Lurk

Random Enviros

2011-12-18T15:55:00.000-08:00

Random rendering of some thumbnails/compositions

Quick update just to throw something up here, been busy with random stuff lately, will do another post next week after Christmas =)

Happy Holidays!

Life paintings and Dark Souls

2011-11-06T12:45:00.000-08:00

2.5 hour sessions.
Trying to get faster mixing the right colours and the block-ins. Always run
out of time for finishing touches for darks and highlights at the end.

Played Dark Souls last month, it's not without problems but wow, such a good game, great improvements over the first game in most areas. No two boss fights are the same; the subtle and non blatant story suggestions adds to the atmosphere so much. The last third of the game feels rushed though and it basically had no ending, but overall probably my favourite game this year..so far.

Who's that pokemon?

2011-10-02T16:39:00.000-07:00

It's Slowbro!

Dat Beta

2011-09-13T21:42:00.000-07:00

The Bone Collector

Random design done after work again, so hard to do personal stuff after painting for the whole day, I will try harder, more pictures in next update =) Partly inspired by Dota2, D3, and my friends always talking about LoL. So I tried making a random hero hehe.

Didn't get into the Diablo3 beta but watching 1080p streams of it is just as fun haha. The game looks amazing so far, the art direction is pretty crazy! Almost 100% sure I'm going to play a Witch Doctor, those masks and the animations..

I also started listening to the Shannara audiobooks. The first book, The Sword of Shannara is really really similar to LotR, down to very fine details. Lets see how the second book goes..stay tuned..

Oh and our company is shipping Xmen Destiny later this month with Activision so check it out if you are interested.

This concludes the nerdiest post I've done haha..probably.

The screenshots..

2011-08-10T18:43:00.000-07:00

from The Hunger Games movie released so far does not look too promising =<, the casting seems so different from what I imagined from the books to be.
(pics from RT http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/hunger_games/pictures).

Not too much stuff I can upload this time, so much stuff I wanna draw, so little time...and stamina haha. Need to go to some life drawing pretty bad, sketches pretty ridged from just doing work related art.

Sketch Dump

2011-06-13T19:13:00.000-07:00

Super late sketch dump haha, never had a chance to scan anything. Saw Kung Fu Panda 2, crazy art direction!

Glamorous Sky

2011-05-19T01:06:00.000-07:00

Quick update, even though school is officially over, it's still crazy busy haha. So many things I want(and need) to do! I'll try to scan some sketchbook stuff soon.

Seedling layouts

2011-04-30T23:29:00.000-07:00

Some layouts from my film: Seedling

Thanks so much for all the feedback! there were so many awesome films this year, Looking back at my film now and looking at the other films, man there are so many things I would have done differently, definitly a huge learning experience.

And congrats to everyone graduating this year from Sheridan!

Seedling

2011-04-30T23:25:00.000-07:00

Seedling from Lee Tao on Vimeo.

Thanks to Richy, Jean, and Elaine for helping me with this film and thanks to Riho for the awesome music! (I still need to re-export the film, the music is quiet haha)

Mages are not Overpowered anymore

2011-04-16T19:28:00.000-07:00

Seedling Image

Wow, it's been a while, no update on this thing for 2 months.

Been in production on my film Seedling, I'll post more details and images about it in another post later on, but needless to say it has been a pretty big project and I'm putting the finishing touches on it now. I've learned a lot over the past few months, from so many different sources, I can't wait to apply those to my work. Time flew by this year and now that school is almost done, it's time to look for a job to start paying those bills haha.

I've been playing Dragonage2 whenever I got a bit of free time during production and beat it today, awesome game, I like the change in direction in this second game =)
Also picked up Tangled on bluray, amazing movie, overwhelmingly beautiful. The only thing about the release is that the extra features on the disk seems kinda lacking haha.

Anyways, more updates on the film and other pieces soon!

Sketchy

2011-01-26T11:42:00.000-08:00

Now it is all film all the time, need to start finishing these layouts and rough animation.

random sketchbook page

btw if any first or second years at Sheridan want to help me with the film, email me haha.

New years

2010-12-31T16:49:00.000-08:00

Happy new years!

