“I love my Bug.”

Let me explain a bit of this story. I wake up today and go directly to my online mailbox and there was an email with this subject line: “Your Threadless submission has been declined :(” I’m like “What?” I had been working on a really cool Beetle car (a.k.a Buggy) t-shirt design. The explanation for the rejection by Threadless is:

1. Your submission was declined because it contains copyrighted material. Pop-culture inspired designs sometimes have legal issues we would rather not flirt with. Unfortunately, this is the case with your artwork.

2. VW Beetles are copyrighted… we have had to pull all shirts that feature them!

OK, well I knew VW is a brand, yet look at my design. I have 250 beetles (insects) creating a car, that is an inspiration of the buggy and not an exact replica with four doors and engine. Maybe they confused the little critters for The Beatles, thinking Ringo and Paul were hidden in the design, kind of like “Where’s Waldo?” You can tell I’m a little pissed off about this, because it was a lot of work to do. And “copyrights” is such a vast topic for interpretation, that it is sometimes annoying to see t-shirts of actual beetle cars since the 70s, and that has never been a problem in pop culture. I tried to do something “inspired by,” because I love the car and own one, but still an original and artistic print. Oh well, I’ve submitted it to another t-shirt company and I’ll let you know what happens. (Continue reading… )

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22 Aug 2008 Leave Feeback No Comments yet

“Avatars.”

Top image left to right: My friends Jenny Eng (pic) and Lech Deregowski (pic), and me. We’ve turned into cartoon characters. This all started with a post by Jenny at Scene 360:

See yourself as a manga character at Face Your Manga where you can create an avatar of yourself. What’s great is that once you’ve created your image you can use the avatar as your icon for all your chat apps (you get a low res version of your avatar for free) or purchase products from the site with your avatar on it. If you find that you love your to pieces and want it plastered all over you things, you can also purchase and download a high-res version which you can then do with whatever you wish.

It is fun to see what we look like in the Manga world. Aside from this, I’ve been tuning into the network lifestyle to pimp Scene 360 and take it to new heights. I’ve read several articles about why you should not publish a magazine on Facebook. But I’ve seen a number of magazines succeeding, because much of their readers hang around Facebook. So I’ve been delightfully surprised that there has been an interest for Scene 360 updates through Twitter and Facebook. It is easier to connect to people through a cross-platform method of posting. A site definitely worth submitting news to is DesignYouTrust by Dmitry Utkin (I met him online way back in 2000 at Factory 512, a very successful design site and now he has a new one just as popular).

15 Aug 2008 Leave Feeback No Comments yet

Cover Image: View of Sydney (c) Brett Moulton

“Video Channel.”

I’ve been doing a lot of updates at Scene 360. The news column now contains images. And I launched a video channel at Vimeo about a month ago, which is doing fairly well. I’m hand-picking videos within the fields of animation, photography, design, painting, and music. It has been fun to see what other people are doing, and I personally enjoy watching videos that show the making of a painting. I hope to buy a video camera someday (I had one in high school, that was a while ago!), and film my painting process too.

The not so good part is my wrist and arm have been cramping out. I’ve been drawing alot for a new project and also have been on the computer too many hours a day for my own stuff and updates. My hand is not accompanying me anymore. So I have been taking it a bit slower these last days. Doing movement exercises in warm and cold water. Massaging hand and arm. Resting. Using left hand. (Laugh) I bought a 2nd trackball. Yes, I don’t use a mouse because that causes a lot of strain to the hand. But my laptop still had a mouse and I used it for a bit, and that instantly strained my wrist. So I decided to buy a 2nd trackball (mine is a Microsoft one with the ball to the left side of device–truly one of the few things I’ve liked from MS). Now, I have two. I always use a gel mat, it supports the wrist so that you don’t have it suspended in the air the whole day. And another method is to get a thick and narrow piece of glass to put on a desk to support your arm. If your desk is not L shaped, then the glass helps. Put your piggy bank and a few other heavy little objects to hold it. It basically creates a shelf for your arm to sit on. I do have an L shaped desk, but at home I don’t, my desk is an antique one without arm support… so the glass allows my arm just to rest as I click and do stuff.

31 Jul 2008 Leave Feeback No Comments yet

“RTPN Interview.”

As I mentioned about a month ago, I was invited to an interview by national TV channel RTPN (Farol de Ideias). The program was about “National creatives designing the world” (“Criativos Nacionais desenham o Mundo”) broadcast on June 14th; and the small number of guests were InteractCreative, Jump Willy, Triworks, mainly studios from up north in Portugal. I was one of the few in the central region. While watching the actual interview on TV, I recognized a name… Benedita Feijo from InteractCreative, she’s done some interesting illustrations with flowers and animals. I was familiar with her artwork via Re-Searcher, an illustration rep where we’re both at. So it was nice to see a face behind the work.

As promised, here are some photos from the interview broadcast. You can watch an excerpt of the program, and if you click continue you can see some shots of my office setup.

DVD Film Stills courtesy and © Farol de Ideias

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23 Jul 2008 Leave Feeback (2) Comment »

“My New Portfolio Site.”

It went up yesterday night, click here to see it. There are now more sections to sub-divide the content from clothing design to photography. Yes, I take photos but took that section down some years ago. I have a new photo collection entitled “Laundry Day,” which studies color and human behavior. My friends have encouraged me to show my photos… so a big thank you to Jen, Stuart, Leslie and my mom for pushing me forward! I’m now excited about taking photos again, going to some location and just shooting–enjoying my time. I kind of lost that enthusiasm, so it is good that it is slowly coming back. If you’d like to leave a comment, there is a guestbook on the site. Enjoy!

23 Jul 2008 Leave Feeback No Comments yet

“Butterfly.”

I haven’t written poetry in some time. I go through phases of painting, then writing, and totally into web design and practicing my style sheets. My current writing has been doing interviews for Scene 360, the latest article with artist Cathy Lo (co-written with Ms. Jenny Jen Jen). I haven’t really felt the need to write a poem, because painting helps me to write in visual form what I cannot express so well in words. Sometimes you feel things, and with a brush stroke it creates that sensation. Creating visuals is so instinctively natural to me, much more then writing. I still love to write, just need a good reason to unleash a poem. The last poem I wrote was about a year ago, entitled “Butterfly”, it was featured this month in South African magazine ITCH. Enjoy!

READ POEM >

21 Jun 2008 Leave Feeback No Comments yet

“It Hurts.”

365 days later, I have painted something for me. Personal art with no strings attached, just painting and analyzing life once again. I’ve been illustrating for Threadless t-shirt competitions, which forces me to explore other themes to fit a target audience—and it is interesting and challenging beyond my comfort zone… although, I still enjoy making art for me, without thinking of the end result and who it is for. It was fantastic!

I did push my brain a bit on how to convert a Flash file into video. There are so many technical details and softwares out there, that what seemed simple took me a day to pinpoint a decent solution. I think a lot of softwares compress too much, and when uploading to a video community site such as Vimeo, they also compress… so the images tend to lose that crisp quality. I was stuck trying to determine if to buy SoThink’s video converter or Moyea’s. I went with SoThink because the interface is much simpler to handle—easy to configure the settings, browse for files, and in terms of output quality it was very similar to Moyea, however the file size was much smaller. I now made an account on Vimeo, I love their video display format, and I will host some footage of the making of my art. Enjoy. Click on “Continue Reading >” to see more pictures.