Bydood

Tag: opinion

  • My perspective for drawing – Process from start to finish…

    My perspective for drawing – Process from start to finish…

    I wanted to give my opinion about drawing. This post was a long time coming as I only started drawing over 5 years ago. That does seem like a long time ago…

    On this website, I have posted different drawings in another category (You can check the drawings at this link: http://www.bydood.com/category/doods-drawing/). If I were to journey back to my first ever drawing, I feel like I have gone a very long way! Like, seriously! I started journey with no experience about drawing!

    I feel so proud of myself…

    From the beginning, I took this hobby to play around and never thought of even posting anything online. I ended up posting just so I can have it stored somewhere. I found that the more I drew, the more I found new ways to play around with perspectives and tools.

    With the many different tools I have been through, I found a process that I have been following for the artwork I do! I am still learning but definitely has been consistent forw 2 or 3 years now.

    I now use the Procreate app onan iPad Pro (2018) with an Apple Pencil.

    So here is my process when I start drawing:

    • Pick up iPad
    • Pick up Apple Pencil
    • Open Procreate
    • Choose “Technical Pencil”
    • Change colour to blue
    • Start sketching the concept in my head

    On a regular basis, I would just wake up and think of random scenarios then ask myself “how can I draw that?” Then I start thinking about an interesting angle… And off I go to start sketching!

    Sketching the concept is my second favourite step in the process of drawing. It becomes technical and fun to figure out how to make a drawing interesting! It almost feels like I am problem solving and once the concept becomes closer to the image in my head, I feel like I just figured out a hard equation to a math problem! (Not that I am comparing it to Math!)

    I spend a huge amount of time just sitting around thinking about what to draw, when I finally have a concept, I start sketching!

    After when the sketch is complete, I follow the next coming steps for LINE DRAWING:

    • Change tool to Inking
    • Choose “Technical Pen”
    • Select Stabilisation > StreamLine > Amount = 75%
    • Change colour to black
    • Create a new layer
    • Start drawing over my blue lined sketch with a thick black line

    This is the most relaxing step ever and probably my FAVOURITE step when drawing. There is just something very relaxing about it. When just following lines with the Apple Pencil, just something satisfying and listening to some music makes me realise that life is good and simple!

    When the black lines are smooth and ready, I start the COLOURING process:

    • Start researching colours to figure out which ones I want to use
    • Add the colours to the palettes
    • Select Airbrushing > Hard Brush
    • Colour the base with a medium toned colour
    • Select size of brush
    • Start colouring the blank spaces

    This one is very relaxing. I manually colour the gaps and spaces by just strokes. I never use the auto fill command; that feels boring. This process is very important to me and I like to take my time on this one. All I do is turn on very soothing music and start colouring! I can completely zone out during this time…

    And finally whatever finishing touches I need to do (whether its shading, lighting or backgrounds), I just add one more layer and add those extra parts in!

    As I mentioned before, this process really works for me and has been for the past couple of years. I am really curious about other peoples’ art process! Really keen to try new ways!

    I hope this helps anyone that has been thinking about getting into the art field! I’m no expert AT ALL but happy to try help those who want to try…

  • Converting WordPress to Angular

    I am in the middle of creating a new website. THIS blog website actually!

    Having a think about the look and feel of my current blog with the basic theme just does not feel like the website I actually wanted.

    So I started creating my own theme in WordPress and every time I tried, it got boring when converting components in PHP and then pulling out the WordPress functions…

    One thing about me is if I am doing a website for myself, I would prefer to just do everything in the front end and if I need to do a small amount of backend, I don’t mind it. I just like seeing things move!

    I began researching upon whether there are ways to convert WordPress to Angular…

    And the answer is YES!

    I found one way which is very interesting! To achieve this, I used the following plugin:

    WP REST API Controller

    WP REST API Controller plugin basically converts your posts into an API where you are able to display your content however you want! All it would need is a AJAX call and then you control how to display the content.

    So with this, I started researching further with how to call certain posts and how to display the pages on the Angular page. Not long after, I found a few websites and developers using this same API.

