Tim’s Blog

My new host and timkoh.info domain

Hi, I just migrated my blog onto a more reliable host and on a new domain timkoh.info! (*^_^*)

Hopefully this new server will make things easier for me to write posts, enable me to receive emails when I receive comments and no more unexpected downtime or hosting restrictions.

Please update your links and bookmarks to point to this site: http://timkoh.info

Otaku room

At Dannychoo.com, there is a competition to find out of all the readers who has the most Otaku-ish room. Given that I am quite proud of my room and have noticed it has become so otaku-ish that even Japanese bloggers mention that my room is more otaku than average Japanese otakus, I jumped at this opportunity to show off my room and entered the competition.

The results still haven’t been announced, but the lucky winner will get 20,000 yen worth of spending money from a company called Tenso to spend on goods at stores that do not ship outside Japan. Tenso apparently receive the mail at their address and redirect your goods to you. Well the word tenso means “to forward” something, like email for example. So to Japanese speaking people, the name makes sense.

Anyways, my entry photo is in the following link:
http://www.dannychoo.com/detail/mac/eng/image/16454/Raptor%5C%27s+Room.html

Wish me luck!

Figure Making

Recently I’ve been making some progress on my figure making. At the moment, I’ve been working on extending the leg from the knee onwards. The length is a bit too long, but I plan to adjust that later on.

This time I extended it by joining the existing leg with a dried stick shaped piece of clay using some wire and covering it in clay. It saved a lot more time compared to last time when I did it without using the wire.

At the moment, the figure may not look very impressive, but I plan to make the basic shape of the figure first. Once that is done, then I plan to add the clothes and smaller details. Next up is to either work on the feet/shoes or the arms. However at the moment I’m still not happy with the shape of the hips and the angle of one of the legs, so I will have to consider about correcting them.

Model and figure making work area

Lately I haven’t done much regarding figure making. The reason is mainly because I simply don’t have the time. Even though I often am in the mood to work on making a figure, the main obsticle is the amount of time (about half an hour) it takes to take out and arrange on the table in the backyard my half made figure, airbrush, paints, sand paper, clay, newspapers, putty and so on.  Then after I am satified with my progress on the figure, I often then have to spend half a further 30mins to 1hr just to clean and pack everything back up. So as you can imagine, it is a lot of work.

Since I noticed that, I decided that I really needed to secure some place for me to work on my models where i can leave things halfway and continue them later on. I ended up deciding on the shed behind the car porch. I ended up converting the desk in the shed into my workplace after asking pleading to my dad to let me use it.

Last weekend, I spent a bit of time prepping up the work area with all the model making tools I needed, and then spent some time working on my full scratch figure. This time, I worked on extending one of the legs that I did halfway last time and sculpted the waist of the figure while referring to some of the figures I put on the desk and also to screenshots of a model I made that in the game 3D Custom Girl. I really only just added a bit of clay onto the leg and let it dry, but the main work was on sculpting the waist of the figure.

When I worked on extending the leg of the figure, I simply just tried to attach some soft clay onto the existing leg and join a previously dried stick of clay to it. However, it seemed that the piece kept falling off, and it ended up being quite hectic to keep it together long enough to dry. (^^;)

After finally managing to extend the leg and drying the clay I added, I realized that I could of done it a lot easier if I simply jointed the two pieces with some hard wire using super glue and then covering it with clay.

Anyways, I still made progress on my figure, and since I can resume work on it at any time, I think I should be able to finish it a lot faster than I previously would be able to.

I want a Clannad mouse!

Since I first saw this limited edition Clannad mouse and I have been pondering over the weekend whether or not to buy it. Clannad is one of the anime that I really like, so this mouse has really caught my attention. Recently my main computer’s mouse has been playing up, sometimes not moving the cursor properly so this is good timing.

However, the problem is that the price is quite expensive for a mouse, and also there are two versions of the design, so I am unsure of which one I should buy if I decide to buy one. I’d ideally like to just buy both of them, but because of the crappy exchange rate, I may have to reconsider.

Apparently this mouse will be released at the end of March. If I don’t hurry up and decide, I know from experience that it’ll be sold out and I won’t be able to get my hands on this again. (>_<)

Negima! Vol.25 Limited edition OAD box set arrived!!

On the same day that I received my new Wacom drawing tablet, I also received the limited edition OAD box set of Negima Vol.25. Apparently this is the last part of the “White wing (Ala Alba)” OAD series for the manga, so I was looking forward to watching this DVD and the the manga to see what happened next.

I always buy my Negima manga from the Japanese online bookshop called bk1.jp. They have a point system which I like that credits you 1000 yen worth of points for every 10,000 yen spent.

Anyways, I had preordered this through bk1 quite a while ago, and had been really looking forward to this day.

When I opened the manga, I noticed quite a large anouncement on the back of the cover page. Apparently the OAD series was so popular that a 2nd new OAD season was given the go ahead. Apparently this new series will cover the events that occur in the magic world. It seems that I have to start preordering some more. The website reports that the new series will be a 4 part OAD production rather than 3 parts like this one.

I have already read the manga twice. As for the OAD DVD, I watched it once so far. The video is as exected, true to the manga, and is done very well. I am very satified with it.

