Watching "how to " videos on youtube and purchasing some supplies for classes

12:50 pm Pacific

Notes from watching "How to Paint Digitally" videos on Youtube:
It looks like flow remains at 100% while opacity obliviously gets changed throughout the painting process. The artist of a video I watched used 40% for sketching out the line art or rough line art, color dodge for highlights and multiply for shadows. It looks like he also uses 40% for shadows and highlights (on multiply and color dodge layers) for the lighting layer. After that, he puts the coloring in a group with normal layers within it so it creates a multiply property (rather than separate layers with multiply layers turned on). The base colors were painted in at 100% and the following layers are around the range of 20-40%
 I already knew about the opacity and multiply but I forgot about color dodge being used for highlights. For some reason I substituted 'overlay' for 'color dodge' as the layer blending mode for highlights. I believe overlay is more for bringing out more colors. I also need to remind myself to merge layers when I finish with whatever I was doing on that layer and to eyedrop + blend to even things out per merge. I should also try out the flatten option and build up from there for a few pieces.

I wonder if this is jet lag kicking in?

10:40 pm Pacific

I've started yawning again though I don't know exactly why I'm this tired this early. A few reasons could be waking up before 7am today, jet lag (though it's not suppose to be this bad if a person travels from East Coast to West Coast)  or lugging 5  bags of groceries with my roommate from the supermarket for almost a mile (0.8 to be exact).

My ankles and feet are definitely feeling the soreness. It's also likely this soreness carried over from Wednesday's  and yesterday's walks for shopping and afternoon visit of Fisherman's Wharf.

In other news, I'm still waiting for my last package to arrive from its transit from Richmond, CA 's sorting facility. I'm still worried about the safety of my package...especially since the internet has been calling Richmond sorting facility a 'black hole'.

My feet are killing me from all the walking I've been doing these two days.

10:35 pm Pacific

Having went through Day 1 of living in San Fran, I can honestly say the weather is very fickle. This applies more so to the afternoon rather than the mornings or evenings. It's hot one moment and then when the wind blows it's cool/cold enough that you need to wear a jacket. The internet wasn't kidding when it said it's a good idea to bring a jacket with you always.
Supposedly it's pretty cold during the winter season here in San Fran but I don't know how that is compared to winter on the East Coast. I know it can get chilly so sweaters sound reasonable at the moment. I may have to pack some winter clothes from home when I go back during winter break. I know I have to bring a few random things I know I don't need.
I got to experience a few different forms of transportation today.

Arrived in San Fran; only getting a chance to write about it now

I'm just about to crash for the night and it's only 9:54pm (Pacific) here in San Fran. I think it's a mix of jet lag and lots of walking around for dorm shopping and meals. Oh and getting my student ID.

My eyes are so dry now and I definitely had to keep drinking a lot of fluids since it's pretty dry weather here.
Walking to Target was a little more than I thought it'd be but found of a lot of restaurants within walking distance of my dorm. But I don't know what I'm going to do about the meal plan I got... the school cafes are way out of walking distance from my dorm, classes and art store nearby.

I should change the time zone on the posts. Maybe. Right now I just want to sleep.

Moving onto page 12, corrections I need to make

Finally move on from page 11 and working on page 12. I need to change up the panel boxes info; I feel like a lot of ten show front or side views of people's faces and not so much zoomed out side angled shots, etc. 

I need to fix some details regarding the groups contacting each other ; I've got the hand facing the wrong way. 

I'm glad I haven't written into the comic pages itself what Lee's name was yet. It's literally the next panel I need to sketch. Blue Bolt already existed as a superhero so Buster will have to be Lee's alter ego /superhero name instead. But heck, there are a LOT of Busters out there! 

I can't believe I go to San Fran early tomorrow morning. I'm still debating if I should just stay up until I need to leave for the airport, which is around 2:30 am. I've stayed up until that time before, both during this summer and during the school term, I just haven't stayed up until that time recently nor have I gone until around 6 am without sleep recently. The last time I did was my all nighter near finals in May. However, I figure I can sleep on the way to the airport in the car and sleep for the number of hours it takes to get from Newark to San Fran. 

continuing on page 11 and San Fran in a few days!

I realized as I was eating dinner that my right hand, my drawing hand, 's muscles felt slightly tense. I decided for the sake of my hand's future I would take a rest with drawing and sketching until tomorrow.

I spent probably 3-4 hours placing the outlines on top of the sketches of page 11 of my comic.

