30-sec Portraits of Idling People on the Train

When you're on the MRT train and you're bored, one of the most entertaining things is to draw. And the most interesting subjects you could ever hope for are sitting right in front of you in a row, sitting still, engaged in their own little space, unaware that someone is watching them....

This really nice auntie sitting beside me peeked over to see I was doing and started giggling loudly once she figured out which people I was drawing. She then thanked me for making her laugh. Glad I was able to make a random person happy today. =)



"Woman With Pursed Lips SMS-ing Boyfriend"

"Big Hair, Big 'Phones"

"Dog Tags Are Macho"

"Immersed In Canto-Pop on My IPod"

"Uncle Turtle"

"The Seat Beside The Glass"

"PSP Boy"

"Momma's Mountains; Sista's Valley"

Fibrous Sticky Cocoon

It's been a long time since I last updated this blog, mainly because of work and reservist training commitments. Thanks to those who regularly checked for updates here, and I promise more exciting content will be added in the near future.

We had an 2-day exercise which involved setting up a defence position in forested area somewhere in Marsiling. The thick jungle vegetation consisted mainly of large fruit trees like durian, jackfruit and rambutan trees, and we were tasked to dig shellscrapes or trenches in the ground in which we would sleep in. Very much like sleeping in a shallow grave, I suppose.

I lay in this damp hole in the soil, slipping in and out of consciousness as I struggled to sleep, the strange intoxicating stench of rotting fruit, the sounds of metallic rifle magazines clicking in the dark, and the texture of crisp leaf litter and moist organic matter brushing against my skin, the depthless freckles of light that streaked through the aged leaves of old trees, completely immersing me in a surreal, deeply tactile environment.

Call them visions, or dreams; these few images vividly surfaced in my mind as I sank further and further into a sub-conscious state of mind, a distorted reflection of the reality around me....

cilia on sticks
pustule-like, glistening like insect eyes
nowhere to shift without touching them

a heaving mass of scales
some brittle and skeletal
some black with age and decay

fibrous husk of tissue

like frozen muscle

deep scars that hide dark secrets

feathery antennae that bristle

that curl and wisp and fray

invade the crevices of your body

Don't Bottle Up Your Feelings...

Bottle A: Darling, your eyes are gorgeous. They're so....clear and transparent.

Bottle B: That's because they're made of glass?

Bottle A: Errr.... your beautiful head is so.... shiny.

Bottle B: That's because my WHOLE BLEDDY HEAD is made of glass?

Bottle A: Well... I love your... transparency. And your... openness towards me. It's as if I could see right into you, into your beautiful, pure soul.

Bottle B: In case you haven't noticed you could probably see right THROUGH me. And that's coloured water by the way. Probably food colouring... you know.

Bottle A: Come, let me hold you tight!

Bottle B: You've got no frickin' arms.

Bottle A: Oh. Crap.

Teleportation Puzzle

Care for a little bit of of cerebral stimulation?

This is a little invention of mine called the teleportation puzzle. Basically it's a grid of patterns which act as pairs of teleportation gates, and you need to get from the top left hand (entrance) to the bottom right one (exit).

The trick is, when u step into a gate, you immediately get teleported to a gate of similar pattern, and from there you choose another gate, moving only horizontally or vertically. So eventually u have to get teleported to the pattern at the bottom right, and then you exit.

Sounds easy? Try for yourself lor.

Sounds hard or don't get it? Just take it as just another drawing lor.

Saccharine Sweet Beach Babies

This is more freakin' saccharine sweet than sugary caramel drizzled on strawberry cotton candy with colourful sprinkles on top.

Something I did, that is more lighthearted...and kawaii... I guess.

Someone call a dentist before I get tooth decay.

Azure Cavern Lake

This is a digital painting that is still in progress, but I thought it would be interesting to share with you guys a little bit about my work process. First stage would the conceptualization stage, which usualy is a sketch using pencil, which might be inked in properly with .3/.5 pens afterwards, depending on the look. This time i'm going for a more "painterly" effect without the sharp outlines, so I just scanned in a very rough pencil composition.

The idea is a scene of a large underground lake, cavernous but with its own network of jetties and pendulous architecture hanging from the cavern ceiling, a bit inspired by the carved profiles of classical balustrades and columns. We see a protagonist taking in the whole scene, but I haven't defined him/her yet.