    I started with the following API:
    …/wp-json/wp/v2/posts?page=1&categories=150&_embed

    This pulls out something like the following:

    This is what made me realise that this is possible to do my whole blog in Angular! So now I am just fully invested in doing this new website!

    So as of so far, I have spent a few weeks working with this API and will be posting updates as I go. Its going pretty slow but this makes me focus more of my front end development instead of playing around with server side code.

    We will see how this goes……

  • Working from home or the office?

    From looking back from the previous post, it has been 5 years since my last blog post! Thinking back at all the things I have done, I feel like I need to write something!

    Before I get into it, analysing the posts before, I realised just how much I was trying to make this blog into something that was meant to be inspiring for others. The more I thought about it and the content I was writing, the more this blog became less about benefiting me. This is where I want to steer this blog back to what it was set out to be:

    Life updates and general rants to keep me sane!

    Every time when I start something, I always think “how can this benefit me and how can this make me money in the future?” Then I go into this rabbit hole of how to do this and changing my content to relate to my readers. And then the content becomes harder to write as I start to think “will anyone like this”? This had caused me to stop writing my blogs. But this did make me find another hobby I never thought I would have gotten into though… DRAWING!

    But the simple reality should really just be writing blogs so that stuff just doesn’t get built up in my head and letting it out somewhere… So there is the small explanation of the silence…

    So… Where have I been?

    I guess a lot happens in 5 years but the past 2 years have been very quiet and that is of course to do with the pandemic! Let’s talk about that!

    Since the lockdown ended almost a month ago, it almost feels like the lockdown never happened but I sure as hell know it did and it almost made me go CRAZY!

    When my work switched from the office to home, it started off well. I liked the thought of how flexible it was. But then as time went on, it became a horrible experience.

    So I found that at the end of a work day, I tend to always forget the time and end up working overtime without me knowing it. I think the biggest difference in the office is that when you see everyone is leaving, that is usually the trigger to stop working! But when remote, I have the illusion that everyone is still working resulting in me needing to work too. I need to change that!

    With this extra overtime accidentally happening, it tends to make me lose focus with my personal hobbies and detach me from a lot of other things I could be working on.

    On top of this point, I spend a huge amount of time on the same computer and the environments start to get very merged in together. My workstation is now a “work environment” where it used to be a “gaming/creative environment”. It does become harder to identify whether my workstation is a place I can switch my brain off…

    So when people ask me:

    Which do you prefer? Working from home or working in the office?

    My answer would actually be “a bit of both”.

    There are great advantages working from home. It gives me a flexible lifestyle to do small errands and continue work as per normal. On the other hand, going to the office gives me a social aspect to have small talk and know that there is life outside the “remote bubble”.

    The restrictions do seem to be lifting and it does come to be a big relief that this is happening.

    I suppose when things go back to normal, I would prefer to work 2 days in the office and 3 days at home. That sounds to me like a very good balance!

    What do you prefer?

  • Inspiration hunt

    Inspiration has been hard for me to get hold of lately. I tried different ways to push me back into the momentum of the inspiration wave. I have also read different ways from article to article to help me open up the creative side of me.

    I found that when I work on something harder and harder, my frustration increases and makes me stop being inspired. I start new drawings to relieve the frustrations then when I return to the drawing, I seem to lose the creative momentum and often give up as the new drawing overrides the past ones.

    However, I read in one article, it mentions that being in the same environment can make one lose creative juices however, finding a new environment starts pushing new visuals.

    During my recent holiday, because work was not on my mind for a week and a half, drawing stuff and being more creative about stuff began to flow naturally than forced. Forcing creative stuff just hurts my head a lot and I start rethinking whether drawing is what I want to do as a hobby.

    I also read that spending only one hour a night doing something you love doing pushes one to create great things. But these “great things” aren’t to the full 100% extent of the creation as it feels forced than natural.

    As I look at my drawings, I noticed that most of them consist of either frustration or sad types. Every time, I draw a smile, I seem to always rub it out and end up giving the character angry or sad emotion.