Figuring out solutions for scenes following page 11

I realized, before taking a break for dinner, that with how things were progressing on page 11, it wouldn't lead to Spark Shock's dilemma later on in a realistic way. The main issue would be how Lee would get thrown into the room if the villain was tied up.

new Batman actor and page 11 of comic WIP

I didn't expect the news of the new Batman actor to make it to CNN news but I guess the debate was big enough to make it there?

When I discovered the news yesterday, I realized I never actually watched Daredevil (2003). I decided to take a chance and watch it despite the ratings it got. I'll just say it was a good attempt. The attempts of showing Daredevil's "vision" was pretty neat but I felt like the movie was more so a romance between Daredevil/Murdock with Elektra than Hells Kitchen and Daredevil, if that makes any sense.

In other news, I actually woke up at a decent time today!

Rainy weather

Rainy weather never helps with me trying to wake up early. I woke up before 7am to see one part of my room bathed in orange light while the other with the usual sunlight aura. I still feel like I might have been dreaming about that part. I fell asleep again and got woken up by the rain at 8 am only to fall asleep and wake up again with my alarms around 10:50am .

I ended up having to run errands with my mom again today and our faulty garage door gave us troubles. I don't know what's wrong with it but it'll either not close or take forever to open only 80-90% of the way. What's even worse is that it's always one or the other and always requires manually closing it half way.

In other news, I think I'll do some work on my comic; I'll have to see how much I could work on it when classes start again though but that's later on.

Still packing

Sigh, I'll never like packing, regardless of the occasion. Boxes shipped but baggage needs to be sorted. I took measurements of the luggage to see if they were under the dimension restrictions and then I had to run through the dimensions of carry on luggage. Rather annoying; having to measure various amounts of suitcases.

Tree Gate concept

I re-visited an image that I had in my head when I looked back at some books from my childhood. When I was little, I kept up with the Pendragon series. Within the series, there were gates or portals or some kind that allowed Pendragon to travel to different time periods or worlds. The gates were relevant to the worlds they were a part of. I imagined if there was a forest or jungle sort of world, trees would serves as gates.

Thus this concept:

Packing continues and pauses several times

I wonder if I can say I'm half way through packing? I've gotten through most of the stuff I need to ship, now I need to figure out how much and what kind of clothes to bring via suitcase and via shipping.

Gonna be busy the next few days

I'm going to be preoccupied with packing things, such as clothes, bedding, kitchen ware,etc, to ship over to California before I take the plane next week. My friends know I'm heading to San Fran at the end of Aug to continue my studies at Academy of Art University. People following my blog may not since I think I only kept the news on Facebook or word of mouth among my friends.
Anyways, while I'm figuring out what to pack for carry on and what to pack to ship, I might not have a chance to do any sketches. It all depends how fast and how much I need to pack. It could range from a few hours or a few days but I definitely need to pack things to ship before the end of the week.

In other news, the next series I decided to pick to watch while sketching was Iron Man (animated series from 1994-96) , Fantastic Four (1994 series), and Spider Man (1994 series). I have no recollection of ever seeing Iron Man (the animated series) on tv during my childhood but I do recall watching some episodes of Fantastic Four and a good chunk of Spider Man but not the whole series, thus selecting these series to watch.

Another self portrait/profile picture drawing attempt

I still haven't been as inspired with a potential profile picture drawing as I was with the scarf one. Today's was a random pose I thought of while looking at my tablet and pen.  Even a cropped version doesn't satisfy me, but at least I'm more satisfied with this one than the one from 3 days ago.

Lady Arachnid - original character design, colored

I fixed the hair color and fixed up the right part of the image. Additionally I added some quick shadows. 

In the meantime, I accidentally found a full game play through of Batman: Arkham City and Batman: Arkham Asylum! I really do love the amount of work put into these two games; the challenges, characters movement, combat, story, plot,etc. I might be a bit bias though as I'm a fan of DC and Marvel, haha.

On a different note, I realized I haven't worked on my comic in a few days. Pages 9 and 10 are sketched up but haven't been colored. I'm trying to think of what to put on page 11 since at the moment the story seems to jump from the main character, to the groups to the main character's brother and cousin. I need something to tie everything together again.

Lady Arachnid - original character design, colored

Oh wow my hand is sore. I finally got the colors applied onto the character. I'll have to go back and polish it a little more later today, unless I get another idea.

A few things I know I have to fix are the darkness of the hair, color balance and probably a simple background to use for shadows. 

Lady Arachnid - original character , design

As I mentioned earlier today in a post, I had an inspiration for another character design. I was surprised how long it took for me to finish designing the character.
I think I took about...4 hours.