The next step is to paint the entire scene in a monochrome wash to establish all the darks and lights of the scene. This creates some form of depth and defines the main objects. Of course, this is done very quickly and intuitively so I won't get obsessed with filling in confusing details right at the start.

Now I establish the main colour scheme for the picture - a dark, greenish-grey look that makes the buildings look like they are carved out of jade. The only differering colour is a warm highlight in the corner, where an opening to daylight allows little sphere-copters to emerge out of the cave.

That's all for now, folks. Stay tuned to monitor my progress!

Metallic Cords Around My Head

Cords.
They hiss and writhe around your torso
Metallic Medusa.
Warm eyeballs that freeze into directionless titanium ball bearings
Flesh that becomes cold plastic.
Diaphanous blood that now throbs through your body.

I watch silently as the transformation takes place.
Not thoughtlessly, nor painlessly.

Your body remains rigid while something in you
collapses
and dissolves - I can see it in your glazed visage.
Like a machine.
Little red lights and circuits that shut down at regular intervals;
You die a thousand deaths, whirring to a stop.
And I anticipate the silence that follows.

Part of me watches helplessly
As one would watch the disintegration of a massive glacier
Falling impossibly, slowly, majestically.

I wonder too about the ghost in your aluminium shell.

Aural Score

An aural score is a written or drawn interpretation of a piece of music that cannot be noted in normal musical notation. This is a score I did as an assignment in a class, and the piece that this score corresponds to is definitely not your usual pitched music. It begins and ends with the sound of doors opening and shutting, noting the movements in the piece.

Each segment is a soundscape that depicts a scene - the 1st minute or so that you see in the score is actually the sound of a clattering carriage, which suddenly morphs into the sound of a city street in the dead of the night, with rain and soft traffic sounds.

Does music need notes and rhythm to be beautiful? I don't think so. Perhaps it's the little sounds that remind of you of a special place, the voice of someone, the comfort of the hum of your PC - things like these that become the music of life.

Japanese Assassin in Full Fuschia

Some friends commented that I had this cutesy style that's quite recognisable so I decided to have a bit of fun and go out of my comfort zone in doing this one... Not much to say about this, except that: if I were to design a CD cover for background electronic music played during Japanese Cosplay events....this would be it I guess. Not that I really think there's a market for that kind of music...

On hindsight, when I'm free I'll probably do the following things to this:
1. make the stuff behind her more symmetrical
2. clean the lines up by re-drawing the whole assassin digitally
3. reduce the flowery stuff a little

But oh well... probably won't do it in the end....

Planar Burrows

This is an idea that I will be working on in the near future, which may actually materialize into a physical product. Just to give you a hint of what this is about, it's a mix between ideas from a book called Flatland, a colourful PSP game called LocoRoco and some of the creatures I have created so far....

Will keep you all updated on the progress of this! Watch this space.

Loss, Isolation, Perversion, Hopelessness and Frustration

In the light of current events... here's something more negative to darken up your day - a 5-panel abstract piece featuring 5 dark emotions.

Enjoy yourself figuring out which is which.

Evolution to the Zodiacs

Time for a drastic change in frequency and style as we travel back to the past a bit more. This is a doodle I did a long long time ago on the back of a writing pad - you can still see the creased texture of the brown paper. I've just colourized it on Photoshop to add a bit of depth to the picture and you can still see the title that my friend helped to give to this drawing - "Evolution to the Zodiacs", in his own handwriting. A pretty optimistic title, considering that I envisioned a sad, mutated bird-like creature unable to fly, clutching a beautiful wilting lily in its beak.

Ok, maybe I admit the teenage years fuelled some kind of artistic angst.

Radioactive Angel

Here's something I did pretty long ago in an anime-inspired style. I took part in this T-shirt design competition, and the theme was "Radioactive" so I decided to interpret this theme in a slightly unconventional manner - designing an Angel of Radioactivity, spewing unstable molecules with her staff and holding an orb canister of uranium or something. OK, looking back at this I find it a bit cutesy and Power-Puff girl-ish, but anyway here's what I did. Notice the bright C100% Y100% green colour - it's meant to be Radioactive!

