Iron Man

Iron Man WAS one of my favorite superheroes when I was still young. I became a fan of Iron Man because of playing video games.

For starters the arcade game Captain America and the Avengers was my first exposure to the superhero. He had this beam blast move and considering the alternatives were Arrows by Hawkeye or Captain America's Shield throw (there was another character but I can't remember his power) I started to choose him a lot. And I played a whole lot of arcade games when I was young (sadly much more than I can afford to do now, ooh 4 peso tokens in worlds of fun and fiesta carnival where are you?)

He also was a playable character in a host of marvel fighting games (Marvel Super Heroes: War of the Gems,Marvel Super Heroes and Marvel vs. Capcom 1 and 2. and I like his moveset especially the fact that the proton cannon looks powerful. So I was exposed to him a lot.

He was also in other games like X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. But I never really used him there since I'm a wolverine guy and he was really the one that I use the most (but this would be a story for another day).

Anyway I played all these games before I started reading comic books. So most of my stories of Iron Man are non canon and mainly focused on the good things that he does.

But I started dropping my admiration for the Iron Man superhero thingie when I read the story arc of Marvel Civil war. This is quite shallow since I just happened to like the other side (the one Iron Man is not on) and well that's that. Quite childish haha

Now onto the Movie, I liked it, it was not short but it didn't drag too much. I also like the Tony Stark portrayal there and the tale of Iron Man's origins was goofy enough that I enjoyed it. The butterfingers robot was cool hehe.

Anyway, after seeing the Movie here's the Panda Thingie that I made. Uhm Photoshop pen tool, convert point, blur filters, and layer blending options. I really liked doing this, I made this part by part like armor plates being layered on top of the other, and while looking at it by turning off the visibility of some the layers I guess I was imagining the construction of the ironman suit.

The Forbidden Kingdom

Saw The Forbidden Kingdom with my dad last saturday.

When I first saw the movie's trailer I thought that it wasn't really going to sell because it was a good movie but rather because it was an event. And I guess even they realized that by featuring the tie up of Jet Li and Jackie Chan in their trailers.

So before watching the movie I was really just in the mindste to be contented with seeing the fight scenes. However I was pleasantly surprised because I found myself enjoying the movie. Part of it was because of Jackie Chan's style of humor and the major part is because that girl who played that sparrow thingie was cute (and for me she was even hotter on the modern day scene) Also I had recently played Warrior's Orochi and staff fighting and mass crowd beat em up style scenes were still quite fresh on my mind.

Which leads me to this "work". I think this really sucks. I was doing the flat part of the shirt/robe thingie when I got tired because I kept on getting things wrong so I just decided to give up And try different filters to achieve a certain look. But I wasn't able to pull it off so it's a hodge podge of different filters and shapes with no real purpose haha.

Panda

Decided to try to create a panda image just because I really find pandas cute.

One of my friends said the panda looks chinese, and I guess subconsciously I did that because I remember watching a show about Pandas and in that show they explained those pandas are found in China.

Again Pen tool and shape tool for the panda. The background was just some shapes and blending modes and a default photoshop filter (which one exactly is something I don't know).

Penguin Boy

I think I was watching nickelodeon's The Fairly Odd Parents and when the show finished they showed a clip made by some animators about a guy with a Penguin family being chased by someone with a bull dog on top of a flat iron (makes sense?).

During those hours where I'm supposed to be in bed and dreaming of better days. I decided to fire up photoshop and try my hand at creating my own cartoony image. And I came up with this penguin boy thing.

Mostly used the shape and pen tool's convert point function to come up with the different shapes. Not as nice as what I had in mind but I guess it looks cute enough.

Swirls

This stems from me being unlucky (?) in my job hunting activites which then leads to me having a whole lot of free time in my hands. One of the things that helped me de-stress from the pressure of being a bum, as well as pass some time was trying to learn how to improve my skills in the use of photoshop. So I tried doing some images again, I guess this time my foucs was more on creating things from my own imagination rather than rely on tutorials and other stuff.

That said, I was looking at some files on my computer and saw this. One of My friends commented that it was nice. So lookig at it again I tried to remember how to pull it off (I lost the link to . So after some fiddling around with the tools and filters I was able to come up with this variation.

For me the image is quite nice, the different color variations that one can do with its color however (I think I also mentioned this in my previous post) I have no idea how to incorporate it into other works. Suggestions for that would be very much appreciated.

Going back to the thing about doing my images from my own imagination and creativity and skills, I'm reminded of something that I read somewhere, a few years back. It went something like "Photoshop Filters does not make someone an artist (or was it Graphic designer I have forgotten the exact thing)". Now I'm not claiming to be an artist or a graphic designer, but in a way it hits that I really should try to improve my own understanding and use of the tools rather than be reliant on tutorials and filters.

And although "Photoshop Filters does not make someone an artist" it sure helps in making something nice :)