Notes on another character design

I guess after watching Face Off and Heroes of Cosplay on the Syfy channel, I got a sudden inspiration for a character. I had the sudden thought of 'how do these people think of these creations?' which spawned my next drawing.
Originally I wasn't sure if this would be a 'hero' or a 'villain' but I guess I'd do something different; spiders usually get depicted as enemies/ the bad guys ( Spider-Man is an exception!!)  but what about as a hero?
Spider-like hair, however that would be depicted. Two forms: human version and powered up version. Powered form would be a lot taller than the human form. Personality is slightly different; elegance as Lady Arachnid or Arach.. haven't decided which yet. Hair up in bun but with strands of hair in form of spider legs? That's something I'm trying to figure out how realistic that would be. The bun should look like the body of a spider...
Robed costume, bare shoulders, partial cloak? Lace or some sort of embroidery along sleeve ends and dress/robe ends. Cloth that allows movement.  Black and red color scheme. Perhaps a bit of gold?

Attempted self portrait based on actual photo of myself

For a while I've been wanting to have a new profile picture but one that I would draw of myself. So far it looks like that's still in the future since the one I attempted today didn't turn out satisfactory.
Maybe I should try a cartoon style rather than realistic since it doesn't look like I have enough skill for realism yet.

Still learning through reading tutorials

Another tutorial found on deviantART that gave me tips for my worn process with digitally painting my drawings. Though the original tutorial applies to mostly SAI, the general steps the deviant described will definitely help.

Things I noticed were blending the background with the subject; airbrushing the subject colors into the background and vice versa. 

Another is the slap on of colors before blending which will desaturate it. Now I know how people add those blues onto the skin.

I still need to improve my drawings though before coloring. 

Sketch dump of randomly drawn characters, if you can call them that.

I seriously need sound while I work so I ended up having anime episodes playing on the left half of my screen while I sketched these characters out. A few of them are a bit ...out there. 

I've got to say though, I really enjoyed the past 3 series I found and watched.

  Symphogear , Zombie Loan,  and Psycho-Pass. 

Symphogear's story was unique so it caught my interest. Actually all 3 were. Battle armor and weapons powered by song. People brought back to life to hunt the living dead and a girl who can identify if they're zombies or not with her eyes. A system that determines people's psychological state and a police force to capture or kill the criminals the system labels. 

Symphogear is still on going so I can wait to see what happens and how things came to be. The origins and what the end might entail.

Zombie Loan's anime didn't cover enough of the details in the manga sadly. The manga completed though so I definitely recommend those who are interested to read it! I enjoyed the twists and turns and "no-ways" it gave me. The ending was something I liked though I won't say more. 

Psycho Pass finished its first season and a second season is due to come out so I can't wait to see what the second season will bring. I can't say more than that since I'd end up spoiling it. It's a little bloody though so those who are sensitive to that, this would be a warning I guess. 

If I was watching Psycho Pass when I was younger and more fearful of what watching horror/semi-gore would do to my rather vivid imagination, I'd probably creep myself out, but I've been building up my tolerance. I guess I have to thank my curiosity and a friend of mine who loves horror, despite freaking herself out when she plays games like Amnesia or Slenderman (just to name two). 

I guess I'd be getting a few "Well, it's Amnesia, you really can't be not scared." To give an example, she freaked herself out from a candle or candlelight, I can't recall which one it was. For me, I became slightly tolerant of horror games from watching Youtube videos of people freak out while playing horror games like Fatal Frame , Slenderman and Amensia. But I've never played a horror game so I can't say I'm completely free from fear after all, I still don't dare myself to watch horror movies, much less trailers. But then again, I've been ok with reading horror manga and some horror animes. Maybe something about live versus animated. I'm not saying I don't get chills or jump out of my seat when I do read these manga or watch these anime, because I definitely still do!

I like sleeping in ...a lot especially if I don't have get up early. This is a problem.

I need to stop waking up so late in the day. Then again, it might be because I go to bed 'late', though it's not really late in terms of college students' sleeping schedules. But I like sleeping in a lot especially if I don't have to get up early and as a result, I end up sleeping for 10-11 hours at times. I'm starting to think I need to change my alarms tones again.
I spent early today reading tutorials on deviantART, one of which was a tutorial on drawing from manga style to realistic style. This connected to me strongly, or so I'd like to believe, because it's pretty much how my drawings are right now, though I guess they'd fit into more of a "semi realistic" category. I liked how the tips and images with those tips helped me visually see what the deviant was talking about. Now I just need to apply that new knowledge!

Riverbed

While opening Photoshop, I was thinking about redesigning one of my original characters but I ended up painting an environment instead. An image of a river, leading to bubbling and a path. It seems I've been going with a monster/ sci fi theme lately.

