My first fanart for Ju-lian of Rules of Make-Believe. This was intended for the art contest they (Ju-lian, the web-artist, and Shinyu,the web-mistress) were going to hold. However, it was cancelled due to lack of entries. Thus, it ends up being here, my very-rarely-updated website.

I actually intended to draw Madam Kwan, another character in the webcom... I mean... webmanga. (Yeah, Ju draws a webmanga, not a webcomic =D That's why she even sticks to the right-to-left sequence format.) However, the reference I used looks so similar to Aida Poh that I decided to draw her instead. You may want to see the characters drawn by the artist herself on this page.

The pencil work has nothing special to speak about, but the colouring was quite special to me. The last time I held a brush to apply watercolour on a piece of paper was around three and a half years before this. The last time I coloured, I accidentally found the way to apply watercolour transparently by wetting the paper beforehand. This time, I wanted to do so, but failed miserably. Painting gradients is much easier done using two colours than using one colour and water. The result is not that visible after scanning, but you can see some of the effect on her dress. The red on light areas looks pale, saturated with the whiteness of paint instead of the whiteness of the paper.

The thing that I'm not pleased with in this picture is the colouring of the dress, especially the area around the stomach. Another is the proportion of the body. On paper, it looks fine, but, on monitor, I think her head is too big...

Dimension: A4 paper (21 x 29.7 cm) Paper: printing paper Pencils: 2B mechanical, 2B genuine, and HB genuine Watercolour: Guitar Watercolour (I don't know if this is a local trade mark, but the quality is good even if it is not the best watercolour in the world.) Work duration: around 3 hours for drawing, a week for colouring as I stop every now and then to wait for the water, which I apllied excessively at times, to dry off. Date finished: 3 January 2003