Geller Outfit

I've been planning on drawing this outfit from Robert Geller's FW 2010 show for ages, and have had an idea bandied about in my head for a while. Thought I'd try and get it started. But the pose just doesn't seem exciting enough... Anyhow, initial sketch.

The Adventures of Kuh & Ikaw

Back in college, my then-best friend Senen and I had a penchant for making demented stories about our own characters, usually animals with bizarre backstories. After doing all those pastel sketches in the past month, I realized that my sketchy cartoon style might look good in the digital pastel, retaining the roughness that I always had with it (mostly because they were quick, rough, and on whatever sheet of paper we could find), while at the same time giving it a more finished feel (if the rough rendering could be considered finished). Senen and I had talked about finally fleshing out the entire epic story, and this might just be the way to get it going... Of course, this is still subject to further refinement...

In Vestments

I wondered why my duck looked so suspicious of the motley crew beside him, so I decided to leave him naked while the rest were sartorially (well, except for the fish) resplendent. I could arguably draw a whole story based on my critters. And this rough style might be perfect, since my own cartoons were always more rough.

That feeshie thing makes me laugh.

Miss The Migoo

If you encounter any advertising for the animated movie "Mia and The Migoo," run, don't walk, run AWAY from any theatre showing it. What a horrible, awful waste of time. Despite its dubious "Best Animated Feature" award from the European Films Awards, it's definitely not up to Pixar standards for story and substance, and it's wannabee Miyazaki attempt is subpar at best. While the animation was beautiful with a fresh, old school style, the story was non-existent, and the script was horrific. Meanwhile the titular mystical characters were the kind you just wished would die. Ugh. I had to go get a couple of drinks afterward to wash off the bitter taste of that movie, hence my late-ish posting...

Cathy and her friend Heron

Cathy and her friend Heron's heated political debate came to an abrupt end, thanks to Cathy's unexpected new strategy.

Slutty Tinkerbell

That's kind of the mood one gets when listening to Girl Talk's Night Ripper.

Blobby Bob

Watching Buffy on DVD and not really feeling like sketching, so I picked up a pad and doodled. And when I made her nose look so blobby and pudgy by the addition of that horizontal shading, I lost all interest in it, haha.

On a side note: isn't that pad I'm sketching on horrific? It's one of those free things that junk mailers send you along with stickers of your name and address. I can't bring myself to just throw them away no matter how ugly, because it's such a waste of paper, so they end up being used for shopping lists, To Do memorandums and, apparently, lousy sketches.

When In Doubt, Add a Feeshie Thing

Some days I like nothing better than a stupid-looking passel of critters.

Silly Veggie Thing

After working so traditionally on Bobby's drawing, the last thing I want to do is launch into another high-effort piece (although frankly, I'm inspired enough to do so). But man, my drawing hand needs a rest - it gets cramped from all that stylus-handling! So, have yourself a veggie clown thingie.

Bobby 2011.4 DONE!

I. JUST. CAN'T. STOP!!

I keep tinkering and tinkering with the Bobby sketch, and it keeps evolving on me, and as it does, the other parts that were fine a day ago need to be redone...! It's becoming more of a portrait now than it is a sketch, which is fine I suppose... you'll notice the colors are a little more subdued and layered, and I adjusted the tilt of the head as well as defined many of the details, like the lips, hair and eyes... pretty much everything.

I'm reasonably sure this is done, but I'm gonna walk away from it for now and come back to it later. I'll either love it or want to retool it, but one way or another I'll have some sort of decision about it!

edit: I fixed a few details that I spied last night, i,e, the corner of the lip as well as a bit of refinement to the nose, and I have decided that this portrait is done! As someone recenty told me, "Done is better than perfect." Hello. Glad to move on!

Bobby 2011.3

I'm starting to get into the niggly little details and it's much more involved, as I supposed subconsciously I've decided that certain parts of it are done so now I'm less inclined to be adventurous for fear of runing it. Still, I love doing the details, rough as I'm handling them.

Bobby 2011.2

Omg, I'm going so classical with this drawing it's not like me. When you finally get a groove, things just happen, and it's so much fun when it does. But damn, it takes such a long time to get there, and you can't just turn on the inspiration like a switch. I'm finally getting a groove with this portrait, but it's honestly taken years... and there's a horde of unfinished 'canvases' all awaiting their turn at completion.