Today felt rather long during the early parts of the afternoon. My mom wanted to see what kind of car my brother bought in terms of seeing if the car had a cargo cover in the back and if the back windows were tinted or not,etc. Then there was another car that was probably the same class with a different model number that was shorter in her eyes and she wanted to make sure. And just before leaving the dealership location, my mom pointed out that the cars outside the building had no price tags whereas the ones inside did and my dad stopped the car, went out and checked. After lunch and some grocery shopping, I found out alkaline batteries can be thrown in the trash. As a result of that discovery, I went through a bag full of  batteries from since my childhood, or even before. I say that because I ended up finding several batteries that were some Chinese brand I believe my parents used. Checking each battery, I made sure they were all alkaline batteries I could throw in the trash. The reason for all of this was because my parents ended up buying rechargeable batteries today and decided to make an effort to use those more so than the non-rechargeable ones. 

Redesigning Character - Shadow

A few minor clothing changes and I think the design looks better. I didn't go into much detail with the coloring though.

Redesigning another character

I decided to redesign another one of my characters yesterday and didn't finish the initial design line work until midnight. However, thinking about it before I went to sleep, I didn't quite like the costume design; it didn't make sense for the character. Clothing wise, I wonder how it'll hold in combat. The collar design doesn't sit well with me yet. Or maybe it's those arm warmers I'm disliking since they seem to clash with the rest of the costume. If I made them less puffy, it might be better. Or maybe to match the hair tie/ornament, they should be in a similar style.

Sketches while waiting...and then falling asleep.

While waiting for my mom to finish her doctor's appointment, I decided to sketch a few things while in the waiting room. I never did finish any of the sketches, either because I was mostly unsure what to sketch or I was pretty tired. Maybe more so the latter since I ended up falling asleep before finishing the last sketch.

I wonder if I can try teaching myself some foundations?

I had a small thought enter my head when I tried the silhouette method for drawing a character. Maybe if I had foundations this would look better/right.  I wonder if I can try teaching some foundations to myself. Something like 30 minutes of figure drawing might prove useful! But then life drawings will be difficult to force myself to do since I'd get bored. Or rather I fear that I'll get bored.

Toxic Waste - concept, rough painting

I wanted to paint something non urban this time for an environment. I didn't really know what to paint subject wise except for "non-urban". After some random splashes of paint on the [digital] canvas, I ended up coming up with toxic waste flowing in the foreground with some sort of mountain and part of a city visible in the background. I figured with toxic waste, there's chance for mutation which would lead to some sort of toxic waste monster. Then again, this is my imagination running wild haha.

Fight in the Distance - more colors

Wow, my muscles are still terribly sore but at least my neck muscles aren't as sore as yesterday. It was horrible, as in terribly uncomfortable, trying to sleep with my neck, upper arm, and thigh muscles hurting!
In other ramblings, I finally got myself to work on the Fight in the Distance concept. I can't seem to get a finished look on it but I think it's because I went with the values first route. I remember reading on someone's blog that that concept artist usually doesn't use values on environment concept art. I figure the reason might be toggling the black and white feature in Photoshop would help figure out if the values still read while using color to paint in the concept.
Even after color balancing and adjusting the saturation, it doesn't look very finished so I think I need to try the method with not painting in the values. I'm going to have to look back at the videos I saw with digital painting environments and seeing how some artists go about with their process.

Sketching out new cover for chapter 1 of comic

Since the silhouette method didn't give me a result I liked or could use, I went back to sketching, outlining and re-outlining for thinner lines. I've decided to paint in the hair though, so that's a work in progress. 

Should I be calling the comic a graphic novel instead?

/edit 7:03 pm EST

I completed the cover.

Tried the silhouette method...didn't like what I got from experiment

So I tried the method of painting the silhouette first and then refining, but I didn't like how the form was shaped. I don't know if it's because of the design or just how it looked after I tried blending in values. I might just want to go back to sketching and outline the final form instead. 

Ahhhhhhh, sore muscles!

So yesterday a friend of mine held their family's annual summer party-get together. It was great seeing friends again, especially since I probably wouldn't be able to see them again until next summer. (I'll be on the other side of the U.S once the summer is over.)

At the party, I definitely was a lot more active than I have been during the rest of the summer. Last year was home run ball (or kick ball... I don't recall the difference). This year, I threw Frisbee with two friends, 'Squeaky' and Shannon, badminton with those same two friends and Chinese Yo-Yo-ed with 'Squeaky'. I ended up going pretty all out, though tennis styled on my end against my friend (Squeaky) who played badminton. It was interesting since neither of us has played our respective sport since high school; she's a year younger than me. Right about now, my muscles are feeling it haha. It probably didn't help that many of us were crouching near a campfire for most of the night when it became too dark haha.
And, now it's almost 2pm. I really need to draw stuff now or I won't really finish anything today.

