This is a nice one! After watching the video and reading my review on the How To Draw Manga Books in this article I got a message from Steve.

Steve told me that he shares the passion with me and many others who love to draw girls. After my review he decided to give the book on Female Characters a try. I’m very glad that Steve likes this one and I’m even more glad that I could deliver some valuable information.

While Steve was shopping around he also ordered the book Let’s Draw Manga: Sexy Gals by Heisuke Shimohara. This was finally the reason for him to contact me and recommend this book. He told me that the next time I make a video or write a review on Manga Drawing Books, I definitively have to include this one. A side note in Steve’s message was that this is not a book for kids, but he would recommend it without any problems to the adult audience/artists.

I gave the book a glance on-line and read the three reviews so far. Indeed the readers said that you could better keep this away from children. My first thought by reading this reviews was Duh, who is buying a book for his kids with the word ’sexy’ in the title anyway?

However, I don’t think we have to wait until I’m able to hold a load of books into the camera again. I’m happy to see that readers get involved into the topics of this blog and I trust Steve’s taste for books on this subject. Though the cover looks less sexy than I’ve expected.

So I let do him the recommendation this way. Thank you very much, Steve.

There are by the way books that I rather recommend to avoid. I share this information in one of my newsletter issues.
It’s free to join and done in seconds here.

I was a little confused lately. As I don’t do technical tweaks regarding my newsletter very often I discovered that I had an organizational problem.

The problem I had was how to organize the spreading of the passwords to the protected posts without taking the risk that a subscriber would miss one.

The first thing I learned when I got a message from my dear member Miryam was that I seemingly didn’t communicate what I meant in the first place. It wasn’t clear that the password for the Derren Brown Undertaker Trick I’ve send wasn’t one password for all protected posts. It wasn’t even clear if it was a different password for every subscriber.

The answer to this is: every protected post has its own password.

However, at this time I had a problem delivering the passwords due to some chaos in my brains. I’ve set up a follow-up message for every password. You see, organizing it this way wasn’t really clever at a second thought. A thought that by the way hadn’t come to my mind if Miryam hadn’t contact me.

Why was my first approach not clever? Let’s say we are a couple of years further and there are 50 protected posts (just an example). If I would then send the passwords in sequences of 4 days it would take 200(!) days a new subscriber would have to wait until she get the password for the post she is most interested in.

Not really fair, isn’t it? After such a long time she would’ve forget about this post anyway. I had to change this.

After drinking some more coffee I thought about the idea to give every protected post the same password. This would be easy to handle but also easy to misuse. Subscribing, getting the password and then unsubscribing again isn’t really the result I want to achieve. It wouldn’t be fair to the members who joined the newsletter and it wouldn’t be fair to me.

So I decided to make a list with passwords and send it to every new subscriber within a week automatically. Every new password I will then broadcast to my current subscribers and will add it to the password list for new members who join my newsletter.

It’s so easy!

Sometimes I just think much to complicated and then it’s great to have readers like Miryam around who help me taking a step back with my thinking. The reason for this post is to say:

Thank you, Miryam!

Think easy folks and have a great day.

In this video automotive designer Tim Rugendyke (Ford and General Motors) gives us a quick step through how to draw a Hummer. Horacio Cane, get your pen ready.

You understand that I recommend doing this digitally. If you use Manga Studio for this (what makes the perspective drawing very easy) and import a car from the many 3D objects that come with the software.

A Hummer isn’t in the package and you maybe rather want to draw and design your own models. What will be an exciting experience of course. If you are into drawing and designing cars Tim wrote his eBook How To Draw Cars Fast And Easy for you.

Not everybody who read my the article on my first tattoo experience also watched the accompanying 13 minutes video. This is too long and too much asked to a stranger who is passing bye. Especially if the article is quite long as well.

This said, I want to share this little story with you.

It’s mentioned by Ilaria during the filming and it’s from my dear friend Pedro. He told me this story about his workmate during one of our Wednesday (beer drinking) evenings we hold since 15 years at the time of writing this.

Pedro had this workmate who showed up at work with a sleeveless shirt showing his fresh and gleaming new tattoo. It was a tiger with a black Chinese character right beside it. They had the usual chat about pain, costs and meaning. I can’t remember exactly what Pedro told me the Chinese character was saying, but it really doesn’t matter as you’ll see in a second. However, it should have been something cool and tiger related.

