You might have noticed by the spamming of my deviantART link everywhere, that I have begun drawing again. I have improved with colouring in Photoshop but my drawing skills are still on and off. It seems like they depend on my mood or something. One day I’ll draw decently well, the next I’ll be completely hopeless. Weird, huh? Either way, I still need a lot of practice and so, practice is precisely what I will do a lot of!

Above is a quick example of my practicing in which I focused on trying to get a clear facial expression. I focused mainly on the eyes and so that is why here, the rest of the drawing seems much more scrappy in comparison. I found whilst shading the eyes that i completely forgot how I used to shade them and so I had to improvise. Must work on that!
Oh, today I installed Windows 7 Ultimate x86 (32 bit) and Adobe CS4 Master Collection and have been playing around with them a bit. I must say I like the new Photoshop UI and Windows looks pretty good, after a lot of customisation as usual. You can see an example of how I have set up my Photoshop CS4 Extended below in my 21.5″ 1920 by 1080 secondary monitor.

They have added quite a number of new things to CS4 including a menu dedicated to 3D content, and another menu called Analysis. There have also been a lot of purely cosmetic changes, some of which you will notice the moment you run Photoshop whilst others will be found when you start using it properly. Haha, I’m giving nothing away. Anyway, that’s all from me.
Welcome back! Guess who decided to revive their blog a week before their last two final exams? Yeah, you’re right. It’s Sha!
As you can see, I’m beginning to slowly get back into designing my own layouts. But you’ll probably also notice they’re nothing like the style I used to do. No fancy stuff, really simple, centred, two column layouts. Although, instead of using anime/manga images or photographs by other people, I now use my own. It takes a lot more effort but it’s worth it! Right?
Anyway, this one features Suigintou from Rozen Maiden. I don’t remember anything about the anime but I think what she’s wearing looks cool and I also like her hair! I changed her eye colour though. It’s supposed to be red but I wanted to use more blue in my layout. I might make some small changes over the next few days but nothing major.

As for the main image of Suigintou itself.. It took around two hours to draw and another seven or so hours to colour. Yeah, I’m really slow. But then I was doing like three other things at the same time! .. Okay, that’s not much of an excuse.
I got the idea from an image of her, sort of similar to this and thought, ‘Wow, I can use this somehow!’ But when I got to actually making a layout out of it.. Well, it wasn’t so easy. Oh well, I managed to come up with something. Hehe. (Obviously I don’t plan out my own layouts too much before I start making them.)
And that’s all I really have to say about this one~