Don't have much to put on here, been working on film layouts the past month. The Panty and Stocking OST is pretty sweet, also bought a pair of Beats headphones to listen to it haha

See-Through

2010-11-30T23:32:00.000-08:00

The preview for the PSG ost is out, the See-though track is sick(turn up bass)
if you want to sample: click this
track number 9 is NSFW though haha

still a whole month away =/

life drawings this week

Fly away now

2010-11-16T20:31:00.001-08:00

Designing my seedling character for my film =>

Man, 1 more month until Panty & Stocking OST comes out. Can't wait, M-flo did a pretty good job with the soundtrack so far haha, reminiscent of Nujabes' soundtrack for Samurai Champloo, so many good tracks from that.

I wasted a weekend of my time that I should be working on my film on..Rune Factory 3 =/. Harvest Moon games are always addictive, gotta maximize my cropssss.

H

2010-11-05T17:34:00.000-07:00

H pencils are the best =>, hatching is so much smoother and blends with the paper way better than 2b+ for some reason. It's not dark enough for enough contrast so need to go to a 2b+ eventually though =<

Going to try to update more often

life drawingsss

2010-10-15T18:05:00.000-07:00

working on film full time. only life drawings to post haha

Journey to the West

2010-08-23T20:44:00.000-07:00

It's not really based on journey to the west, the tentative title was Journey for the file name and they are facing west...so...yeah

An rpg group traveling. (From L->R)
Shaman - Warrior - Oracle - Summoner - Spirit Healer

yeah I just really wanna play diablo3..

digi sketches

2010-08-16T20:08:00.000-07:00

(big image file)

I been doing 40-50 minute sketches on sketchoholic.com with the Imaginism crew. In the sessions or marathons, you have 1 hour to draw/paint the idea/topic and then vote on your favourite one at the end. These are some recent ones I did in the past 2 weeks(there's more but I just selected the better ones haha). It really helps you think faster and get ideas down faster when doing these. The ones before I could hardly get just the tonal B/Ws done in the 50 minutes, but I've been able to use colour soon after that, it's good practice and good for warmup haha. Last 2 pics are studies.

Amazons

2010-08-03T18:23:00.000-07:00

theme for this month =>

This one is still early WIP, I need to finish this painting by next week. The idea is that these are sorta like an amazon RPG group, from L->R, the Black mage/Shaman, Warrior, Chieftain/Oracle (group buffs =>), Summoner, and the Cleric/Spirit healer. The composition kinda sucks cause I just started from left to right in the sketchbook =/, needs more tonal adjustments before colours. crits welcomeee.

and random painting of zelda I didn't post from a while ago.

sketch filler

2010-07-30T21:08:00.000-07:00

random crap from sketchbook and studies and stuff, nothing past an hour. I'll post some more finished stuff sooon =>

uguuuu

2010-06-25T20:12:00.000-07:00

scanned(really bad quality, some are phone photos =>) some drawings from sketchbooks this week, don't really like any of it, but I felt I should update before going to AX next week =>

...

E3 2010 disappointing

2010-06-18T15:22:00.000-07:00

Sony, where's our rpgs.. no last guardian either..

Microsoft, too much natal AKA kinect

Nintendo was the best this year, so many great nostalgic titles (new zelda, kirby, goldeneye, golden sun, donkey kong)

anyways finishing up printsI was thinking either megaman or MC next to samus cause MC and Samus is kinda overdone..but painting MC is more fun.

E3 time again =>

2010-06-13T13:44:00.001-07:00

Just read all of the FMA manga after the last chapter came out. Pretty good =>
Eva 2.22 is just awesome, why cant they make anime these days like eva =<
been doing fanart prints for AX during my free time, doing one more before the con. The zelda one is gonna be split

The rest are random stuff, mostly 1 hour digisketches. Nothing from sketchbook this time.

I can't cook

2010-04-28T20:23:00.000-07:00

I don't know what I'm gonna do when I move to Toronto for co-op lol...

Felt like drawing some hands.

The apple sticker I was using to keep from smudging the sketchbook while drawing and just slapped it on after lol.

KickAss was awesome, Nic Cage was awesome, Hit Girl was awesome, even the bad guys were awesome.