    This definitely shows my emotion through life.
    It is either work related or just life as a whole. It does not sound great however, when I release them on Social networks, I feel a slight relief upon how people either like or comment on it. There are people who mentions that they can relate which makes me feel better.

    There was one drawing that was produced which consists of a smile and that one made me smile too!

    The next few drawings I have produced I feel like the colours and emotions have been altered in such a way upon how I feel so I hope you enjoy them when they are released.

    So I guess what I want to really push out to all you creative individuals is not to always be in the same place. If you feel like you are slowing down as a creative person, remember to get out of your comfort zone or the place you are “trying” to be creative and try work somewhere else to have a bit more of a view. It doesn’t have to be a holiday or somewhere magnificent… It could simply mean that you can go to a coffee shop (preferably one you have never been to) and work there. It seems rather simple but it helped me a lot to think out of the box.

    What do you guys think? IF you guys have solutions to getting more creative, please leave a comment! I would love to get some new ideas to think creative!

  • What’s with all the haters?

    What’s with all the haters?
    So here is what I gathered. Haters are basically individuals who like to put their point of view towards a certain someone who they disagree in whatever they are doing. In other words, these people like to be the ones who like to put other spirits down when it is not necessary to.

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    I suppose it is quite nice for someone to be honest and give out their opinions but too much of it can make one feel like they should give up.

    I guess this is a two way street:
    – The person who is being hated should stay positive and not let it bother them
    – The person who is hating should let their opinions out but at least with a valid reason

    When an argument starts in regards to this matter, it occasionally gets ugly and starts making the other person think twice about what they are doing. If it is an argument, that just means that the two people have different views and have a 30% chance of getting them to agree with each other. Why spend that time trying to get your point across when the conversation can move onto something more positive?

    We, humans, cannot control ourselves when it comes to firing our mouths off when it’s not necessary however, in some cases it is a good thing to hear, taking it too far is another story.
    Now this post was not just a random one… The reason for this post is due to the fact that whether the person is a musician, an actor, a director or whatever, there comes a point in their lives where they end up in the news or articles with one of their pitfalls in life and for this very same reason that fans stop following them and begin hating on them. They believe that they are supporting the stuff read on the news when buying their product in the shop!

    A little silly don’t you think?

    medium_4809626938

    Here is an example. When we buy an album, we are simply supporting their passion, not what they have done in their lives! Haters would ask “Why did you buy their album? Don’t you know what he/she did!?” Gossip is not what gets me to decide to buy an album… It is the music and beat that I look for.
    I suppose what really triggered me to write this post was the YouTube comments I disagree with and also, artists who really deserve a lot more credit but ends up with no attention because of their history.

    I suppose I can’t change how other people feel as they are who they are but I just want to send out my view to the world.

    Stay positive…

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  • Programming in today’s world…

    Here’s a brief history about my experience in programming. I walked down a path of many different programming languages where I got to adapt to platforms that were unfamiliar to me… I went from Visual Basic, to Java, then to PHP with MySQL, and then finishing with C++. Programming languages are amazing in my opinion and rather interesting. However, nowadays, it seems like things are getting a lot simpler for people to develop programs. Sometimes, you don’t even need to write a single line of code! Seeing as that is the situation, with the right documentation and tutorials, creating games or applications has become so simple to a point that anyone can do it. All it requires is patience and motivation.

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    Creating applications can be quite fun since everything is laid out for you but there are other times when it is better when you have that flexibility to create particular objects yourself. These third party solutions have led me to decrease my skills in development and I am forced to develop programs from scratch to keep myself up-to-date.

    The last thing I created with a third party tool is a game written in C++ called Marmalade. They gave the opportunity that you can port your games or applications from C++ to any mobile device on the market. For my case, I was able to create 2 simple games and release it on the Apple App Store. This did give me the advantage to ease myself into C++ and use object oriented programming which was rather fun to code in.

    Now that I am a web developer, I am forced to develop random stuff in my spare time so I do not forget the basic principles in programming; although I am aware that it is at the back of my head somewhere.