The next day Pedro’s workmate came to work and looked pretty disappointed and kind of nervous. Pedro asked him what was going on and he told that he went home by train the day before. While he was waiting on his train to arrive a Chinese girl came to him and asked very politely: Excuse me, but why is your tattoo saying a quarter to five?
Pedro’s workmate immediately protested and said that she must be mistaken as his tattoo said something powerful, tiger related. The girls shrugged and went away smirking.

Pedro gave his workmate the clever advise to go to a Chinese restaurant, showing his tattoo to an employee there and then he would knew it for sure.

The guy admitted that this was very wise and after work he decided to take a meal at the local Chinese. He asked the waitress if she could read the character on his arm. She said no (she was born in the Netherlands, could talk the language but didn’t knew all the characters) but she would ask if the chef had time to look at it.

After a  while the chef came and he said with a friendly smile that it said a quarter to five. Pedro didn’t tell me if the guy finished his dinner, but he wasn’t that happy when he came back to work the next day.

If you like tattoos at all is a question of taste. If you like Chinese characters as a tattoo is a question of taste as well. Personally I find Chinese characters in a tattoo beautiful and esthetic. The problem with them are stories like the one above.

What amazes me the most when I hear or read a story like that is that people don’t do any research beforehand.

In the first place you know that a tattoo is for life. If you think about a tattoo and you think at the same time that you can let remove it later if you don’t like it anymore, here is an advise I want to give you: don’t let anyone tattoo you. Just don’t do it if you are not for the fully 100% confident that you want to have it on your body for the rest of your life. Think before you ink!

In the second place people tend to spend a lot of money for their tattoos. Of course it’s in the eye of the beholder what you consider a lot of money. My Chinese character tattoo had a price of $ 100,- back in 2008. Not expensive and it’s the quality you can expect from a top tattoo parlor as East Side Ink in New York.

If I wasn’t confident at the time of getting the tattoo that the characters are exactly saying what I thought they were saying, no needle had been put in my arm. I can assure you this for the fully 100%.

I was lucky that Ilaria’s adorable Chinese friend Ching was so nice not just to translate the saying for my tattoo but also to gave me the advice to take another saying what’s an Chinese idiomatic equivalent of it. This is the help you need if you are not Chinese and want to have a proper tattoo consisting Chinese characters.

When I came home my girlfriend confirmed that she couldn’t find anything  weird in my tattoo. It was after the inking was done but this gave me the final security as my girlfriend had studied the Chinese language.

But be aware! Even if you know a Chinese person who is keen to help you doesn’t say that this will work without failure. You see, translating a text from one language into another takes more than just the skill of translating words one by one. Even sentences isn’t enough. Why should I’ve made the decision to translate a text into Chinese that no Chinese person would ever use? You see what I mean?

Again, if I hadn’t had the assurance of an accurate translation and advice I wouldn’t have this tattoo today. If I had known about the Chinese tattoo artist Yingying at this time I would have invest $30 or $50 extra to make sure my tattoo isn’t a failure and a waste of my money all together. This is even more true if we talk about tattoos that cost a couple of hundred bucks. Removing a misspelled tattoo is painful and much more expensive than the tattoo itself.

Yingying’s service is no automated stuff. She delivers custom translated Characters for your tattoo. Her design makes you stand out from the crowd with zero risk of misspelling. Besides this she works secure and fast. Within 24 hours you get your translated design delivered. She also provides the stencil outlines what can save you the money for this as well.

You should consider this if you are up to get a Chinese character tattoo.

Thanks for reading and have a nice day!

Momo from the Momozone was talking in one of his recent video’s about getting rid of belly fat. Jamie Oliver, one of my favorite chefs, had a presentation at TED about the dangers of overweight. Though I’m a strong believer in Paul McKenna’s approach of losing weight, I’m sure this videos are fun and very motivational to burn down some fat a little faster.

First let’s have a look at Diversity demonstrate their dance in the street. Motivating people to move. 

Now it would be your turn, I guess. Warren, Jordan, Little Perry and Jamie teach you some dance moves in this four easy routines. Watch it, try it and if you are in for more scroll down.

After the easy part we come to the fair routines with Ian, Sam, Ack(?) and Mack. Personally I find this routines still easy. What about you?

Ash, Mitch and Toe(?) taking you a step further in this two videos with this hard routines. My guess is that this should be doable for everyone of my valued readers.