Awesome movie.

quick sketch/paint fanart after the movie.

school..almost done

2010-04-20T18:27:00.000-07:00

The last month was basically a big production month filled with animating, painting and lots of tedious stuff for school. Now with most of that stuff over, it's finally some time to get to learning some new stuff. Never have I enjoyed doing studies more ohoho.

some concept stuff for 4th year film

these painting sessions are such a stress reliever. The feeling of the wet paint on canvas is close to orgasmic in nature.

long leg is long

April

2010-04-01T09:37:00.000-07:00

No time to paint with the group film due in 2 weeks but been painting this one off and on every couple of days before bed. Feels like somethings missing, but can't place what it is.

and random art dump

quick story boards/concepts

Song of storms

2010-03-06T16:56:00.000-08:00

Been listening to the Ocarina of Time sound track, good times, memories, nostalgia, etc
I really like piano renditions of classic tracks, and just piano in general haha.

2 Life painting sessions, I think I'm starting to be able to work the oil to what I wanna do now...sorta haha.

the second session I used a more limited palette and I learned so much doing it, gonna go with this method for now and add more colours as I start to get more comfortable with it.

I scraped the painting over my gym bag by accident so there went all the rendering on the face and body of this one haha.

OH yeah, I'm also looking for a sketchbook that can take watercolours and still is good for fine rendering with pencil at the same time, anyone know of anything that fits the bill? The sketchbooks I have now can take watercolour very nicely but is way too rough for pencil rendering ;_;

one piece ;_;

2010-02-18T12:17:00.000-08:00

Oils turned out a little better than acrylics, I think I'm gonna stick with water soluable oils for these sessions now.

maybe paint this sketch, but it's not finished =/

Mass Effect 2

2010-01-31T23:16:00.000-08:00

Is sooo good, love the new characters and the development of returning characters. The new asari Justicar character is fking awesome, a pure Chaotic Good character. Good thing BioWare decided to take out the planet exploration and the Mako stuff, that stuff was not so fun in the first game. enough talking about that but gonna sketch alot of ME2 stuff now =>

concept for a game idea, influenced by avatar and a mixture of a lot of game principles and designs i like. Just a random landscape so far lol.

trying out acrylics at life painting, it's not turning out so well haha, but it's fun. Theres been so much stress these days with all the school stuff, internships, portfolios and personal stuff, going to these sessions are a really nice way to relax =>

character design

2010-01-07T12:09:00.001-08:00

trying to design a more modern and realistic character

no time to rest =|

2009-12-21T11:46:00.000-08:00

Last month of school was basically a mad dash to finish all the assignments and stuff from the term =/.

Action Analysis

Layout

English presentation illustration
English assignments, tests, and essays took up the most time and it was the least relavent subject of the term =/

and now really behind on portfolio

only game I'm playing these days are on ds lol, the new zelda is kinda fun but really easy.

yummy moon...cheese cake

2009-11-04T17:01:00.000-08:00

yay finished, had to repaint alot of elements, especially the tiger =/ so probably...30+ hours total =>

underpainting

2009-10-29T22:31:00.000-07:00

chugging along with the painting =>
tiger needs sum stripes =/ gonna hold off on the details till the end, it feels so satisfying when doing finishing details...but now, things are going...slow

man I'm loving frogs and toads these days, so fun to draw and paint

crits would be awesome =>

She has a frog balloon

2009-10-20T21:08:00.000-07:00

your argument is invalid

life drawings

layout

Just stroll through the trees and let your miseries go

2009-10-13T20:41:00.000-07:00

sunshine hurricane all the highs and lows

random stuff this week, too many games, I seriously have to stop playing.

The second one is a compostion for a painting im doing, havn't done any personal stuff in so long, sometimes I just want to paint something for myself. how I wish i had the time to do the painting traditionally =<

GAMES I WANT TO PLAY

2009-10-01T19:09:00.000-07:00

UNCHARTED 2
DEMON SOULS
KINGDOM HEARTS 364/2 DAYS OR WHAT EVER ITS CALLED
DRAGON AGE ORIGINS
HALO ODST
ASSASSINS CREED 2
FFXIII(2010 GOTY)

..