Angular Rabbit

Peering through orthogonal hedge,

Is an Angular Rabbit with an edge.

With parallel lines as a pair of eyes,

A pointed tail of particular size.

Right-angle carrots are his food of choice,

And tangential lettuce makes It rejoice.

When the Angular Rabbit needs the loo,

It most gleefully poops out cubic poo.

Surreal Whale

Remember the jellyfish post? Another creature which I think is really beautiful is the whale. I once told a friend that one of the last things I would do before I die would be to actually see a blue whale live in the ocean - a majestic creature that's as big as a bus or a house, but floating so gracefully in the water, reminding me of a huge space shuttle performing its slow ballet in synchrony with the planets in outer space.

Spatial Calendar Revisited

Hey all! Thanks for the great ideas and responses after seeing my Spatial Calendar idea. Will be trying to develop the idea (once I'm free...haha) and here are some of the comments/suggestions that some of you have come up with:

1. Why is Saturday and Sunday the same size and rectangular?
>> Good question. Maybe this calendar seems more suited for the workaholic...

2. Maybe the boxes could be more free-form, and defined by the owner of the calendar.
>> That's a great idea. Was thinking of creating a random grid in the background which people can draw over to define the size of each of the days.

3. Maybe you could have date numbers floating around.
>> Possible. Then you could have little bubbles connected to these numbers, where you enter events and times. These bubbles could then be connected to each other as well!

4. Why the need for numbers / days?
>> You know...that's a very interesting question.. Why are we even numbering our days and dissecting our time like that? More of a philosophical question I guess... There's this idea of "free music" or music that breaks the boundaries of the space-time grid (regular beats in time), why not we break free of this cycle (day/night) and see our life more as EVENTS in a long long lifetime. Worth thinking about...

Bumping into a Little Creature

Was experimenting with this style of illustration - it's pretty much the same way I did Nitro and the Dragon, but I wanted flat, bright colours that are somewhat like that of a children's story book. Here we see a lady purple dreadlocks/chicken/slug thing with her elephant/polar bear/skullface husband encountering a little seal along the way.

Some people ask me where on earth do I ideas for all these characters, and the truth is... I don't really know.

I played this game with a friend once where we drew random shapes on a piece of paper and had to fill in details so the shapes made sense ... or looked like something. I guess that's how these things are conceived - your pen just randomly moves around until u chance upon something that looks good to you, then you bring your idea to life.

Unfortunately, I realise that's how I design many other things as well - banking on pure chance and intuition, then riding the wave once you catch onto something. That's BAD when it comes to more function-driven design, for the record.

Spatial Calendar

This is one idea of that I had that I was pretty interested in developing.



When you look at a calendar, you see equally spaced, boring blocks of empty space waiting to be filled in with activity. Because of the way you see these uniform blocks, it drives you to live your life in this routine way, forcing you to conform to a activity-time grid that determines your life.



What if you changed the way you looked at the days? Some days seems shorter, longer, more hopeful, exciting, constricting, inextricably linked with other events in time on other days. Here's a calendar that encourages the living of a non-conformist, non-routine life:

Seriously, don't ask me how it works. Just know that every week has 7 days.

Mutation's Abound

Here's another plant from my series. It's inspired by the fusion of 3 things - a Zen Garden, a cactus and a faucet, thus I call this a "Faucet Cactus". I guess what these three things have in common is the idea of balance. The Zen Garden inspires balance, the existence of the cactus is a result of balance in a harsh climate, and the faucet is a tool to balance an equilibrium of flow.

(Man, this guy is really good at crapping the shit out of nothing.)

The result? Something that seems really at peace with itself and its flat stone base that it grows from. Enjoy.

Party Pills!

When you feel like partying, you bring out the booze.
When you feel like partayyyyy-ing, you bring out the disco ball and a flashing dance floor.
When you REALLY feel like partayyyyyy-ing..... bring out the PARTY PILLS!

QB: Say YEAAHH!
People: YEAHHH!
QB: What you wanna do??
People: PARTYYY!
QB: What you wanna doooooo??
People: PARRRTTYYYY!!
Retarded Amoeba: Mambobobo-chi.
People: MAMBO!
Retarded Amoeba: Chachagoogoo..
People: CHACHA!