By the way, I found that in Vol.25, the fight that Rakan-san had was very interesting. It was a battle scene that surpassed my imagination. (^^;)

I bought a Wacom Intuos 3 6×11 tablet！(^o^)

I often check out Wacom tablets on Ebay and often look at how much the Intuos 3 tablets sell for. Currently, the 6×11 tablets sell at $550AU average. Normally if you were to buy the same tablet from the Wacom website distributor, It normally costs up to $650AU. This time, I had found myself an auction rather than a buy it now, so I decided to add it to My Ebay so I could follow it and hopefully get it cheap. However, after a few days, about 5 minutes before the auction was about to finish, I actually noticed the reminder email sent to me. As I didn’t check my main very often, I had nearly missed it. As I already own a smll Intuos 3, I wanted to upgrade to a larger tablet, however, as you7d expect I was hesitant because I already owned a tablet and wasn’t as good at drawing as I would like to be. So anyways, I ended up just bidding in the last few seconds really not sure if i should buy or not.. and I ended up unexpectingly winning the tablet.

I wasn’t sure at the time whether I should of been happy or if I should be regretting the purchase, but I was sure shocked that I won. The price that I got it for was $445AU. As this was my first bit at such a high amount, I was a bit worried, but now that I think about it, I actually got the tablet at a great price.

I paid straight away with Paypal, and I got a notfication mail the next day from the sender that it was posted. The tablet I bough was actually stated as 2nd hand, but it really was as described, in very good condition. It was in fact in better condition than the smaller tablet that I have been taking good care of. (^^)

I received it in a quite large package. When I purchase the tablet, I had a general idea of the size of it, but in reality, I was pretty suprised at the size of it.  It takes up about hlaf the space on my desk and did require some rearranging.

It took a while to get used to drawing on the larger 6×11 sized tablet. It took roughly 1-2 hours. My previous tablet was so small compared to it, so a small twitch of my fingers would make a large movement of the cursor on the screen. However on the new tablet, I had to not only move my fingers, but also had to use my arm and wrist to get the same effect.

Anyways, I am really enjoying this new tablet.

It’s been a while

Lately I’ve been quite busy. As I’ve been full on at work during the weekdays, I often feel like at least writing one post on my blog during the weekends. However, 2 weeks ago, I borrowed a huge amount of anime on DVDs from a new otaku friend that I made recently. Anyways, I’ve been spending the last 2 weeks copying the DVDs to my computer non stop. Thanks to that, I’ve ended up filling up my previouly empty 1 TB drive that I bought previously. I barely have 100mb free on that drive now! (^^;)

To make things worse, I still have a number of anime that I haven’t finished copying yet.(^_^;)

Besides for anime, I also borrowed a large number of visual novel games. Apparently this guy is a much more passionate visual novel fan than myself. Anyways, I had a busy 2 weeks.

To tell the truth, I wasn’t only busy due to borrowing anime and video games. I was busy with doing Jujitsu and Karate, Drawing anime pictures, reading novels and so on. Also I just remembered, but last weekend I wasn’t feeling the best. On the Sunday, I had food poisoning, felt pretty weak all day, and had a head-ache from morning till night.

I really wanted to update my blog on the Sunday, but I couldn’t even concentrate enough to do even that.

Anyways, I have a huge backlog of things I want to write about on my blog, so I’ll plan to write about it in my blog over the weekend…well maybe! (^_-)/

Girl in a school dress

I just finished colouring my picture of a girl in a school dress which I had sketched previously.
I find that the legs and the tips of the long hair wasn’t drawn the best, so I don’t particulary like those parts in the pic, but all in all, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

This would be about my3rd attempt at colouring a picture i’ve drawn. Since it’s been a while since I have used Photoshop, I ended up watching my copy of the series “Deji e no bunpou” (Grammar of Digital art) a Japanese TV programme which follows how professional illustrators draw and colour their artwork. So I essentially was watching it and trying out the techniques described. Although as expected, I wasn’t able to do anywhere near as good at they did. Haha! (^^)

It took me about 6-8 hours to colour in this picture. However, I think I spent half that time watching the deji e no bunpou series.

Have you seen Deji e no bunpou before?

Pen Cafe Open day

Last weekend, I went to the open day of a local drawing club called Pen Cafe. As I am not too good at drawing and have trouble keeping motivated to draw, I though this was an excellent opportunity to get myself drawing more often and to improve.

I found out about Pen Cafe from the how to draw anime workshop at Waicon. Since then, I’ve been in contact with some of the artists that I met there on deviant art and also visited the Pen Cafe page there.

I was quite impressed with the opening day. Everyone was very friendly and I made a lot of new friends. I have to admit, I spent most of my time socializing while I was there, but I did learn a lot from everyone that helped give me drawing pointers.

I was also suprised at the number of anime fans there, and how passionate they were about it. I met a couple of guys who have been to comic market many times and had fun chatting with them. I also met a guy who is very good with sculpting, model building and painting using an airbrush. He interested me the most as he was in my opinion an expert in the field who was happy to help me with my garage kit anime figure building and for my sculpting (both which currently haven’t progressed much lately).

I was disappointed that I didn’t finish any pictures at the end of the day, but the following day, I did mange to draw a picture that I was proud of following all the techniques everyone taught me. It is still unfinished, but it is definately one that I would like to finish off and colour in.

When going home, since it was dark and because I was unfamiliar with the university and the area, I ended up getting lost. However, I was able to find my way back in the end after a bit of a journey. (^_^;)

Next time I should make sure I keep a street directory in my car.