    Not long after this development, I discovered Unity which was based more of a drag and drop development and minor effort of programming however, they do give you the option to code in C# which is rather nice. The good thing is that if programming is at its minimum, it just means more creative games will be released with minimal effort which is good and bad. Good that it creative ideas are shown quickly for others to see but bad because programmers such as me cannot appreciate the programming of the game, like the good old days…

    medium_178961991

    Speaking of programming, it seems like the books are slowly disappearing from our ways of teaching. Books were a great source and now it is taken over by the internet. Don’t get me wrong… The Google search bar is an excellent tool and I probably use it at least once every day and it is free so why spend money if you can get information for free? It is the same question as why do we prefer internet news instead of magazines? It is because we don’t like to be using our screens all the time and our eyes need to divert to something else. Also, stumbling across something that you don’t know is highly likely just by flicking pages in a book… I believe books still have a big role at this present day so book stores… PLEASE DO NOT CLOSE DOWN!

    To summarise, this is not me complaining about the way how things are, I am only just specifying how I used to program and learn and it has changed quite a big deal! Quick development is great but slower and optimising the code to every angle is a great accomplishment and truth be told, I haven’t had that kind of feeling in a long time. Maybe some point when I actually complete a project is where I will feel that sensation once again but I suppose time will tell…

    For those who want to develop games or an application, there are loads of tools out there… Just search for them……. With Google….

  • Quick update…

    It has been a long while since I have written a blog post however, now that I have installed Evernote (http://www.evernote.com) on all my devices, I can finally share across all platforms so with this, I will probably write more posts…
    So I want to start with my development progress since I have been hard at work recently. I have been working on securing a virtual server which I recently purchased from Linode.com. This is the first time I have ever used this and I spent quite a bit of time doing this. My aim is to use this virtual server to keep all my future developments here so I can monitor precisely what is going on. Although it does require a bit of technical knowledge to get around to places, but it was rather fun just getting to understand it. The server seems to be stabilised and now moving forward to creating my web servers onto it. I have 3 in total so I need to secure those. This server has the capability to do much more and I plan to use it to its full capacity!
    So lets move onto movies… After a lot of waiting around, I finally sat down to watch the entire Fast & Furious collection (only the 5 movies… The 6th one is on hold until the DVD is released)… I think it was a good set of films but the fact that it was rather a messy transition between 1-3 but went back on the story at 4-5. But 2 was more of comedy and 3 was just a whole new story with new characters which rather put me off the whole collection altogether. In my opinion, I think the 5th was probably my favourite one.
    Moving back a bit more, so I went out to purchase a tablet, Acer W700, and I need to put my opinion on this bit of kit. So this device holds an Intel i5 3rd gen processor, 4GB RAM and Intel HD 4000. The 11-inch screen grabs an impressive HD resolution with pixel perfect display. Nowadays, this tablet is my complete replacement of my Mac Mini and it accomplishes more or less my day to day activities on a computer. One downside I would probably mention is the heating and the noise that comes out when a bit of activity is being processed on the tablet… Besides this, I believe it can sit side by side with a low end laptop but just with the touch screen controls…
    Finally, gaming… Resident Evil 6… The game I bought on the first day it came out and completed 2 campaigns but need to finish the last one. The game is pretty good with the storyline and all but one problem is the camera angles. It is very frustrating when the camera just moves around a lot and also, it is too close to the body that the bottom is not visible. If these issues were fixed, this may actually reach a 8/10 but unfortunately, I would give it a 7/10…
    I hope to work more on my blog so I hope you enjoyed this one.

  • Withthegamers.com

    There has been a project that I have been involved with in an upcoming website releasing a version shortly. The first version of the website will consist of the latest news in gaming and will keep you up to date with the upcoming events such as the long awaited E3!

     

     

    Sign up to our newsletters at:

    The site will be free to use and is available to anyone. We have some exciting ideas coming ahead so be sure to check the website often…

    We are open to feedback as well so if you also have ideas, please let us know and we will be sure to note it down.

