Illustrations

Illustration for Hacker Monthly #19

j@jgwong.org (Jaime G. Wong) — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 16:26:16 GMT

My illustration made the cover of Hacker Monthly #19, woo! The illustrated article is "An iOS Developer takes on Android" by Nick Farina. As always, I sent drafts to Cheng Soon Lim and he immediately chose the developer examining the huge android.

My brother helped me as the model. He suggested the looking-back-pose and I told him, "No, you're supposed to be back against the iPhone, ignoring it." Later, while looking at the shots, I realized it was a very good idea. It's like the developer felt some guilt and looked back to the iPhone. Also, this interaction integrates the iPhone in the illustration.

Cheng Soon Lim loved it and put it on the cover. Nick Farina (the article's author) put it as his twitter avatar. Now that's pretty cool!

NaNoDrawMo 2011

j@jgwong.org (Jaime G. Wong) — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 16:45:56 GMT

NaNoDrawMo is an annual event which takes place on November. It's an incentive to draw more, with the goal of creating 50 drawings in a month.

I wanted to participate this year, but I only made 9 drawings. Everything changed beginning November and I was even tempted not to participate. I hope next year will be better.

Illustration for Hacker Monthly #7

j@jgwong.org (Jaime G. Wong) — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 17:10:00 GMT

A new month, a new issue of Hacker Monthly magazine. This month's article was "How Universities Work" by Jake Seliger. It's, as its subtitle says, "A Guide to American University Life for the Uninitiated." The editor suggested a freshman in front of a university, so I drew a draft and he loved it.

I made a quick model in Google Sketchup as a guide for the wide perspective. I love Sketchup, it's easy to build these things and get to work on what matters.

I decided to use again the painterly style for drama. Here's a detail of the final painting:

Illustration for Hacker Monthly #6

j@jgwong.org (Jaime G. Wong) — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 05:00:00 GMT

November's issue of Hacker Monthly magazine had Zed Shaw's "Products for People who make Products for People" as a featured article.

The core idea for the illustration was, quoting from the article: To the Product Person I am a dinosaur. I'm a Long Beard. I'm a guy who makes web servers for fun and gives them away. [...] Second, to them a web server isn't "product", it's infrastructure. It's not even a toilet, it's the rusty pipe that feeds water to the toilet.

So, here's the Long Beard guy and his peers. Since this is about "products," I chose to represent them as furniture sellers -- furniture being the "products for people." Just like a web server is not supposed to be an end product, but infrastructure, the Long Beard sells planks of wood: raw material for furniture.

Following the article, the peers watch him in disdain:

To a Product Person the things I make are laughable. They aren't products because people don't use them, only programmers. To make a good web server you just have to code. There's no design, no usability, no human elements at all. The all superior Product(TM) has design, usability, and is used by humans. "Your web server is just used by geeks and it's just code."

Tony Eisler

j@jgwong.org (Jaime G. Wong) — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Tony Eisler from the Mana Khemia video game.

Drawn by request.

Flying Pig

j@jgwong.org (Jaime G. Wong) — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 05:00:00 GMT

This little bacon was drawn for an article on my blog.

Illustration for Hacker Monthly #5

j@jgwong.org (Jaime G. Wong) — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 19:20:00 GMT

For the October issue of Hacker Monthly, I was asked to illustrate "How to Read Mathematics" by Shai Simonson and Fernando Gouvêa, a very interesting article.

Playing with the idea of Mathematics being a foreign language, I thought of an archeologist/explorer reading math symbols carved on ruins (#1). Other idea was a Math symbol teaching a school student how to read the Math language (#3). I had some other ideas with aliens, but unfortunately I didn't have much time to draw many characters, just keep the ideas simple. While skething those and reading the article again, I came up with idea #2.

The idea came from this quote from the article: "Mathematics has a reading protocol all its own, and just as we learn to read literature, we should learn to read mathematics. Students need to learn how to read mathematics, in the same way they learn how to read a novel or a poem, listen to music, or view a painting.".

Here's a closer look:

One thing I've been learning about composition and color theory is you use a higher contrast on your areas of interest. In this case, our subject of interest is the painting rather than the girl.

This is the same image, greyscaled, so you can see the values more clearly contrasted:

If you look at the original image again, the colors on the girl lose saturation as we go to the bottom. Her sandals have almost no hue. In contrast, her bag and her hair are saturated; their purpose is to guide you again to the painting.

Dessert

j@jgwong.org (Jaime G. Wong) — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 01:35:00 GMT

"Dessert" is this this week's Illustration Friday topic.

Yummy! :)

Illustration for Hacker Monthly #4

j@jgwong.org (Jaime G. Wong) — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Hacker Monthly issue 4 is out. Cheng Soon Lim, the editor, suggested to illustrate an article by Tom Moertel called "A Coder's Guide to Coffee." He gave me images of latte coffee art and the idea to have something that represents "coder" drawn on it.

For those of you who aren't hackers and don't get it, the figure I chose was the Hacker's Emblem:

(Yes, it's not exactly coder, but every coder is a hacker by nature)

I had a hard time thinking on how to illustrate it. Since it's latte art, doing a comic-style, inked illustration wouldn't cut it, so I went for a realistic, painterly style. I didn't have coffee at hand (I don't drink coffee), just tea, so I made a cup, took my Acer Aspire One netbook and shot several compositions.

I left the latte art for later, so it dawned on me too late I should have used milk! (Latte coffee? Hellooo?) My reference was a dark transparent tea, while the latte is opaque milk with coffee. I couldn't take another picture since light has already changed. Finding the right hues for it was a challenge, since color is always relative. I examined many pictures of latte art to see how it mixed and blurred when drawn. I wanted to emulate its behavior the best I could.

Finally, Cheng Soon loved it so much, he put it on the cover of the magazine. That's absolutely awesome.

Comes to Pass my Way

j@jgwong.org (Jaime G. Wong) — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Losing sleep
In a waking dream,
A recurring face I see
Comes to pass my way

Still, my heart,
Will you please be still, my heart?
In this world of change
You keep turning me round again

Vangelis - Losing Sleep