I also tried a sharpening filter on it and I do like how the strokes get even more painterly...

Bobby 2011.1

Continuing the unabashed editing of a now years-old portrait of my friend Bobby, whose hair is now shoulder-length, just to indicate how much time has passed since I took the reference photo (2009! Yikes!).
I started sketching in "pastel" in Painter and really took a few steps back to add in details that I was too timid to really map out. Even at the expense of warping what I thought were well-rendered features, I just needed to let go (as I had done earlier this year when I first started retooling this portrait) and let the instincts take over. I even started doing my signature color bursts, like the hot pink on his lips and the bright navy at his nape, just for kicks. They weren't necessarily in the photo, but I 'saw' them. The face will need refining later, but for now, the underpainting is coming along. I even popped up the levels in Photoshop, because I was too timid with the colors. It's actually fun again.

Silly Bird Thing, Too

I'm kinda liking this silly bird thing. Can you tell?

Silly Bird Thing

I was simultaneously watching old episodes of Buffy while chatting with a friend in Australia about the Japanese nuclear crisis, and sketching on a pad I had lying around. Needless to say nothing had anything to do with any of the other activities...

Bosco and his friend Heron, 2

Bosco and his friend Heron have absolutely no idea how this happened.

Clemency

I wanted to do a rough fashion sketch with a male model who looked like Clement Chabernaud, so I pulled up a pic from his Uniqlo ads and tried to roughly render his face, but as is my wont I ended up added more and more details to try and make it look like him. But damn, if I'm doing a portrait then I really need to refine the features more, but I don't want to, yet I was treating it like a portrait, so I had to stop... now it's this weird Not Clement face... ugh...

2 Minute Eggplant Thing

Let's see: losing an hour to DST, waking up and rushing over to have brunch with my Filipino Bloggurls Izzy and Wax, running home to get a workout in the gym before heading over for drinks at the new, 2 week old Mondrian hotel with my friends Bosco and Piergiorgio before heading out to dinner and a bar crawl for 6 hours until 2 am? Yup, I have about two minutes to draw something. Apparently something nicely stupid.

2 Minute Duck

So I had to cook for a small dinner party tonight, then went out to a cocktail party at a friend's apartment, then had to return to do all the dishes, and on top of it all, the clock springs ahead and we lose an hour. So I gave myself two minutes to do tonight's sketch, which happened a tad too late with the time change. Ah well. Quack.

Comics Pose, Revised

So much for burning it into my mind - I got teh contraposto all wrong. I went back and retrienved a copy of teh issue because I'd forgotten what the Emerald Empress' costume looked like, and I realized I got the pose kind of on the wrong side. So, minutes of correction, both digital and manual, end up with me just tired of drawing her already! ;)

Comics Pose

I totally forgot to do a drawing last night, but I suppose I can cut myself some slack since I did two drawings just the other day. Anyhow, this was something I was thinking about: a comic book I loved as a child, The Legion of Super Heroes, inspired me to draw. I had never seen illustrations as dynamic nor, to my barely 8 year old eyes, as realistic. It was after reading Superboy and The Legion of Super Heroes issue number 198 that I began my lifelong obsession with comics. There was one pose I remember well, from then-artist Dave Cockrum (who later went on to co-create a little known group of mutants known as the All-New, All-Different X-men) of the Emerald Empress. She wasn't zapping any rays from her hands or emanating any powers, just directing her magic Emerald Eye, but man, she was working the pose! It was burned in my mind so I made a quick sketch and abandoned it for later as I went about my day (which was pretty damn busy, I might add).

Manolis and his friend Heron

Manolis and his friend Heron waited for ages on the set of "Central Perk," but Jennifer Anniston never did show up with any coffee.

Neuva Camisa

While I was rethinking the barongs, I thought about retooling all the other traditional parts of Filipino native dress. The camisa de chino is one of my favorite shirts (I own and wear quite a few even today) as it's basically a short-sleeved henley with really wide ribbing on the sleeves. I thought about extending it into more of a shirt dress kind of length to make it something that can be worn by itself by women, but also adding seamwork so there's a bit of an Alaia/Geller/cyber feel to it. Against all white cotton and rib, it just makes it an almost tech version of the the classic pinoy undergarment...

