Its been taking me a bit longer then I really wanted with this, but it was due to having been called in to work on days that were meant to be free for me, so its not that I was lazy this time around. I’m hoping to have much more free time to work on this coming week. So far with the “inverted” piece, I finished up the spear top that I was having problems with the last time I posted, with the help of the perspective exercise I have been doing the past couple of months, I fixed up a little perspective problem I had with it. I finished up the two vellum traces of it, which I will now have to transfer into the Bristrol. From there I will have to fill up everything with markers, this is how it looks so far:

Just to give an idea of how far I wanted to go with this, this is the old piece I had done a couple of years back, I didn’t spend a great deal of time on it like I did with these, so I hope the dedication and time spent shows when I’m done:

In case anyone hasn’t seen the blazers yet, I finished them up and took some pics:

For more pics check out the album: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sharp020/sets/72157627639314181/

I already started on the next shoe, but since I spent so much time working at Starbucks during the weekend. I have to go ahead and dedicate more time towards the portfolio, so I won’t be able to work on the next shoes till Wednesday I believe, on that night you can expect an update regarding that. Thanks for reading!

Its been a bit since I posted, its not that I’ve been lazy and not worked on anything, I just been to lazy to type haha! Anyways about two weeks ago I gave up on the cross hatch piece I was doing, it was just taking too long for a single artwork and it was extremely boring to do. I might work on it later again, but I will leave it as a last piece to do so that I can get other things done. Apart from that I did stop working on the portfolio for a bit, I took a week off from work to focus on it, but ended up working more on the pair of blazers and learning illustrator more then anything. Yesterday and today I finally did do some work with it though. Yesterday I studied some proportions for the human head and today I finally got to work on a rough sketch for the next piece I gotta do. Heres the piece I came up with:

On the left is the initial rough, rough sketch, and then on the right is the working piece, the only thing I have left to work on it is to refine the top of the pole, from there, tomorrow I will retrace it again and put it on a piece of bristol, from there I have to do an inverse of the image with the marker again, thats why there is only half of the face.

Now with the blazer, I’m pretty much done with it, I gotta fix a little piece in the morning, but it will be quick, I’m hoping to go get the shots done on tuesday:

Aside from this, my friend FALSEQUEST got a new shoe done, sick stuff, check it out over at his site: WWW.FALSEQUEST.COM

Sorry for the lag on the update, I have been working on the blazers for most part of this week.  About a week and a half ago I finished up all of the black parts in the the “cross-hatch” piece for the portfolio, here is the two side by side:

That was probably on Friday night, August 26. I went to work afterwards and on Saturday I decided to take a break from the portfolio and work on the blazers, I had a hidden stitch idea which I tried out for them, but it didn’t work out, then I took a shot at a different way to go about it, but that too failed, its just that at certain points the edges would have gotten way too thin to work with. Unfortunately I spent that weekend with that fail since I tried to work with those two experiments and as I said previously it didn’t work.  On Sunday afternoon, I though it out some more and decided to go back to the original quilting idea, so for the most part of this week I had been working on that. I also finished up the embroidery for the heels. So here is the proof:

That is it for the night, the plan for tomorrow is to continue with the “cross-hatch” piece for the portfolio, I have not worked on it this week so I gotta dedicate some time for it. On Sunday I will probably continue with the blazers. That is it for now, I’ll update you guys as I go.

Sorry for not updating in a bit. I have gotten a couple of things done but had found it hard to find some time to get on here, first would be the portfolio piece that I finished a couple of weeks ago, here is a picture of it:

It felt great to finally get it done, it was pretty complicated trying to get all of the panels in the corresponding shade, but I’m really happy with both of the parts inside of this piece.

I already started on the next one which is supposed to be an exercise on cross-hatching and stippling, it will be the hardest(most time consuming really) piece I gotten up to this point. When I had done my original piece a couple of years ago, it turned out faster but less detailed because I wasn’t able to flex some of the parts to get very accurate with it, now I pay way too much attention to small details so this sort of thing is going to get really mind numbing. What I have to do is to remake the “cut-out” striped exercise I had done before, but this time with markers. This is how its looking so far:

The second picture shows a bit how I am working on it, which is basically to put it side by side and with a pencil work out the shapes until I’m happy with how it looks and then fill it in with markers, the splatters are really hard to work with since I gotta give it a certain edge to each circle. I’m actually just a bit farther ahead then this picture, but so far I’m only doing the complete back spots. Then I have to come back around and put on the actual cross hatching and stippling.

Now with the shoes, I mentioned before that I was going to redo part of my converse to check out the durability of the glue, not too surprising, I finished them up. I redid the tongue/toe into a black canvas to give it breath ability becasue the previous set up had a polyurethane coating which even though it made it waterproof, it didn’t make it breathe so my feet were getting pretty sweaty.  I redid the embroidery on the tongue with my new logo and glued it using a somewhat new glue I had and tried out a method suggested by a friend.

Worn in the rain for fun!

I have been wearing them for a couple of days and so far no real separation has happened, there were some tiny spots that got loose, but it was due to an inferior glue line fix I had used initially, so I went on it around and figured out how to fix it so now its working great.  The plan with these is to wear them for a straight month, if nothing happens at all then I will start taking orders for vulcanized shoes.

This weekend I got a very rare opportunity for myself, which is Saturday and Sunday off from work, so I’m hopping to get a bunch of stuff done. Today I’m working on the blazers for my sis over in Japan, I finally decided on the quilting design(post’s title lol) meaning I can finally get the work started on them, I was also waiting to see how the glue would turn out with the converse before working on these, but I got a good feeling on the glue job so I will redo it here on the blazers.

My quilting is a work of precision, which unfortunately had made it difficult to decide on something initially, lets see how much I get done today. Tomorrow will be dedicated to work(and hopefully finish) the cross-hatching piece.

I have been working on some sketching exercises and “visualization” basically perspective stuff, but I had gotten way too into it, so I haven’t been able to actually work on the portfolio which as some of you might know, is why I’m taking the break. I decided to change up my daily schedule a bit to put less emphasis on those sketching exercises I was mentioning and dedicate more time on other things, one being the portfolio and the other being shoes, I’m gonna get more active with them then before, so hopefully if everything goes as scheduled I should have a new shoe done within 1-2 weeks, and probably a month from now I will start taking orders again.

Heres how far I’m at the portfolio, on the last update I had done three pieces, now I’m at the fifth(I’ll upload the fourth later today) which is supposed to be based upon this piece I did a about two years back:

The top section is pretty easy to do, just time consuming, its supposed to be a trace of the left paper piece in order to make a trail. the bottom piece doesn’t exactly take as much time, but its just a bit of a brain exercise to get the right panels in the inverted colors by the edges. I’ve been procastinating on this for almost a month so today I finally gotta put some work on it, heres how far I’m on it:

Well yeah, thats gonna be fun haha!

Now with the shoes, I’m currently working on some blazers for my sister over at Japan, initially they were supposed to be the vans I had posted a couple of months back, but due to the lack of a last they had turned out all wonky, this time I actually got one in hand so it should be a different story. This is the base:

I already took them apart, and started the pattern making so I should have some interseting pictures later.

Concluding what I had mentioned in the beginning I will be alternating days between working on shoes and my portfolio, so later today I will be working on the portfolio and tomorrow(Saturday) I will work on the shoes, this will keep me posting basically daily and  you can see how things turn out and how long it normally takes me to work on such projects.