i didn’t expect the kind of reception it got in the following weeks. people have been asking – no – demanding for more, so occasionally when i have the time i would sit down and scribble a new comic. it was given the honours when DICE themselves recognize the game and featured it on the battlefield blog. i was ecstatic.

then it immediately got the attention of a wider audience, which i am more than grateful for. a russian gaming magazine, gameland.ru, contacted me for publication rights. i traded in publicity and promotion in exchange for the publication rights. this is the first time the comics have been featured on printed media.

you can read the rest of the comics here.

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

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…

i started this when i fell with a fever about almost a year back. somehow i managed to forgotten all about it. and it took another fever a few days back to remind me to finish this piece off.

the 3d model was done in sketchup, basically throwing stuff around without really making any sense. i tried to get a feel of chaos, something of a post-war feel, complimentary to the world of matrigal. then i exported it in grayscale, and painted over in painter 9.5. added the red ghost there as well. this is the first time ever that i’ve used the pallette knife tool. pretty nifty. later transferred into photoshop for after effects. finally i went into coreldraw to add some letterings to break the monotone.

i might need a few hours more to add in more details and basically finish this up entirely. but still running a fever, so perhaps later.

Sabariah Tukang Sihir (Sabariah the Witch) is an idea for a comic book spawned by bohrtaag back in 2002. it tells the story of sabariah, a 15 year old girl who’ve developed a certain mystical abilities after a series of events. the story tells about her life, how she deals with being a teenage girl and at the same time having special abilities, helping others fight their inner demons as well as physical ones. despite having a very complex story line, the project have mellowed down, almost to a fullstop. it never made it as a comic or novel, although it has been developed conceptually. here i’m trying to build on the idea of STS, and construct animated gifs based on the characters turning it into a 2D fighting game ala street fighter, king of fighters, mortal kombat and samurai showdown.

most of the mystical characters are derived from malay folklore, one of it exhibited above is the orang minyak (roughly translated as oily man). technically orang minyak is known as a twisted man who’ve fallen to the dark side while exploring a forbidden knowledge to become invincible. the curse of the knowledge, once u’ve failed to fulfill its requirements, is that the man will become orang minyak. in order to lift the curse, he has to rape 40 virgins until he becomes normal again.

above are supporting characters from Matrigal Graphic Novel. from the left: mastura, suria, ootarid, nor, annisa, dato’ mahagrasy, rafandi and augustus

Hi! Welcome to azarimy’s sketchstation v3.0.

Right now I’m still working on to improve this site using Joomla! Content Management System. All of my stuff are still around, but you will not be able to access it just yet. I’m going to have to manage this site from scratch, and probably combine both my PhD and my sketch/comics stuff into one site.

It’s easier to manage this way, as I won’t have to spend too much time on scripting the site.

Thanks to Joomla! for making this happen.