Welcome Back

A remake of an older painting of mine.

Shooting Star

Spotlight on Autodesk

A short article about me on the Autodesk Sketchbook news. My paintings were used as splash screens for Sketchbook Pro (for iPad) for almost a year now. I think they're going to get replaced soon...Check it out.

Spring Fever

This month's entry for Travisty's Beard. Topic was "Spring Fever".

Frozen In Time

I recently stumbled upon this amazing photographer who does animated gif images. I've seen similar approaches before but this totally blew my mind. So beautiful! Make sure to check out this link. I gave it a try myself today. This is my friend at a cafe. I'm certainly gonna do more of those.

update:

I did two more of those today. Gotta find a way to keep the file sizes a bit smaller. The jumping pic was impossible to keep small cause the whole background was moving. So it ended up being over 1MB. It's super fun creating those pics. It requires a lot of thinking.

Light Painting Madness

It's been a while since I painted with light.
I went to Death Valley with my friends this past weekend. It was an overwhelming trip. After watching a beautiful sunset I decided to do some light paintings. Most of them are 30 seconds exposure and painted with the iphone 4 flash light. I explained my technique in one of the earlier posts. It was super fun. (Shot with Nikon D7000 18-105mm 3.5-5.6)

This one is done with a different technique. The letters are extruded with the iPad screen. There is an app called holographium. You type in a word and the app cuts the word into slices and plays back the individual slices over time. Now if you use a long exposure in your camera and move the iPad slowly you can extrude your text in space. Pretty amazing.

And last but not least this is something I did with my co-worker. It's the same technique like above but in this case it's a real human body that was cut into slices. You can find the video and the process here. 

This is a lot of fun and I want to experiment more with it. (Canon 5D Mark II with 24mm 1.4 25sec exposure) 

Inexperienced Hateful Magical Boy

My friend send me a random character generator. It's generates some pretty cool character descriptions. This one was an "Inexperienced Hateful Magical Boy"

Lecture at SJSU April 8th 2011

Last Friday I went to the San Jose State University to hold a presentation for the Shrunken Head Man Club. About 200 students showed up. After a lot of talking from my side I did 3 painting demos. The first one was a simple setting to show the basic concept of lighting and to explain what is going on in my head before I start painting. The second demo was a more complicated setting using the same technique. I refined the first demo a little bit once I got home since it was too rough and my macbook screen was not calibrated well.

The image on the left is a night scene with the desk lamp as the main light source and a little bit of moonlight coming through a window on the right side causing the rim light. The image on the right is a daylight scene. The main light is coming through the window on the right side.

The second demo was the image on the bottom left. This demo also included how I organize my layers when I paint at work to be able to address changes quickly.

I painted the scene on the right side beforehand to show how lighting can be changed easily.

SJSU people thanks for the warm welcome and being such a great audience. I had a lot of fun presenting! I hope I could inspire some of you guys to do daily speed paintings and to set some "unreachable" goals :D

This is the thread of the sijun forum I used to post at back in the days.

Best of luck everyone!