Spreadsheets and more spreadsheets...and brainstorming?

Changing that font thing is annoying; I wonder how the default looks though. 
...
Might as well test it. Oh it's actually not that bad; this means I can just start typing without having to remind myself about the font style.

I usually start my day with checking deviantART daily deviations to check out what sort of tutorials might have made the DD. Today there was a tutorial on planning novels (I've linked it for any of those who want to give it a read) and there were two things I took away from it. One is to write down all ideas, because it's very likely you'll forget them. Luckily for me, I've been able to remember the more major scenes of my story and the rest of the earlier events have been 'documented' through my attempts at comic-ing (that's probably not a word) during middle school and early high school. There's at least 6 books!! Though they're all different sizes since I literally took notebooks from school that I couldn't fill, ripped out the notes and used those pages as the comic book while stapling a hand drawn cover for them. Definitely not anything presentable, both on the exterior and interior. 

The second thing I took away was making a spreadsheet of *all* your characters. To paraphrase, even the cab driver should get documented! 
Anyways, I plan on roughly setting up an excel spreadsheet and perhaps the character relationships in a notebook. 

Page 8 of comic completed.

Posting something art related rather than organization posts. Finally, haha.

Really wish there was a way to change the default font here, so I don't have to keep reminding myself to change the font every post.

Anyways, I was finally able to get something done on Photoshop after having spent 2 or so days exporting blogs onto this blog and organizing everything as well. 
I wish I had more time in the day to do more but all I could get done for now was coloring in page 8 of my comic. 
My plan for tomorrow, as in when I wake up, is to try a certain method for digital painting. I've been watching FZD videos the past week and want to try the silhouette method. I don't know how well it'll turn out for humanoid characters but it'll still be worth trying it out! 
If the result turns out well enough, I'll use it for creating a cover for chapter 1. As I said before, the first version looks... bland and doesn't really seem like it should be a cover. I actually don't know what it could be used for, if anything. If I'm remembering correctly, I didn't put enough thought into it when I painted it. That or I just had no idea yet. I know for future chapter covers, I plan on featuring an original character of the story for each. 

Update

I've updated all the blogs posts in terms of labels, literally cutting the number of labels down to half or more than half. It was a bit lengthy in terms of the number of hours I had to use up. Now I just need to fix my portfolio posts and I'll be set to get some drawing or painting in today!

Portfolio blog is up and mostly done!

I finally found a good template for portfolio use, now I just need to separate the images into their own posts so the tiles are actually tiles rather than large columns!
I'll leave that for when I wake up later today though... 
Along with going through all my older posts and fixing the labels. That'll be a few hours of tediousness. 

Finally! Moved all blog posts into one blog!

I've finally moved everything , from first art blog on Blogger, from Wordpress (the .com one ) and from Weebly, onto this blog!
It took a while but thank goodness for having archive navigations on these blogs otherwise I would still be clicking to earlier Weebly blog posts! 

On a similar but not so similar note, it looks like the Blogger app can't save or post any blog posts so that's pretty lame. It looks like, until /if they fix the app, I'll have to resort to my Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook page. 

Fight in the Distance - different coloring; plans for when I wake up. Also Instagram?

1:00 AM EST

This would be the second time this week I completely lost track of what time it was and ended up finding out that it was 1 AM. Coincidental? Maybe.
Anyways, I digress. After spending two days (not 24 hours straight) on matching the previous 6 pages of my comic with page 7's style, and finally catching up earlier today, I was able to finally work on coloring 'Fight in the Distance' concept. It took a while for me to get the right blending mode since "Normal" didn't look right even with opacity adjustments. The final decisions were a color wash layer (low saturation color under a multiply layer I believe) and a soft light layer with continuous buildup with a 6-15% opacity brush. 
Tomorrow's plans, as in when I wake up later today, will consist of coloring page 8, which I've already paneled and lined earlier this week, sketching up a new cover page for chapter 1. Hopefully I don't sleep in too late tomorrow and can finish those two tasks before the evening rolls in so I can switch to working on the 'Fight in the Distance' concept.
I may or may not start up recording my progress again. I think for the most part I can't record brainstorming since that'd be boring for viewers, maybe. I need to try creating a character without line art/sketching with lines. Once I know I'm comfortable with a certain method, I'll record stuff then. I know I can do that for environment paintings, at the very least in gray scale (values).
In other news, I finally decided to get Instagram and plan on using it to take reference photo shots. It might be a while before I get any photos taken though.