BUT THERE LITERALLY ISNT ANY SPARE TIME, WHY DO THEY SAVE THESE RELEASES FOR RIGHT WHEN SCHOOL STARTS? FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

and nothing to update except group film concept =/

September

2009-09-25T16:47:00.000-07:00

I think aside from the occasional Bioshock progression, I've played no games since school started =<. I think i get depressed if I dont excercise my need to play them vidya gaems.

watercolours at life drawing

rushed film concept images for class pitch

Rise my pet

2009-07-18T13:31:00.000-07:00

working on portfolio stuffs =>

not enough time and too much games

cars

2009-07-11T21:21:00.000-07:00

I sketch cars in the parking lot during breaks at work sometimes. These are done on cardboard that I use to write down the stuff I need to bring up lol. I threw away some of these with the lists I write down by accident too haha

random 1hour chrome study

Impel Down

2009-07-02T09:45:00.000-07:00

ok no more one piece, so tired of painting faces.

Boa Hancock

2009-06-29T19:01:00.001-07:00

Boa Hancock, Royal Shicibukai, ate the "emotion" devils fruit. Supposed to the most beautiful pirate in the world of one piece haha.

trying another different style with this one.

Ivankof

2009-06-27T19:57:00.001-07:00

LOL

Kingdom Queen Emporio Ivankof, ate the Hormone devils fruit. Has the power to manipulate the different hormones in everyone. Prime example is freely changing anyones gender. And somehow her powers allow her to deflect any attack, but who cares when you can change someones gender on the fly ahhah.

Blackbeard

2009-06-26T16:19:00.000-07:00

Blackbeard, ate the darkness elemental devils fruit

uh, not motivated on this one at all, trying another style, didn't work out that well, and I don't like the colours ;_; but this is whats good about doing something once a day, you dont work on it forever trying to fix it, just doing the best you can and moving on =>

gonna do a female next, I need a break from manly pirates. crits would help =>

Magellan

2009-06-24T18:54:00.000-07:00

Magellan chief warden of impel down, ate the poisonman devils fruit.
Probably my favourite one piece "arc" bosses, hes the main antagonist in the current arc but it's written so that you really understand his motivation for protecting his prison, I root for him secretly =>

Crocodile

2009-06-23T09:12:00.000-07:00

another one Piece portrait, these are getting really generic really fast, but I kinda wanna do a series of these. Learned to paint some gold and feathers in this one. learning a lot from these quickies >)

Sir Crocodile, sand fruit user. One piece has SOOOO many bad ass characters wow. He has a fking gold hook. It's actually bigger in the manga but I couldn't fit it so I had to make it smaller =>

Jimbei

2009-06-22T14:04:00.000-07:00

A practice piece today that I actually finished rendering, instead of moving on, can't seem to finish pieces these days =<

Jimbei the knight of the sea, one of my fav new characters from One Piece, although he is just a one dimensional support character.

maybe daily?

2009-06-06T20:25:00.000-07:00

Thinking about doing dailys

today at work they were talking about some UFC so I did a sketch after work => ugh, working really sucks but its a neccessity. I'm trying to not blame work and saying I don't have enough time to practice, so I'm aiming to do productive stuff even after work. No procrastinating haha.

1.5 hours prob, I WANT TO RENDER MOOOOORE, but I need to sleep now -.-

E3 2009 = awesome

2009-06-04T19:48:00.000-07:00

no reference fail

anyways E3 this year is sooo win, so many awesome games coming out. FF13 just looks better and better, another year left FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

metroid trailer was mindblowing when watching the nintendo conference live. The FF14 announcement was Meh. Golden Sun DS, Heavy Rain, Uncharted 2, awesome awesome awesome, can't wait to play them. Assassin's Creed actually looks really sweet now, throwing daggers at unsuspecting enemies? EPIC

=x

2009-05-23T20:37:00.001-07:00

boy I'm nervous about my G drivers test =x

painting

2009-05-12T20:22:00.001-07:00

yay finally done. Around 2 weeks work.

The concept for this painting changed a lot from the initial stages. This is for that good vs. evil thing on dA. I wanted to show how choice and perception affects everything. Me and Wesley and some guys were just chatting a while back about the environment and stuff like that and wes mentioned that even though we're aware of what we are doing and are aware of all the changes that need to be done, we don't do it. And how we always say the experts would figure it out, but the thing is, that the experts and scientists or whatever HAVE already figured out how to solve the problem and has been telling us what to do for so long. Stop burning fossil fuels, too much forest clearcutting, eat healthier, everything like that. We choose to keep doing the things we do and if we don't change ourselves, then there won't be a miracle solution to our problems until we get pushed to the very edge of the cliff. if you eat fast food and shyt on a regular basis and yet you're middle aged and complain about health problems, no fking shyt.

