Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Call Me Frank


This piece was done for my final assignment for my Digital Art module. The theme was "A Singapore Fantasy Christmas", and we were supposed to take a photograph of a landmark in Singapore, put a person from a different photograph into it and make it look real. My idea was to put a Santarina on top of the Fullerton Hotel.

Here in Singapore, we have Christmas decorations along Orchard Road, which is our shopping district. There is actually a competition for the best decorated shopping centre. This picture played on that a little, making the Santarina a "decoration" for the Fullerton. I'm sure the Fullerton would have won if this were real (I should try to send this picture to the papers or something).

This is the first time I'm doing any photo compositing. After deciding on the idea, I couldn't get anyone to pose for me, and I didn't have a santarina outfit either. My teacher suggested that I looked for different pictures and cut and paste the body parts and put them together to get the picture I wanted. I was fortunate enough to find several photographs of the same Asian santarina taken by a Singaporean photographer. The stock photos cost me 9 USD, but I got the body parts I needed and was thus able to "frankenstein" the girl for my piece (hence the title "Frankerina"). The clavicle area is a dead giveaway.

The other challenge was to change a daytime photograph to a night scene. Lots of repainting of the lights was needed and that was really troublesome. I had to cut out some of the lighting which Fullerton normally has behind the "Merry Christmas" so there will be enough contrast for the words. The office lights had to be repainted, the street lights, the car lights, the highlights on the buildings, road and plants. If you look closely enough, I painted the green traffic light wrongly. It's supposed to be the bottom light. The top one is supposed to be red.

And here are the original photographs used in the picture (except for the sky):

Friday, December 14, 2007

Thunderhawk 2008


If you're familiar with the cartoon M.A.S.K. (no, not the Jim Carrey one), you're probably an 80's kid like me. M.A.S.K. was one of my favourite cartoons!

I always wanted to do a 3D model of Thunderhawk ever since I learnt how to model cars, so when I had to do some box modeling for my class assignment, I decided to do it. But lo and behold, I couldn't get the blueprints for the original Thunderhawk, and I couldn't get my hands on the toy. So instead of using that old Camaro model, I substituted it with the new Concept Camaro (a la Bumblebee). Since the new model's spoiler at the back is fixed, I did away with the raised spoiler/bumper thing and just added the afterburners below.

The model's far from perfect due to time limitations, but I guess it's good for starters.

P.S. I referred to a good car box modeling tutorial found at http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=156460

My Fav Art - Illustration, Design, Photography, Animation and More!

Welcome to my art blog! I do a lot of art work as part of my job and coursework (I'm studying animation while working) and most of it is displayed in places where people won't look for it or can't access (like Facebook). Because of that I decided to put up a blog featuring some of my art work and explaining some of the processes and problems encountered and solved. Happy viewing!