Barong Filipina, 3

This was actually a sketch I did two days ago, but I was holding back on publishing since a friend of mine cautioned that publishing the ideas could lead to someone knocking them off. But another opined that publishing it now establishes that you thought of it and timestamped it. Anyhow, it became moot when a friend I thought of collaborating with on this as a possible line or article decided to post it on her Facebook page. Ah well.

Anyhow, this continues the idea of wearing the barong casually: I love the idea of paring it with skinny faded jeans and the traditional wooden clogs known as bakya, but carved with the (back-then uber-tacky) idyllic nipa-hut landscape scenes into super-high platform clogs. The bakya idea isn't a new one, but if done with the stratospheric heights popular in fashion today, it's particularly fun and relevant now...

Barong Filipina, 2

I've actually designed like a dozen variations, and they keep coming. This is one I thought up while at the gym. Without the right fabric and cut it could go terribly wrong, but I kinda like it as a weird Filipino version of Le Smoking with the current big pants trend coming in. If the pants are a really flowey fabric (peau de soie?) the piña top can be a nice breezy contrast. I threw in the fuschia platform heels just to make it more current. :)

Barong Filipina

So here's the first sketch of a potential design. It's almost like a maternity blouse, but since it's a traditional men's formal uniform in the Philippines, it's kinda fun to rethink it as casual women's wear. I dunno, I kinda like it.

Bagong Barong

A quip between me and another Filipino the other day spurred me to redesign the traditional Filipino barong tagalog, a sheer, oversized man's shirt usually made of pineapple or banana fibers, for women. There have been many versions of the barong throughout the years but I could never recall people wearing it as a casual dress statement. Back in the 90s, I used to wear the linen and ramie versions favored by teachers and office workers as casual wear with chinos and sandals here in New York, a subversion that might be seen as sartorial heresy back in Manila (somewhat akin to wearing a tux jacket with jeans). But Filipino women rarely used it instead preferring the rather overt statement of the terno, with its almost costumey butterfly sleeves. So I thought it might be fun to redesign the barong as a flirty woman's top. These are a few initial ideas.

Flip Fops

I decided my 30s fop from yesterday needed a flipside view. It's a very feminine pose but hey, they're fops, they're all posed in foppery. I like that word, foppery.

There's something really satisfying about just sketching with a pen and paper - or any natural media, I suppose. It just has such a weight to the illustration, because it's so real. Even throwaway sketches like these feel more important than just quickies in Painter, which I often feel I can just delete without saving (ironically a feature that I often think is a plus for fear of wasting paper). I really should do more natural media sketches.

Deco Contraposto

I was watching "Inception" and got a very strong sense of 30s menswear chic. This isn't a drawing based on any one character or look, but the feel of elegance. Joseph Gordon Levitt had a very elegant lean feel to him in the movie (although not as fey as my drawing). Kinda swoopy.

Jil Sander FW2011, closeup

I must've been inspired by the makeup - this face turned out really nicely despite how quickly I drew it (from my imagination, although I did have a reference for the makeup, even if I didn't really copy the model's face). I just went into it and refined a few lines and features.

Jil Sander FW2011

I used to love Raf Simons' menswear, but I soured pretty quickly when he took the reins of Jil Sander, as I felt his designs lost what it was that I loved about the collections and both lines seemed to blur into one another... although I always liked how his menswear sensibilities translated into his Jil Sander women's collection. Still, I was ready to write him off completely this year after another disappointing menswear runway show for both his eponymous line as well as Sander, but after two especially directional women's collections, I'm warming up again. I still don't love the menswear, but my appreciation for his Sander women's wear is offsetting that. This is the beauty look of his latest Sander show for FW 2011.

Catalog Croquis, 2

I decided to fill in some details and render the sketch more, albeit sketchily, as opposed to how I might plan to do this. I wonder if I worked designing clothing if I would actually sketch this way more? Anyhow, here's Hathaway's Atelier Versace gown from the evening, my favorite of the 6 that she wore Oscar night.