*Frenetic Latin music plays in the background*

Disclaimer:
Plastikk-cube is in no way endorsing the use of drugs in any form, and instead encourages the consumption of healthy alternatives like Tic-tacs.

Identity Crisis

Liar Liar Great Balls of Fire

Ok I lied about the last post being the ONLY panel. This is the 2nd scene where he reaches a tavern in the desert town. His spidery camel has 7(!!) legs. "All the better to walk with, my dear."

The Quest of Ears

I have 2 really really bad tendencies which kind of screw up many many things in life.

1: I tend to have inertia in getting something started because I'm stuck or lazy. (like NOW)
2: I get something started really well, then I give up halfway or get lazy again.

This thing I'm showing here falls into the latter category. It's a vision that I had of starting a comic strip of a roguish guy with Big Ears who has some great task to do that ultimately causes accidental harm to people and creatures he comes across. Here is the very 1st panel and the only panel that I did after a gave up, realising the sheer amount of work that goes into this shit.

The setting is very fantasy-like, and the 1st scene would be a desert town run by red piggish things. Notice the details like the "egg-plant", the strange way of writing (in varying sizes of circles on a line) and stuff.

Things You'd Probably See After Sniffing Too Much UHU Glue

Nitro is a fat dinosaur.
He loves bright colourful things like sunflowers and rockets, although everyone tells him sunflowers and rockets don't go together.
However, Nitro knows that on the Moon is a huge field with bright yellow sunflowers.
With his large red rocket strapped to his back, he hopes that someday someday, someone will light his bright red rocket so he blast off and fly to the Great Sunflower Field on the Moon.

The Dragon has had small wings for as long as he remembers.
He doesn't mind them, but sometimes they get caught in the leaves as he soars through the branches of trees in the rainforest that he lives in.
He sleeps a lot, mostly upside-down in a banyan tree.

Pokyu the Pufferfish

As promised, here is Pokyu! Ernest approached me to co-design a package for a dehumidifying product that his aunt was promoting, some silica stuff. We came up with the idea of Japanese-looking packaging with a puffer fish mascot. You know, the fish soaks up water and puffs up...
Basically the idea was to make it as "Japanese" as possible, thus the jap words and the rectangle eyes for the cuddly fish. So here's the front of the packet:

Retarded Amoeba

When in despair, ask the great Retarded Amoeba for valuable advice and It will bestow it upon you.

How to Get a Design Concept: The Secret Manual

Ok this is something important for all archi people: the ultimate guide to getting an architectural concept for your design, compiled after my detailed analysis and understanding of NUS archi student's work. After reading this, you should have absolutely NO problem with a design concept!

Step One:
Whatever your program/art/school or whatever you're doing, even if it's a Dog Lover's Hostel or Ketupat-making school, just tell your tutor your design is about LAYERING. Then just link it to whatever you have.
e.g. Ketupats are woven with leaves creating LAYERS, so my concept is about layering.
e.g. Indian cuisine is about many smells and tastes, thus the idea of LAYERING.
e.g. When a dog craps on the ground, the poo, the grass, and soil form inextricable LAYERS.

Step Two:
Be sure to make it look CHEEM! Use common catchphrases that will leave the tutors nodding their heads in approval like:

1. This blurs the boundaries between the inside and the outside.
2. This takes the user on a journey through a series of orchestrated spaces.
3. This creates interesting nodes and spaces for people to gather.
4. This creates a sense of suspense as **** is suggested but not fully revealed.

Step Three:
Use cool tutor-approved words! Why say "put together" when you can sound pro with "juxtapose"? Why be stuck with the word "filter" when you can use a 3-syllabled word like "percolate"? The key to success is confusion.... don't forget!

Step Four:
When all else fails, use the Universally Approved Concept Statement that applies for every single damned design that you see:

"My design explores and challenges the relationship between Man, Nature, and the building by creating spaces that encourage activity and interaction among the users of the building. This is done by orchestrating a sequence of interesting spaces that slowly reveal themselves as the user moves through the building."

Be sure to add a series of diagrams that you directly scanned in from an obscure book, adding in lots of arrows and text that no-one would bother to read. To top it off, draw a HUGE pencil drawing (do spend more time on this) of your Ketupat or Dog, which would take up half of your concept panel.

