Kelantan trip, and the road to drawing

Five month later for another post on the Kelantan trip? The reason for the long gap is because I have only thought of some unexpected thing which the trip had given to me.

Now's a good time to talk about it, or it'll probably be forgotten altogether.

After a long period of pretty much not drawing anything for three years (I was very well into drawing up until 2010, where I stopped regularly drawing until I picked it up early this year). If I was to mention a few key moments throughout the drawing journey so far, the Kelantan trip would be one of them.

It was then which I started to try and delve into drawing comics and... the incorporation of puns/cross-referencing between fandoms/inside jokes, which had lead to the main three drawings done during the trip:

I would say I was still figuring out which style works for me (still am), but the brief trip had made me to settle on the mashing of simplified 'cute' style drawing with a more typical/conventional anime style drawing. I noticed I was using a simple black dot for the eyes of the simplified drawing then, before I switched to large coloured iris which I'm sticking with right now.

And speaking of colour, can you believe it took me about 4 month before I actually got to post those drawings up? In part I was too lazy to put those up, but the decisive moment that gotten me to do so was when I went back to the drawings and applied some recently learned technique on digital colouring. It was quite a big leap forward for me - because I absolutely have no intention of colouring my works before, as I was not confident on placing colours on top of the lineart.

And now, I try to put color in my drawings whenever possible - which prompted me to ask myself, how come I didn't attempt colouring way back then?

Malay language strips, in case you're wondering. Malay puns off their names.

Cross reference to Steins;Gate.

Inside joke poking to a friend's nickname.

So here we are, the coloured version of those drawings. As far as improvement are concerned, I'm quite satisfied with them - though that shouldn't stop me from being complacent and not refining and practicing new knowledge further.


Kelantan is - the way I see it, much like other less-hectic and not-so-much-distraction cities - a good place to develop the chop for art (recalling a KL-ite who mentioned on how he use the quiet tie there to develop his drawing skillls during his degree years). I'd like to see how the next return trip to Alor Star would turn out, seeing as I've turn to drawing for killing time now (or you might call it procrastinating, too...)

I should perhaps make more art related posts in the future. Blogging is something which needs to be uphold in face of all these touch-and-go social medias, yes?

Drawing too.