Perception, is our point of view, how we view the things around us. In this painting I wanted to show the dual aspects of perception. do you perceive the monsters to be the "bad" guys hunting the innocent woman in the forest or is the woman the "bad" person taking their fruit and the monsters are just guarding their dominion against outsiders. I think sometimes we give judgment too preemptively. I know i do it a lot, something to try and change =)

anyways that was a lot of rambling, Crits really wanted thanks =)

April Update

2009-04-23T19:31:00.000-07:00

FINISHED SCHOOL ASSIGNMENTS...YES

the last 3 weeks has just been INSANE, crazy busy, but its now over, I really bsed all my final assignments =<, not a good thing, rushing things makes you not learn as much as you could. I find that it's only in times where you actually have no spare time that you have the most creativity and urge to paint/draw/do things for yourself. Figures, and probably this drive that I have now for creating pretty things will probably leave me by the end of the week leaving me to do nothing for the summer haha, lets hope not =)

usual doodles

DS colors

This one was pretty fun, everyday before I go to sleep, I spend up to 30 minutes painting a part of my room on Colors for 4 days. I turned off all opacity control to practice colour seeing and basically choosing all the colours i put on the canvas. Then I put them together, pretty cool, there's only 4 parts to the collage and you can tell where they end cause my perception of colour of my walls change every day haha. A little bit of editing in photoshop to connect them as best I can, the panaramic perspective is a little wierd to illustrate.

another day's 30min closeup study of my water cup

Layout 3hour speedpaint

I noticed I have uploaded a layout painting with each of my posts, so I'll continue that haha. This is a long pan for storyboard so the composition when seeing this whole thing is just aweful. Not even going to go through all the bad parts about it.

WIP

A wip i'm working on, started the sketch like a month ago, never got time to work on it, I'm still at a sketch tweeking stage where I'm moving stuff around and changing stuff for the composition, I'm gonna take my time with this one, hopefully I can use all the things I've learned these past months and use it.

Critiques are always welcome, say mean stuff, don't hold back =) if you really want, you can post anonymously (I think I turned anon posting on).

March Update

2009-03-23T16:17:00.000-07:00

Uploading a bunch of random sketches and doodles. I really want to do some pokemon fanart =/, but boy it's so busy these days it's insane.

first up DS Colors doodles, facebook doodles, any sort of random unfinished doodles.

School stuff

sketches and studies

February Update

2009-02-27T14:29:00.000-08:00

Not much to put up here, A lot of stuff has happened in the past 2 months.

Anyways, I've been mostly concentrating on just pure drawing these days, my main goal these days is to just get better at drawing, for some reason using tone just comes more naturally to me than using line to describe form. All my sketches are pretty bad haha, so I'm not going to upload them =< I should really get some life drawing scanned sometime. anyways the only updates I have are school assignment stuff.

Human voice Synch assignment

4 hour matte painting (with overlayed colour wash layer lol)

December Update

2008-12-27T11:53:00.001-08:00

Happy Holidays guys!

20~ hours photoshop cs

4 hours painter

Animations

RAGE animation(expression change)

Weight Lift Toss

November Update

2008-11-30T15:50:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the no update last month, had nothing much to show, was in a painting slump of sorts, and it's really busy at school right now. 2nd year is fking crazy.

I realized I never put my animations up, so now's the best time to correct that.

Punch

Super saiyan(JongHo lol) ball and tail

Kida(Atlantis) head rotation

September Update

2008-09-24T14:32:00.000-07:00

I really like the sith picture, even though it's only a speed paint, something about that composition I really like =/. The dragon layout thing I might work on some more, not motivated to finish it.

These 2 are studies from William Whitaker's paintings, an amazing oil painter, I want to study in his classes ;_;. The 2nd one is traditional oil.