;

Have a great dancing day ahead! You can of course grab a cup of coffee and read some of my articles if you’re not in the right mood for dancing.

You don’t have to be my sister or brother to make me listen if you have any request. As my dear New York sister Ilaria asked me to provide the drawings I showed in the video of this article in a separate blog post I browsed my HD for scans of them.

The images are made with an old serial flatbed scanner, so please have mercy if they may not meat the newest quality standards. They have a blue shiver at the edges. By the way they are all 13 years old at the time of writing this.

I drew a lot of this kind of portraits. Not just celebs. Most of the drawings I made are sold. I remember that in the early 2000th the owner of a modern art gallery over here in the Netherlands bought a bunch of them from me via an Internet auction. This may sound great, but I also remember that it was for small amounts of money and they I just wanted to have them showed somewhere, rather than lying in a drawer or gathering dust in the basement.

John Malkovitch – This is one of my favorites. I think I drew this from a still of the movie Con Air with Nicolas Cage and others.

Robert DeNiro – I drew this one from a photograph published in a magazine along an interview with this chameleon as they used to call him. If you wondering about this, it was because of his ability to play this diversity of characters and being convincing with every single one of them. 

Winona Ryder – This is drawn from a still of a movie where they had all this old dresses and stuff. I can’t remember the title or even the role Winona Ryder was playing. Did I ever tell that I knew a young lady that was as beautiful as Winona Ryder? She could have been a twin sister. Didn’t saw her in a long time.

Juliette Lewis – This was a very easy one. Taken from a still of Natural Born Killers, I guess. I always wondered what I liked about her besides the fact that she is a effing good actress. I don’t know, she has something.

If you want to be able to draw like this or even better just invest $14,95 and buy Christopher Sia’s course. If you not sure about this read my article on How To Draw Pencil Portraits Fast and Easy and buy it then.

If you just wanted to see the drawings, this is OK for me too. I appreciate your visit and I hope you found them recognizable.

Have a beautiful day.

The chance is big that your singing is much better than mine. To give you a little creativity boost I want to briefly describe how I made this 3 minute music video.

First I have to warn you, it took quite a couple of hours to produce and it’s not likely that you are much faster than me. But OK, let’s take a look how it’s done:

The Soundtrack

1. I searched for an instrumental version of the Gary Jules version of Mad World, found one and put it on the first track in Magix Music Maker.
2. To make sure the lyrics are right I browsed the Internet for them and found them very quick.
3. I placed my unprofessional computer microphone in front of me and hit the record button to record the first voice on the second track of the Music Maker project.
4. Considering that my voice was to weak and flat, I decided to fiddle around with the effects of the software. The compressor gave my voice more volume and a little reverb is good for Lady Gaga, so it can’t be bad for me.
5. I repeated steps 2 to 4 five times for the background vocals. I guess you didn’t think that it was that much.

The Video Recording

1. Putting headphones on to fake a studio ambience and most of all to try to mislead you from the fact that I can’t sing.
2. Starting the finished soundtrack I recorded.
3. Running to my green screen.
4. Playback to my own recording.
5. Done!

The Video Editing

1. Load the video I just made into Magix Video Deluxe
2. Load the soundtrack on the next track into the program
3. Sync both by dragging the soundtrack in the right position. This worked out well immediately and still amazes me.
4. Selecting the video and fading the green screen away.
5. Putting an image of the Brooklyn Bridge (I shot myself when I was in New York) in the background and put it on a track above the video. It’s like working with layers in in graphic programs but just the other way around. In this case the layers below covering the layers above.
6. In the next track I put some photographs of me (couldn’t find another victim) to give the video that little extra, for so far you can talk about a little extra if you see me (smirk). However, I could also have used different video’s in this track(s) what would’ve made it much more professional looking. But I had none.

I hope you find this brief explanation useful and I look forward to see your results.

After watching this  short video it’s possible that you see me capable of drawing pencil portraits. If you are interested in portrait drawing I wrote this post for you.

I liked to draw as long as I can remember. Sometimes more and sometimes less. There were even years where I didn’t bother to take a pencil in my hand and make a drawing. But sporadically I always felt the urge and then I got productive. Most of the time this urge had a duration of a couple of month and then disappeared. Sometimes for a couple of years until the cycle started all over again.