Cool! Now you have a CONCEPT!

Bulbous Floater

Q: What happens when you place an onion in a fish tank?

A:

QB's Photoshop Clinic #1

Thanks all for your kind comments on my art blog! To make it more worthwhile for you guys to visit, I've decided to start QB's Photoshop Clinic to reveal all the tricks and secrets of my very limited arsenal of Photoshop tricks. Haha!

Instantaneous Pop-Art Transformation (Difficulty Rating: 1 star)

1st up is a simple effect that demonstrates the use of 2 of my favourite filters in Photoshop: Cut-out and Find Edges. Application of these 2 filters would almost guarantee an artsy Andy Warhol-ish poster look that I really like and use a lot.

1st up: the original photo

This is a pretty cool photo I took of those advertisement boxes you find at bus stops - only that this one is broken and has a creeper growing within the glass... looking like some abstract advertisement for perfume or something.

Duplicate your photo layer.
Apply a FIND EDGES filter on your top layer and it should look like this after you DESATURATE the layer.

This process creates an outline effect that is very commonly used by Architecture students to fool tutors into thinking their photos are actually hand-drawn, in particular studies involving serial vision.

Apply a CUTOUT filter on your bottom layer and you should get this cool effect when you turn off the visibility of the top layer:

Turn on the visibility of the top layer then turn the blending mode to MULTIPLY and wow, you get this:

Ornate Maze Construction

This one actually brings me back to one of my favourite pastimes long long ago - drawing mazes. Can you believe that I actually filled an entire piece of mahjong paper with a giant maze once... with passageways like 5mm wide. Took me damn long to do that... and I have no idea where it went.

Drawing mazes are somewhat therapeutic. You have to follow a strict set of rules in order to make a maze work, and to make it an enjoyable maze for someone to complete, you need a sense of anticipation of which path people are most likely to take. It's a craft that needs a lot of patience as well - a slip of the pen and you could close up the last path that leads to the end, making the maze unsolvable.

This is a simple maze inspired by a Chinese pattern I saw recently. I added some extra ornamentation just to make it look nicer, but most of the time my mazes would be purely circulation paths.

Drippy the Cloud

I really really really hate having a running nose. Somehow the malfunctioning of such a small part of your body can cause a total shutdown of your entire physicality...
THIS is how I feel when I get a Drippy the Cloud:

Flight of Bubbles

Another blast from the past. I did this way way back when I first learnt some techniques in Photoshop, and started playing and digitally painting my pen drawings (also having WAYY to much time on my hands). This one is a water dragon clinging on to his massive mummy. I wanted to capture the feeling of immensity; this is also accompanied by a sense of inevitable coldness and vulnerability. I guess sometimes that's how I feel in life - inextricably attached to something much bigger than myself, but still feeling hopelessly suspended and lost. Woooo.

16 Objects

Objects. Every single object breathes with a life of its own, and tells its own story. Whether metallic and cut with machines, soft and spongy, randomly crystallized, transparent, tangled and grown over a long time, or crumpled and dry, objects together generate meaning. I did this little piece as a matrix of 16 fictitious objects with unclear origin or function.

Here's something I did some time ago - it started off as a bunch (or bouquet) of arrows of differing transparency, and then I decided to turn it into a little jellyfish mascot of mine. I love jellyfish! The way they're freakishly alien yet so gracefully drifting and pulsating in the dark water...

Why the little plastikk qube

To begin it all, I'd like to say that if I were to be an object, I'd most likely choose to be a transparent cube made of cheap plastic. Not acrylic, but the type of plastic that you make those capsules with little toys inside that come out of machines when you put a dollar in. The cube that is me would be about 5cm by 5cm by 5cm, just nice to hold in your palm. The plastic would be around 5mm thick, with no visible seams. And completely empty. I'd like to think of the centre as a complete vacuum, but I guess it would probably have trace amounts of air in it.



Of course, being a cube, this object would probably stack very efficiently, along with many other cubes of the same type and size, all transparent, like perfectly shaped ice cubes sitting within an invisible 3-dimensional grid made visible by the distortion of light. Some of these other cubes would contain gases of varying properties - light helium, flammable hydrogen - some pungent, some corrosive, some inert. All of which are completely transparent and invisible.