January 29th, 2008 Ahmad Al-Mahir
I brought a few students to the Ancient Civilisations Museum to do some research as part of a 3d workshop I conducted recently at a local junior college. I always find it refreshing to walk around in those large museum halls and observe the ancient artifacts and priceless treasures on display. There’s so much to see, analyze and learn. And sketch! My appreciation for musuems continue to grow with each visit, and I really should make it a point to visit them more often. Either alone or with like-minded friends. Much as I’d love to bring my family on these visits cum sketch-trips, I doubt I’ll get the opportunity to really focus on drawing. My boys are at such noisy disruptive ages at the moment. It’s not that I don’t want to bring them on museum visits. On the contrary, I think they would find it to be very enriching, educational excursions. It’s just that those visits won’t likely result in any decent sketches done.
Anyway, so at the ACM, I spotted a nice Chinese statue lit in an interesting way and couldn’t resist pulling out my sketchbook and pen.
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July 5th, 2007 Ahmad Al-Mahir
I’ve been keeping in contact on and off with an ex-colleague of mine who’s a self-proclaimed undercover hippy; a free-spirited songwriter cum DJ cum world traveler. Billy’s living the envious happy-go-lucky life playing gigs all over the place and writing (and selling online) songs. A recent message he sent got me inspired to do a couple more quick pencil sketches for him. See, a few years back he thought a drawing I did of a “Mat Rock” (that’s a typical term for a malay rocker for those not in the know) was pretty cool, and I gave him permission to use it for his website/album promo. Apparently, his fans liked it too and have been asking for more. And as usual, I never got round to doing anything about it. Till now. Actually, I just felt like chilling out after a pretty crummy day and do something totally unrelated to work or 3d for a bit (strangely it seems to be a recurrent theme for me these past few days) so sketching seemed like a good idea. Besides, I haven’t been practicing lately so…Â Hope y’all like it.
Go on then, tell me what you think?
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May 23rd, 2007 Ahmad Al-Mahir
As part of an assignment, my students had to go to the zoo on Monday to capture video footages and sketches of various zoo animals. I figured I’d join them and get in some drawing practice myself. After half a day of roaming around, here’s a montage of the animals I managed to scribble in my sketchbook (click on image to enlarge):
They’re mainly rough sketches done in pencil, taking no more than 5 minutes each. I’d actually love to get more details in (especially that lizard and tortoise) but it can be quite the challenge capturing information when the critters keep moving around! I suppose I could just try and grab as many quicker and looser gesture drawings as possible instead of sweating the details. That was actually my original intention, but these guys were just so darn beautiful and intriguing I couldn’t help but try and draw more! I also missed out on quite a few animals (e.g. the big cats, racoon, wolf) either because they’re hiding or asleep, or I just plain ran out of time. Truth be told, I’d probably be more than happy to sit around and draw all day, given the chance. 
If I’m lucky, I may get the opportunity to indulge again some time in the future. Who knows?
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the drawings!
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June 28th, 2006 Ahmad Al-Mahir
Here’s another set of sketches of my favourite superheroes I did recently - the mighty Thor and the mutant Wolverine.
Now back to work!
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June 3rd, 2006 Ahmad Al-Mahir
The past week I’ve been focusing solely on the research project and preparing for the presentation, so “Wait, Mister” has taken a backseat. I think my short presentation on Thursday went quite well considering how nervous I was about the content and amount of preparation. Now that it’s over, I’ve resumed work on “Wait, Mister!” - rigging Mr. Knox from scratch. I’ve decided to attempt to set up Mr. Knox’s entire rig myself instead of using the default XSI biped rig provided (I won’t go into why I chose that route right now). If all goes well, I’ll use the same method for Kid. Otherwise I’ll be re-looking at that default rig again. Unfortunately, what this means is I’m a little behind schedule at the moment.
On a brighter note, “Granny’s Cat” is finally uploaded on my gallery. There were 4 of us working on it and it took us 3 months to complete from concept to final delivery. I was responsible for animating some of the shots, as well as rigging the cat and setting up the lights for most of the interior shots. We tried to ensure that the workload was distributed equally according to our strengths and interests. Considering it was our first time working as a group (and using XSI and Shake) I think we did a pretty decent job. Check it out here and tell me if you like it. It’s in Quicktime movie format at 500×400 resolution and is about 26MB in size so it might take awhile to load.
Some screenshots:
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