The portrait drawings I showed in the video above are some the result of one of this cycles in 1997. Most of the drawings I made weren’t long in my possession.

Back then I showed the portraits I drew to my friends and it didn’t took long that I did commission jobs in my spare time. I wasn’t really interested in doing it as a business as I just loved the creative process and the thought that some of this drawings would maybe last longer than I would. I remember a job were I drew portraits of friends from old child photographs, put it in a nice frame and they gave it to their parents for the 40th anniversary of their marriage. I recently asked if they still got it and it felt good to know that the drawing still has a special place in their home.

It was a nice distraction from my day job I had in the IT-business in those days.

I remember one day when a friend of mine asked me if I could teach him how to draw pencil portraits like this. I was surprised when I thought about it and my answer was: Of course… ehemmm… not.

You see, I can’t say that I am a bad teacher. But if I have to teach something I always have a concept in mind that I apply. I never considered to teach someone how to draw portraits of people. The problem was that I never analyzed at that time how I did it myself. I just did it.

After thinking about how I did it I came to the conclusion that I always studied a face or a photograph and then in my mind divided it into what I called shadow fields. I studied the shadows in a shadow and so on. Sometimes it felt a little weird. When I was at the supermarket I studied the face of the girl behind the cash desk and thought about how I would start drawing her.

However, I had not really a concept. How could I teach this?

My answer to the question stayed No. Not just because of the problem described, but also because of the fact that I had a very time absorbing day job and the relaxation I got out of my hobby would disappear. And besides this: what would you charge for time consuming drawing lessons?

Since I made my love for art a part of this blog I started to investigate what others do and how they do it.

My latest discovery is a pencil portrait drawing course by Christopher Sia. After deciding that his portraits of David Backham, Tom Cruise, Halle Berry, Avril Lavinge an others are pretty awesome, I signed up to receive his free tutorial material. I wanted to find out more about his way of teaching, as I know that in most books on the topic you’ll find very beautiful drawings. The most important thing is missing: a step by step explanation of how to get these results.

In the first instance I found Christopher Sia’s claim of teaching you how to draw like this within 8 days kind of outlandish. But soon I recognized that he has a very good and logical approach of it.

When it comes to portrait drawing I don’t really build it up in a logical way. Most of the time I start with the eyes and go over to the shadowing before I did the rest of the features of the face. I guess I do this because I’m pretty confident about my skills. But of course often I discovered to late that the proportions weren’t as they should be and I could begin again from scratch.

Considering how time consuming my approach was if something went wrong, it shows that it’s a matter of how you start drawing your artwork. If you do it systematically you can be more secure of not making mistakes that force you to start all over again. This results of course in a lower learning curve and makes the claim of learning it within a week much less outlandish.

Anyway, if you have already the skills to draw good looking pencil portraits this course is not for you. There isn’t even a book I could recommend to you to achieve better results at the time of writing this.

A characteristic face like Al Pacino’s or a young face like Avril Lavigne’s? What face would you say is easier to draw? It’s the last one, isn’t it? Sometimes it’s just better to start with something more simple to begin with. You gain the confidence needed and go to the next level with your next drawing. I didn’t made drawings like I showed you in the video when I was 3 years old. They were much more simple than that. Don’t misunderstand me here: they were good!

In his course Christopher takes the example of Halle Berry and then he starts leading you from scratch through the whole process. You could also decide to take another celeb or a person you know and start following his lessons.

His steps are as followed:

1. Choose a reference picture that’s right for you to draw.
2. Organize The Position, Outline And Proportions Of The Features
3. Eye Drawing – Shading and Shadows (I always started with this as my first step)
4. Nose Drawing – Shading and Shadows
5. Mouth drawing – Shading and Shadows
6. Ear Drawing – Shading and Shadows
7. Hair Drawing – Shading and Shadows
8. Face Drawing – Shading and Shadows

His course is 60 pages long. Short if you compare it with other books. The reason for this is in my opinion that he leaves out the unnecessary stuff. Explanations that don’t teach anything and just good for the word count. Do you like to read the history of portrait drawing when you up to learn it? Of course not. You want to see a piece of art emerging on this white sheet of paper in front of you.
With Christopher you will learn right from the start. That’s for sure.

For $ 14,95 (that you can get back within 60 days if you are not satisfied) this portrait pencil drawing course is worth my recommendation.

I hope you have fun with your drawing experience.

Have a nice day ahead.