Awesome

The Surrogates

So if anyone has followed my 'robot academy' work, you'll find that the upcoming Bruce Willis movie 'Surrogates' is remarkably close to the idea i had where regular people had cybernetic parts underlying.

Actually it looked great the first time i saw the posters and movie, reminding me of the character 'cameron' from the "Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles". When I saw shots of the characters jumping and running across buildings and buses, it did remind me a bit of what I had envisioned of the characters I design for 'Robot Academy'. Here's to hoping they do a good job with the special effects because robots are a work of art, and YES it is possible to totally mess it up.

'Everybody'

I really like this video. It's from Japanese R&B artist Jay'ed and the visualizations remind me of Little Big Planet. It's got an upbeat vibe and great graphics.

A-MAZINGER

I grew up with this character named Mazinger Z, a super robot that could shoot of his arms, and had a pilot that flew a plane into the crown on his head. Definitely a very iconic robot, and I had always wanted to design a piece in homage to a childhood hero.

When I started "Robot Academy", it really got the creative juices flowing and I started to think a lot about what I could do, and so I came up with this girl(below).

It turned out pretty well and it gave me chills down my spine because I was essentially designing a new mazinger model. The funny thing is she is quite scary, reminding me a little bit of Freddy Krueger.

Interestingly enough i was in the car the other day in the city with my friend Alex, listening to a cd that I bought in Taiwan by Crowd Lu(盧廣仲) and one of his tracks is actually called Mazinger Z and he sings about it. I guess he has a passion for childhood favorites too.

Wonderland

In case you're wondering, NO, it's not an homage to a John Mayer song.

If you're into the japanese music scene, chances are you'll know who Kaela is, or 木村カエラ. She's a cute pop rock princess and I found her as a good model for one of my works. I spent my friday night and entire saturday working on this one, from the sketch phase, all the way down to where we see it now(at the end). The next stage, is to add people, which will take a long while. I'm happy the way this turned out and I'm definitely going to play with the colors more and go back in, as usual, putting in small details.

Oh, and I call this one "wonderland" after Alice in Wonderland. The original vision I had was when Alice was inside that house and got huge and her legs and head were sticking out of that house, and what if she stayed like that and people had to live with her there?