After a year of ups and downs, I left Alien & Turtle in Feb 2017. I’ve missed the Bit Bin and being out and about as a freelance sword for hire, so it’s great to be on my own adventures again!

So here’s a quick update –

I’m now working as a contract-based freelance Content Designer at MoneySmart.sg, in the exciting world of fintech once again. But of course, I still keep up with other kinds of work, such as Illustration (even oil-painted illustrations now – yay Painting!) and I’ve been stretching those animation muscles again. Some big things happening this year, along with regular-ish posts on my Instagram account of stuff I’ve been up to. Follow @koshkievna for more updates with sketches and doodles and stuff.

After getting a little lost in classical drawing and painting for 3 years, I’ve finally emerged out of the rabbit hole to find myself back in Singapore. What then happened was what a few of us have been calling “The Florence Academy of Art hangover”, which lasted for about 6 months. The beast called The Hangover is really that whole period where you’re really just sitting there feeling both restless and exhausted while wondering “what the fuck should I do with all the stuff I know now?” So I’ve got illustration and fine art, and I still occasionally pine for stop motion. Why was I even thinking about them as separate entities like creepy exes stalking me home every night? I should just be polygamous with them.

With that decision made, I moved into a new studio and co-started a company with Sarah-Tabea Sammel, where I get to do ALL the things. And so Alien & Turtle was born!

Alien & Turtle is an artist collaborative between Sarah-Tabea Sammel and myself (The Bit Bin). We illuminate stories, be it on the screen, page, walls or your face. or your sweet puppy corgi’s face. HOWEVER AND WHERE-EVER, you get the gist. Find out more about us here! 

The Bit Bin will still be here, and now that I’m back out of The Hangover, keep a lookout for new works.

So here’s the first in a series of work that I’ve been doing over the last year, ones I’ve been too lazy to put up on my blog.

……………………………………………………………………………………

Long poses from the last year at the FAA (pardon the bad photos. I’ll document better next year)

Olimpia – charcoal 

6th Long pose – charcoal (4 weeks)

Anna-Rosa

5th Long pose – charcoal, 4 weeks

Giovanni

4th Long Pose, charcoal – 4 weeks

Carlo

We try to be perfect even though perfection is impossible, and yet we try and try harder. In the end, we’re training both our bodies and our minds to become better. It’s never just about hitting the same hole 100 times in a row or making the perfect Bargue, that’s not the point. The point is to learn, and there is no end to learning or to getting better. When I first started this course, I thought I could see beyond regular seeing, which was what the Drawing Academy in Denmark did to us – they changed how we saw, and we started seeing everything as being connected. But obviously, there’s so much more to Seeing than I thought, cocky little fool that I am.  I’ve been properly humbled at this school, and all I think about now is how much of an amateur I am at all this. So back to shooting. Back in the day, it came to the point where I would be making a shot, and I wanted so badly to make it perfect that my body would betray me, and I would blink or shut my eyes at the very moment that I squeezed the trigger. And of course, the shot would be shit. It took me a very long time before I could slap myself out of that mode and shoot in a way where every shot was a process and not the result. Thinking about the result never gets us anywhere, it just makes us .. unstable. Your head gets disconnected from your body, and your mind stops working together with the rest of you. Once that starts to happen, it’s only a matter of time before it all unravels, and soon we’re disillusioning ourselves and telling ourselves that it’s okay, as long as the results are good. No. It never does anyone any good in the long term. That was when my shooting went into a downward spiral, and I knew that it was time to move on. I miss it, but I’ve not had the will power to push it further than it needed me to go, and I regret doing that. I hate giving up on something. So I will not let it happen to me in drawing. Just like shooting, there are times when I’m so focused on making a line perfect on the Bargue that at some point I do blink or shut my eyes at the most crucial moment, and I have to stop, erase, and redo it. It’s when I have to make a straight line curved but still straight, or a half tone shape look vague but precise. I rush too much because I want to get it right, now. and that’s when I muddle it and I spend the next 1-2 weeks working on the same line or shadow shape because it’s just never right. But if I had just concentrated on the doing and not the result more, I might have done it much sooner. That’s the bit that I still have to learn. It’s all very easy to talk about, but so incredibly difficult to do, and more so to keep it constant.

So these days I do the things I used to do when I shot. I do breathing exercises when I get unstable, and I start concentrating on connecting my body and my mind before I work. That’s when I begin to learn so many new things while making that copy or when studying that model. Simona (one of our teachers) said something really good at the beginning, when she saw that I was rushing my Bargue. “The moment that we think it’s finished is the moment that we begin to learn.” Because we “finish” things to the point of our abilities, and so often we forget that our abilities are not as great as we might think they are. It’s when we teach ourselves to become our own teachers that we start to really learn, and I love that so much about this school, because the teachers are all so different and so great, and all of them cultivate this sense of teaching yourself to become your own teacher. Truly wonderful. Of course, we learn so much from our classmates too, because everyone came from different backgrounds, so everyone saw and learned differently. Now I think about every line that I’m making on a drawing, constantly asking myself, is that curved line really so curved? Does that really look like what you’re seeing in front of you? Are those knees really so far below that pelvis? The Bargues have taught me that so far, and there’s still more to figure out. Like I said at the beginning of this ramble, it’s been fking mind-blowing. Just like when I was shooting, all I ever think about these days is drawing and how to draw, and when I close my eyes I see shadow shapes and when I wake up, I think my alarm sounds like a drawing and it sounds like a really bad, crude drawing. And the best thing is, I’m only at the beginning of it, and there’s so much more to learn, so much to get better at, and it will change me forever. I left shooting with a different way of breathing and a different way of holding my concentration, (and also a long sighted and astigmatised right eye). Who knows what I’ll leave this school with. So far it’s made me more ocd and stricter on myself (lots of mental self-slapping for 8 hours a day, ouf, I’m so catholic that way. maybe just in that way.) Like Daniel Graves said when we met in his office – the materials we use will always change us. So to end this long and rather preachy sounding ramble, I’ll put up some drawings I’ve done at the school so far. They’re not that great, but hell, One does not simply walk into Mordor.

