take a break and draw a quick pencil sketch of this seaside landscape which real estate value would no doubt be way over my head should the location exist. I figure this would be a fantastic place to cook fried noodles. Anyway, enjoy. The art, I mean, not the fried noodles.

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Fried Noodles With Omelette

Today’s Breakfast

Using whatever ingredients left in the fridge, I came up with this earlier today, took a picture of it, gobbled it all down, and now in my belly it will find a new definition of pain & suffering as it is slowly digested over a thousand years.

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Baseball Anyone?

What could be more American than baseball and apple pie? Why would a Malaysian girl even give a hoot? Because baseball is Vin’s obsession. (He likes apple pie too, and blasphemously, I don’t, but that’s a different story altogether). During the spring and summer months Vin eats, drinks, lives, and breathes baseball. During the off-season, he keeps track of the trades and developments in the Major Leagues. We started dating in August of 2000, and by the fall of 2001 (the first full baseball season, spring-summer of 2001), I could read a box score. And Vin and I had a long-distance relationship. Many baseball widows would probably reprimand me for encouraging this obsession but (un)fortunately for me, baseball means more than just something Vin is unnaturally fixated on. We met at a baseball game. What? What was I, the least-interested-worst-possible-athletic person in the world doing at a baseball game? Yes, […]

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But did he pee in this?

JLU -The Cadmus Arc

I’ve been a comic book reader ever since I can remember. One of the best spin-offs from the DC Universe would be the DC Animated Universe, beginning with Batman: The Animated Series. The current series set in the same universe is the Justice League Unlimited, based on the Justice League of America comic book, where dozens of heroes pull together to keep Earth safe from evil from both within and without from their space station, the Watchtower. Sounds cheesy? Not if you watch it and catch the excellently written dialogue and tightly storyboarded animation that comes with it. JLU has become one of my favourite animated show ever. Here is a review of 3 of 4 of the Cadmus arc episodes, “Question Authority”, “Flashpoint” and “Panic In The Sky.”. Project Cadmus is no small matter in the comics. Among other things, it created the genetically modified clone which became the […]

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They are for the big

Star Wars Episode III – Backstroke of the West

I present to you screen captures from Star Wars Episode III – Backstroke of the West by way of winterson.com blog. There’s not much I can add to this, except for a whole bunch of loud belly-achin’ laughs. “The front is a lemon avenue flying straightly”? Comedy gold. We need the original actors to redub the movie reading off this subtitle.

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