Submitted for Aurora's tour poster competition via talenthouse.

The competition was love at first sight, I havent heard of the singer before then. But seeing her visual aesthetics and listening to her music gave me the rush of inspiration I've been lacking with for the past couple of months.

The competition's rules prevents me from using 3rd party images, so i took it as a challenge to illustrate instead of my usual digital-imaging. Unlike the regular illustration approach, I'd draw in all the parts separately and piece them together like a collage, The background image was a scanned image of mixed-media collage made from news-clippings.

Original artwork

Poster Layout

Closeup 03

Closeup 02

Closeup 03

Closeup 04

Step-by-step

Hola i'm back in Palopo, this place is slowly turning into home for me, I'll be here for a while which means limited internet. Urgh. Still love it here though. :3

Here's a new piece, I got stuck & pretty much gave up on it for a while. Eventually tried to play around with textures and patterns and voila! done.

(closeups under the cut)

New works up! wasnt sure what was gonna come out of it actually. I started with the CARAMEL piece, which was a zoomed out image with her shoulders and torso, but I got stuck halfway not sure how to finish it so I cut her up and made CHALICE. After a while I zoomed in and realised she looked better composition-wise as a closeup face :)

Hola Hola! I've been experimenting with different brushes while trying to discover a variety of digital painting techniques. Dragonfly was done primarily with one soft brush, and separate brush for the hair details. While Butterfly was done with a whole range of textured brushes and stuff. Personally I'm preferring the softer look in Dragonfly. Less in more I guess.

Dragonfly

Soft shading style

Butterfly

Hard edges & texures

Black Wing

Couldn't resist doing another one!

Original Artwork

Details

Feeling a little dark and a little romantic...

...and if time (inspiration) permits, i'll turn this into a series.

Original Artwork

Details

A while back I had an offer to print an artbook in order to promote a newly opened printing service. They requested 152 pages of artworks, which is pretty much gave me a heart-breaking revelation: That I dont have 152 pages worth of artworks!!!!

What the heck was I doing all these years? Have I been slaving to clients that I dont even have enough artworks I could proudly present as "my own"?

Tragic.

So I ended up in a situation where I will do nothing else but create! My deadline to submit "152" pages was in 3 days since my offer... Sounds impossible but It had to be done for my sanity's sake.

Fortunately for me I got another 2 days extension to work things out... I had to keep churning out new artworks and expanding on some old ones within the short timeframe. 3/5 days I kept wanting to give up, but thankfully I've gotten a lotta push and support from the people around me.

In the end, having to create 20 new pieces in 5 days is ridiculous... So eventually I negotiated to reduce my page count to around 96.

Voila! I have my very own artbook! with plenty of new works to upload on this blog :)


here's the cover artwork