1st long pose – 5 weeks (charcoal)

Portrait of a model (pencil)

Model studies (pencil)

Unfortunately, I didn’t take any photos of my Bargues, I kept forgetting because they’ve always felt so much like training material rather than something to be considered …a drawing. But I might put up a progress series for the current one I’m working on for the next post.

]]> https://thebitbin.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/on-drawing-shooting-and-the-florence-academy/feed/ 1 758 balloon 1stLongPose_Nov 2012 ThursdayPortrait_1Nov2012 ShortFigureStudies_pencil https://thebitbin.wordpress.com/2012/08/16/painting-for-polygon-pictures-for-the-world-of-warcraft-trading-card-game/ https://thebitbin.wordpress.com/2012/08/16/painting-for-polygon-pictures-for-the-world-of-warcraft-trading-card-game/#comments Thu, 16 Aug 2012 17:47:48 +0000 http://thebitbin.wordpress.com/?p=745 Read more Painting for Polygon Pictures, for the World of Warcraft trading card game]]> And so here’s update number 2 of going-on’s… in February this year, Stick and Balloon went to Tokyo because Jimmyfish was awarded a Jury Mention. Among the many exciting things that we did in Tokyo, we paid Polygon Pictures a visit, and that somehow ended up in a painting job. I’ll be honest and say that this was both incredibly exciting and scary for me, because up till February, I’d only ever done a grand total of 6 proper digital paintings in that…painty paint style. Before I got this job I was doing some small painting work for Open Emotion studios, but I can’t say anything else about that project. My point being – I’m still very new to this whole painting thing, and I kick myself every time for not making more time to paint. But here’s to the beginning of my adventure into digital painting and painty paint-ness.

The painting job turned out to be for the World of Warcraft trading card game, and of course, I had to do some tests first. Once again, I’d found myself standing in that mental plain white box of a room with my tools, and a giant wall-sized sign saying “LEVEL UP OR DIE.” Don’t you just love being in situations like that! It’s what I live for. THE ROOM.

So here’s the test:

Young Malfurion

I’ve got a long way to go with painting, definitely. But I learned a lot from working on this one.

And then came the actual cards. I was only allowed to paint Item cards, which aren’t as exciting as doing character cards, but there’s also a lot to be learnt from doing simple cards… and yes, I needed the practice.

The trickiest bit was the magic bits, and I have to admit that I still don’t like the magic on the bow. It looks so messy, argh. Learning and experimenting’s the way to go… anyway, after these 3, I was allowed to paint one character (yay!) and it was an orc lady. Forgive my World of Warcraft ignorance – I haven’t had time to play any of it. My last experience with Warcraft was Warcraft II, back in the day of “Stop poking me!” and 2D orcs and elves. But after working on these – my god, I just craved playing games (especially warcraft) for weeks. So much that I had game soundtracks playing while I worked to trick my brain into thinking that it was playing a game. Which it was, actually. Working on any sort of illustration or design is like playing a puzzle game, one of those ..Monkey Island types where you make weird connections between things that don’t seem to make sense. Ooh, I’ve started rambling. Here’s the orc lady.

She looks quite manly, no?

That’s it for this update. Next update will be ….. Tembusu Bemused: The Tree Chapter! (Part One) that update should be fun, because you’ll get to have a go at playing the game

I’ve been working at Playmoolah since September last year, with the merry band of child-loving strangelings working really hard to come up with a sort of play tool that basically teaches children about financial literacy. I don’t do it enough justice with my description, and I’d rather show it than talk about it.

The Home page

So, I’ve been the illustrator at Playmoolah since September, and I’ve been busy creating and drawing all the characters, avatars, screens, UIs, sets… planets… houses.. buttons.. things. I didn’t work on Coin Catcher though, which is their iPad spin-off game. I don’t think I’ve ever made so many assets for a …thing… before! Which made it a pretty new and exciting experience. And drawing cute things, that’s new to me too. It was a constant struggle of figuring out what was cute and not too weird to the general public… a much tricker exercise than I’d initially thought.

Goal setting

“Earn” World

I’m currently working on more features and publicity things with Playmoolah, among other things. Have a look at the Playmoolah site if you’re curious, it’s all at www.playmoolah.com 

Next on updates: some secret trading card game work that I’ve just been allowed to talk about, and the exciting new Stick and Balloon game, Tembusu Bemused: the Tree Chapter 

A quick update for some work in progress.

About a week ago, Stick and Balloon were commissioned to do a piece for a very piplatchka cafe/restaurant called Preparrazzi. It’s going to be our biggest piece ever (about 1.5m across ), made up of 4 panels, and each of us will work on 2 panels each. Here’s the sketch for the middle bit, and yanyun will work on the two pieces on the sides of this! (and there’ll be one more on the top of this, which I’ll be doing) More updates to come!

I never thought I’d ever like a city, but Tokyo’s such a special place that it’s hard not to fall in love with it. Anyway, we’ve also made a little video to document our short time there, with clips of cool stuff from the festival..and piles of tuna (yum)

<object width=”420″ height=”315″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/OjlAMdgVYsA?version=3&amp;hl=en_US”></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param>