azarimy's sketchstation

I’m currently in the process of migrating my sketchstation from Joomla to Wordpress. No disrespect to Joomla. It’s great and powerful. But it’s like owning a Jaguar but I only use to to go shopping once a week, every weekend nights. It’s severely underused.

So I opted for Wordpress. It’s much easier to manage, and people are more used to the blog format. Hopefully this will also entice me to update the blog as frequent as possible. Oh yum yum.

this is the first t-shirt design in a series of five for the splintered core game. splintered core is an upcoming online game which i’m involved as art director, and this series will be released as part of the promotion of the game. this is not the final design. i will only showcase the final product here when it has been printed .

done using painter 10 and manga studio 3.0 debut.

sometimes a blog entry doesnt quite need a lengthy text. surely the painting above would be enough, dontcha think so?

how long have i been away? way too long it seems.

here’s an update. i’ve been to egypt and back. i saw the dark knight. i’ve been told my research is on a good path. then i was told i’m about to fail my research bcoz my method is wrong. now i’m venturing into protocol analysis, something i’m not familiar at all. i havent had a haircut in a while. i’m a full time house husband now. i’m a lecturer but i’m still a student.

that about sums my whole life at the moment. now to find some money for tickets back home.

here’s another boring weekend. ila went down to london. i bought her a first class train ticket at only GBP18. that’s filthy cheap! not that i’m a cheapskate though lol.

on the way back, i grabbed june’s empire magazine. it had a 3D cover of the hulk smashing through a wall. i was already prepared to pay when i saw a catchier total film magazine that comes with a free foil poster of hellboy2. now that’s even cooler. so i dropped empire and grabbed total film instead.

browsing the interiors, an artwork caught my eyes. it was an oil poster by stephane levallois, a french artist, depicting the incredible hulk hunching down under an arch bridge in a rainy, misty new york night. or atleast i think it’s new york. anyways, as soon as i got back home, i started scribbling in spirit of the painting. but instead of oil, i opted to use the pallette knife. this is to differentiate my work from his. then i changed the character to batman, and the city to gotham. finally, i opted to use blue tinge instead of green, something that is more inline with batman’s gothic feel.

i spent 3 hours doing this. and it feels good.

looks can be deceiving. look closer.

focus, and hopefully u can see the things hidden.

no i dont mean that.

oh whatever…

yet again another style embraced.

a friend of mine pointed out how my style (or rather “styles”) have gone from impressionistic pencils to 3D assisted sceneries to animated pixel arts. “wouldn’t you want to stick to one style and develop it more?”. would i? i doubt so.

i rather enjoy being able to explore different styles, producing significantly different products while at the same time maintaining the essence of azarimy. u can still notice my preferred exaggeration of proportions, camera/lense action and focus, pseudo-realistic colours and my weak use of lighting. it’s all there. i never intend to be realistic, as i dont find the need to. i evolved from quesada-meet-otomo style, and that’s where i’m sticking to .

owh, you can see clearly the quesada influence in the pencils below:

too much of digital artworks can be hazardous to your health, haha! this piece was done with pencils in about 45 minutes. subject is dr. doom, redesigned as a predator in an alien environment.

just a little bored.

here’s a piece entirely done in coreldraw. it seems i wont be starting to use illustrator anytime soon, so might as well just build up on my coreldraw skills. ofcourse, illustrator is the preferred software for DTP and vector graphics processing. but i started with coreldraw, and i guess this is where i’ll end up.

it’s splinter from teenage mutant ninja turtles meets the ham-hams from hamtaro.