    Thanks for the support…

  • Xbox One announced

    So the Xbox One has been confirmed and from all the rumours spread before hand, it seems like the announcement did not reach the expectations of the viewers! In other words, it was over-hyped! Here is precisely what I think of the 1 hour presentation…

    Image from mashable.com

    The name “Xbox One” felt as though they were going backwards… There was a big number “360” at the end of Xbox and now they want to minus 359 from it? I don’t know but to me, it feels like a downgrade to me.

    The console itself was quite a bit of a disappointment to me. The style of it didn’t look so great and to be honest, the old one looks better. The Kinect (which now comes with the console) does look a little chunky and again, I’d prefer the old design. What makes up for my negativity is probably the controller. It looks more or less the same as the old one but a few changes but I guess for me, the controller made Xbox the right choice for me. Although it is not the best thing for beat em up games, it does accomplish other genre of gaming correctly. Seeing that the console and Kinect will be sitting in front of me, the controller is the vital importance of gaming here so all in all, its not so bad…

    Image from Technobuffalo.com

    The presentation then moved onto living room activities. From what I gathered, they seem to want navigation through TV, movies, music and games easier just with a few simple voice commands. Also, they introduced Skype into the mix. It seems as though I was looking at the Windows 8 interface since the Skype call was taken on the side and had the ability to also watch Star Trek. But with Skype integration, that is what made it interesting. One thing I really loved about PC gaming was that I could video call on Skype with one monitor and play  games on the other.

    Then there was a brief overview with EA Sports, Quantum Break and Call of Duty: Ghosts. Of course I expected no game line up since they did specify before hand that the games will be announced at the E3 Expo. Quite honestly, EA Sports always deliver the same and expected games so to me, that is no surprise. Quantum Break was completely baffling! Although the story line of this game remains a mystery, it looks rather interesting. Finally, Call of Duty: Ghosts looks more or less the same as their previous games but the graphics are a touch better.

    Image from Joystiq.com

    So the presentation leaves me with the following opinion. It wasn’t a full disappointment but the big point is that the Kinect will be sold with the Xbox One at launch which is a good thing. With the game line up coming up, there really isn’t much to say just yet but with Skype and TV integration, it makes the console worth having. The controller is also kept consistent which I don’t see a problem with.

    So far, a 7/10 only because I want to see what games are coming out on launch and especially the price is one of the key factors I was waiting for… One other thing they did not announce is the specific day of release… Would be nice to know when to expect this bad boy…

  • Mistakes

    Creating mistakes can be so easy… Some are plain obvious and some are hidden. Question is how do we know a mistake is coming? Let’s analyse…
    Mistakes are made when a certain action is done but then it is followed with a judgement by either yourself or someone else right? So in that case, why do we allow ourselves to consider it a mistake? 

    We are our own worst enemy!

    Some people say that they don’t live in regrets but truth be told, I think we all have one or more regrets if you analyse it carefully. But don’t let it destroy the person you spent building. Lying to yourself just means you’re living a life in denial. 
    Personally, I cannot sit and say I am a perfect person. I just feel as though there are people who are just so afraid in making that “mistake” which could be the very same opportunity that could make you a stronger person. If someone is telling you that you can’t do something, don’t let them take you down! It’s your life and even if you make that wrong turn, at least you tried.
    I am still trying to learn this methodology. As days turn into weeks and weeks turn into months, I keep ending up in a spiral however, as I write this, I feel optimistic that I may just turn it all around in an instant… Nowadays, I use these mistakes to analyse why others judge them as mistakes.
    I don’t know about you but I’d like to redefine that very definition to a positive meaning rather than that negative vibe… Easier said than done but if we are given second chances, then let’s change it!

    I suppose what I am trying to get at with this post is that life is tough when people judge you and you are taken down from their comments when really, it doesn’t matter at all. Sometimes, they can be right but if you take all judgements to mind, it can take a big chunk of spirit from you!

    Everyday is a day worth experiencing to its fullest…

    Remember… Mistakes are allowed to be made because that is what defines you…