Digital Art: My Dream Wedding Dress

Every girl has her own dream wedding dress. It has been an ongoing fantasy to wear extravagant luxurious dress with the beautiful fabric and the biggest skirt, preferably in the color of white. Of course nowadays, Wedding dresses do not have to be white. It is even recommended to wear one with light ivory coloring to add a more romantic air to it.

My favorite color - if I were allowed to wear a wedding dress in the color other than white - would be pink. Not shocking pink, though. But lighter dusty pink, veering to purple, even.

This one is not the final design. More like a rough draft to put on the more intricate patterns and embellishments. The blue gems will have to go and will be substituted with smattering of Swarovski crystals and rose gold threads.

GIF Animation: Love Kiss

Not much can be said. I made these GIF animation to try out a GIF animation software. So these two love themed GIF animation were the first few shots at making an animation by myself.

Next stop would be flash animation. Hopefully.

I am not obsessed with all the romance and the kissing, seriously. These are just the easiest to draw. That's it. I created all the necessary elements on Corel Draw X3 for clean tidy lines. No hand drawing happened here. They were all vector images. Then I optimized the images in Adobe Photoshop and saved it in GIF format. Uploaded the image sequence on GIF animator and Voila!!!!!!

Digital Art: Windance

I made a new image of a girl or fairy or angel, take your pick. Similar method like the previous images, hand drawn outline and digital inking with Corel Draw and coloring with Adobe Photoshop. Not much to be said about what inspired me to draw this image, other than I was thinking about the gale a few months ago. I did pick the title based on the Irish Riverdance.

The color green was my own opinion of the suitable color for the wind element. It's more aqua really, than true green. A mix of water and earth, I think. Earth is true green, water is true blue. Fire should be red or orange. I don't have the reference for this, so it might not be accurate at all. It just looks nice, IMHO.

Fan Art: Sora Naegino (Kaleido Star)

This is a fan art of Sora Naegino, the main character from the anime Kaleido Star. There's the manga too, but the style of my image is purely anime.

I sketched the outline based on a few screen shots of Sora and scanned it. Inked (traced) the outline using Corel Draw so I got crispy clean lines. Then painted the colors using Adobe Photoshop which was so much fun. The costume wasn't from the anime, it's purely mine. Notice the shabby design which was a little dull, not the extravagant getup that appeared in the anime.

Notice the background. I didn't get to write Kaleido Star because it's a bit long. Believe me, I tried. Looked weird. So I opted for the word Star. It's short, meaningful and appropriate to describe Sora.

Digital Art: Ballerina

I made this image based on a photograph of a ballerina in a magazine, can't remember which. It seems that I still can't give up learning to create digital art images. Maybe if the response was good, I'd sell the art prints in Deviant Art.

The original picture is in vector, constructed with Corel Draw. The tools I used here were the freehand tool (equivalent of the pen tool in Adobe Photoshop), shape tool, the interactive transparency tool and the interactive drop shadow tool. For the background, I used gradient fill.

I'm not very good with designing the costume, so it's very simple and unimaginative. The tools in Corel Draw are easy to use without the hassle of using pen tool.

After the vector's finished, I opened the file in Adobe Photoshop to add some effects, like the transparent flowers around the border, and the border as well. A few layer styles and layer mask later, the final image's done.

So, is the artwork good enough for sale?

Digital Image: Rose 2

This is the same rose as previous post. I only made a few changes on the vines. This new one had more floral feel to it, compared to the last one. I don't know, more sword-n-shield vibe?

I made the outlines using Corel's pen tool because of its newbie-friendliness. So were the vines. Only this time, I chose artistic pen. You can even write calligraphy with the artistic pen. Don't know where to find the tutorials though.

I filled the color on photoshop, as usual. The effects were not layer style, only simple filters. Lighting rendering as usual. Some friends told me that the lighting filter only adjust ... well, the lighting effects and none of the bevel effect. Here is the cheat code: use channel. Yup, load your image as selection and create new channel. The result would be a black background with your selection. Fill the selection with white. New channel would be named alpha. Copy alpha channel layer. With selection still active, apply gaussian blur filter with any value you want as long as the image still has definite form. Invert the selection and cut background. Go back to layer tab. Create new channel and fill with any background color you want. Go to filter > render > lighting, and pick the channel alpha copy. The preview window should show an relief-like image, like your original picture was carved there. Apply the filter. Back to original pic layer and load it as selection. Go to the layer with lighting filter on it. Invert selection and cut background. The result should have similar effect to the image above.

Digital Image: Rose GIF

I saved this rose image in GIF format, so it would be alright to place on a web page. The file size is not too large, methinks.

The rose was created using pen tool in CorelDraw. With Ctrl+Q to convert lines to curve, I could manipulate the initial sketch into forms I wanted. Even the swirly lines were not difficult. To copy the object to their exact opposite, I just needed to drag it to the other side while holding Ctrl key, then right-clicked on the desired position. Instant flip. No need to copy layer, and then flip in from Edit menu. But that's just photoshop for you.

Still, photoshop has the advantages of colors. Really beautiful colors you can pick with only an eyedropper. And pretty textures you can custom-make. Some of the awesome effects are only a click away using filters or layer styles. I only added noise and a little lighting rendering for this rose image.

If you know flash, this image can be made into a button. At least, the rose can. Maybe I'll try to make a button with it.

Digital Image: Carol Singer

This is practically the first ever humanoid image I've made using only digital means. Most of my pictures are based on hand sketches.

First, I used Corel Draw to make the outline. I'm not an educated graphic designer, so I won't know about any special feature in that software, hence, the usage of only a simple pen tool. It's kind of easy too. Not as complicated as Illustrator, I'll never get the hang of it. The pen tool can only draw straight line. That's why I have to continuously press Ctrl+Q to create a curve. It's still time-consuming for me, despite the simplicity of said tool.

Then I painted the colors with Adobe Photoshop. Also only using fill option and gaussian blur. Very simple procedure that anyone can do. Shading and highlighting are still a mystery to me. See?