August update

2008-08-24T12:32:00.000-07:00

meh, not pleased with what I did this month lol. Need more time to traditional paint, but fk, between work, play, random art stuff, there's hardly time these days to trad. paint, but It's my fault for loving games ;_; I blame work >)

oily update

2008-07-24T20:39:00.000-07:00

another oil study, this time from a photo reference( you guys probably have seen this model before, she has like..perfect features... O.O. My block in was too rushed so i kinda messed up the feature placement, so yeah, doesn't look as great.

supposed to be a quick facial study but it turned out to be a 10 hour paint fest over 3 days =/. painting from photo sucks balls, especially photoshopped photos.

need to get jo to teach me glazing QQ

now to find some scrap shiny metal to study O.o

July update

2008-07-19T20:11:00.000-07:00

4~ hours
3~h
5h
3h
2h

random shyt, been kinda slacking. Going back to traditional for a while, no more cg for a couple of months i guess. Just pulled out all my oils and shyt this week so =/. So yeah, besides that and I've been doing mostly anatomy stuff, so no point in posting that stuff.

update

2008-06-05T13:22:00.000-07:00

painting update

Cg update

2008-05-20T12:41:00.001-07:00

Both took around 15h each, haven't been drawing or painting much. Sigh, just waiting for MGS4 to come out so bad. only like 20 more days =)

Update!

2008-04-22T11:19:00.001-07:00

Haven't updated in a while but summer just started so might as well upload some stuff from school.
I'm trying to cg and paint oil more haha, but so many games to play ohohoho.

Traditional Paintings:
gauche

water soluble oil

CG
the only cg painting I've done in a while and I'm still not done with it, need to fix some stuff.

Life Drawing

random CGs

2008-03-01T01:42:00.000-08:00

need to stop spending too much time on games..

Studies

2008-01-28T13:16:00.000-08:00

Random study practice from last week.

The b/w girls are from pictures by these 2 popular chinese artists, dunno their name, I just have one of their picture books. The other ones were studies from random pictures I found on my HD. I also threw in 2 layout concepts. Each around 30 minutes to a hour.

2008-01-14T17:31:00.001-08:00

ack, been a while since the last update. I'll upload some recent life drawings next week or something. Meanwhile random CGs.

uhh....painting...

2007-11-10T19:55:00.000-08:00

Started off as normal daily speedpaint, but I ended up spending like 4 hours on the face

shes that character from ffxiii...the game thats not out yet lawl.

2007-10-07T21:15:00.000-07:00

Another batch of life drawings from the last two weeks.

1-5min, in random order.

2007-10-03T19:35:00.001-07:00

I didn't like the title page I did at school so I did a new one. >.>

I find that I'm using the green/orange complementry colours alot. I need to use some other colour schemes lol.

2007-09-23T09:31:00.001-07:00

wow, I went through all the pads I brought home from extra life and only found 2 decent drawings... lol. 8 pads front and back and only 2 pictures =_=

these are both 2s...I think...blah

2007-09-09T18:15:00.000-07:00

These are some pages I took from the stack of pen+paper life drawing I did over the summer break. I only did 30sec and 90 sec mostly, but occasionally I try to do more finished ones. Need more anatomy studies lol, the more you know the better your life drawing is. Thats what I got from a whole summer of gesture drawing lol.

Most of these are 90s with the occasional 30s and some longer ones. You can see a lot of proportion problems haha, I really need to work on that.

2007-09-09T17:44:00.001-07:00

Stuff from portfolio again, I couldn't find any more good life drawings and I don't want to dig through the piles of life drawing from before this summer. I really like the 30 second one. The other one has a ton of mistakes. My character design is really crap, need to practice the cartoon style more.

Man, over the summer I've been doing life drawing with pen+paper to practice instead of the normal stuff, cause I got lazy. I guess I should upload a couple of those too.

Making this picture blog is alot of work =_=

2007-09-08T07:27:00.001-07:00

This batch is some of the things I had to draw for my Animation portfolio. I forgot to resize these, so be prepared for big pictures ;_;

I'll try to scan in some actual animation related stuff after this haha.

picture upload spam

2007-09-08T07:21:00.000-07:00

My random cg character designs

2007-09-08T07:13:00.000-07:00

Ok, I'm just going to upload some of my cg pictures/paintings. Well only the ones I think are half decent haha.

2007-09-08T07:05:00.000-07:00

ok testing image formats

microphone testing 123

2007-09-07T20:22:00.000-07:00

Ok hmm, testing this place to see if I like it for making a picture blog =)