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All done with markers and felt tip pens, and trusty black marker. Got the inspiration for each drawing/doodle from different places. One’s from a song, and two were from my desktop calendar. Random yeah. Most were invented/imagined by me. Yay me.

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Juniors: “How come ours got no design?”

Me: “Eh, sorry, but I didn’t have time to draw on all of your cards last night, hope you guys don’t mind.”

Juniors: “You bring home draw, then give us.”

Me: “But I won’t have time until like, after the exams or something.”

Juniors: “Nevermind, after exams also can!”

Well, here we are. And here we are done.

So long.

These were some studies of bamboo that I did for the Mulan-inspired designs. I did them mostly in colour pencil because I wanted to make the pattern/designs colourful, so I was looking to see how I could enhance the colours of the bamboo.

I realise I have more sketches of bamboo lying around, but I can’t seem to find them! Ah well.

The last image are the three final designs that I came up with, and I used Photoshop to print them onto my designs.

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For the Little Mermaid, I took inspiration from the waves, bubbles and colours of the sea, so I did some studies on these. Once again, my mom advised me on how to do the study for the ‘colours of the sea’ (the patch of green and blue).

I also paid tribute to Ariel’s loyal friend Flounder, by using the idea of the fins in my final design.

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These were done quite sometime ago….and generally speaking are some of my slightly better drawings.

The cat is actually my piano teacher’s cat. Correction: make that a hybrid of my teacher’s two cats. She has one white Ragdoll cat, which is the figure of the cat, but the black fur was supposed to be her other black (Persian, was it?) cat.

The stack of books was significant – I was feeling frustrated at the amount of homework (ie. studying) I had left.

I drew the mousetrap one day after watching reruns of the classic Tom & Jerry episodes. (In my defense there was nothing better on TV, and T&J is a decent cartoon)

This was also the set of drawings where I started to explore colour pencil, even though they look quite horrible here. I know I did the cookies one near the Christmas period – I was reminded of leaving cookies and milk out for Santa Claus when I went to my neighbour’s house and kept his little brother company while he watched Christmas specials of Barney.

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I was inspired by the spinning wheel in the story of the Sleeping Beauty, and I thought of the dreamcatcher when I went to search for illustrations of spinning wheels.

For preparatory studies, I drew spinning wheels, as well as the chinese version of the spinning wheel, and a few different versions of the dreamcatcher in mediums such as pencil, pen, colour pencil and watercolour.

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These are studies of clothes that I did later into my coursework, when I was deisgning clothes for each theme.

I particularly like the black-off shoulder top – not because it has a pink heart smack in the middle – because I originally thought it was going to turn out horrendous and in the end it didn’t. It’s done in colour pencil, and I realised that sometimes you have to be patient and continue colouring and colouring and colouring, and wait it out for the end product. It might not look really good under close scrutiny, but from a distance it still looks like what it’s supposed to. Also, for colour pencils, layering is rather important; don’t expect to get everything in the correct colour and tone one the first layer. By doing more layers, it actually ensures that the colour is more even.

I also like the picture of the black dress with two white stripes, partially for it’s design, and for the fact that it also didn’t turn out as horrendous as I thought it would be. I liked the design because it seemed like a simplified version of my deisgn (criss-cross lines), and it reminded me of Piet Mondrian’s paintings (Broadway Boogie-Woogie! and whatever not). I did it in acrylic, which was rather a big step for me, because acrylic is not my forte. My mom actually helped me a bit – she made me paint in one direction, so that the brushstrokes were at least consistent (mom was trained in a  more Impressionistic style, and in a more traditional style which actually emphasised how to hold the brush – a bit like calligraphy).

These were actually easier to draw than my earlier prep studies on clothes, for some reason. Hopefully me skills improved?

What wishful thinking. Gah.

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After changing from knots to characters, I explored a few different series of/individual cartoon characters. Of course I looked at the Disney Princesses, but I also looked at Alice in Wonderland, Harley Quinn, Wonder Woman and Supergirl.

The drawing of a little girl in a dress in ink is actually a little girl wearing a Belle (Beauty and the Beast) costume. There is another sketch of Belle in her iconic golden ball gown, which I drew from a meet-and-greet Belle (meaning a real person dressing up as the character) from Disneyland. There’s also one of such drawings of Cinderella in her light blue gown. I also drew a few roses to explore possible design elements from the story, though I eventually discarded the idea. There are some drawings of the rose illustrations for the movie, sketches of real roses, sketches of cloth/silk rosettes, and a few doodles that I did after looking at one of Takashimaya’s paper carriers.

The Queen of Hearts one is a drawing of a costume that I found while searching for pictures of Harley Quinn, actually, and then I thought of looking into Alice in Wonderland too.

One of the reasons why I didn’t choose to work with the DC comics characters was because their outfits were either too done-before (in the cases of superman and wonderwoman), or were slightly too theatrical/costume-like. I mean, Harley Quinn wears a unitard, for heaven’s sake.

It was fun doing drawings of cartoon characters! You realise that even if you know how Wonder Woman looks like, it’s still very hard to draw her.

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Just in case you find some of my posts locked.

“I love our aep family!”

It’s one word that we invented last year.

Play charades, hangman – whatever. It’s bound to come to you soon enough.

Happy guessing!

boonny