Dear Chibi,
Season 3 of Starcraft 2 has arrived! I played my placement matches for 1v1, 2v2 random and 3v3 random and ended up in the same league as last season- Platinum in 1v1, Diamond in 2v2 and Diamond in 3v3. I’ve come a long way since my bronze league days, so hopefully with a little more practise (particularly on my micro), I can get into Diamond league this season (solo) :D But of course, I’ll need to maintain Platinum first! XD

Meanwhile, I’ve got a new SC2 friend named Dstyler (thanks to Burpy) and 2 nights ago we decided to play some 2v2. Now, Dstyler is a much better player than I am. I’ve versed him three times before and lost pretty convincingly. I didn’t think he would want to team up with me but we did end up playing, kinda doing ‘whatever’ since we didn’t have much of a game plan. Surprisingly, we won 4/5 of our placement matches (Dstyler was dropped in the game we lost) and ..we landed in MASTERS LEAGUE! woohoooo! :D We were both pretty excited when the blue shiny starred icon popped up. yay!

Now to make the other ones look pretty too =D

Dear Chibi,
Just in time for the XianJian QiXia Zhuan 5 game release in July 07, 2011- I’ve completed a set of ‘Chibi Dolls’ of the four main leads: Jiang Yun Fan, Tang Yu Rou, Longyou and Xiao Man.

Jiang Yun Fan was probably the easiest to draw out of the four, since his outfit was relatively straight forward (well..compared to the others!) I found it strange that both his shoes were different, but I guess no one likes things in pairs anymore :p

Tang Yu Rou was the first of the set I drew. I really like her character design, especially the petal dress. I had a fun time drawing her :) This one is dedicated to a lovely person.

Long You was rather tedious to draw, lol. His outfit is really confusing and it was a little hard finding a good reference image since most of them were slightly on an angle. I like how it turned out though, his hair was kinda fun to draw too.

Xiao Man..why are you so adorable? She turned out to be my favourite chibi doll (beating Tang Yu Rou by a teeeny weeeny bit). I don’t know, but she came out way better than I thought. I had a lot of trouble getting her hair shape right with the bandana. Her outfit may appear simple but it’s very very detailed! There’s a lot of texture /beads and colours on the fabric. Her hair piece was also good fun to draw :)

And…I guess that’s it for now. Hope you enjoyed looking at them :}

Dear Chibi,

Yesterday I logged onto battlenet to play a ladder game as I normally do after work. Surprisingly, I was promoted to the Platinum league after winning the match :D! OMG!

As of 6th May 2011

It took me a few moments to register before I started squealing in joy XD Usually I know when I’m about to be promoted, as I’d consistently win games and be evenly matched with opponents in a higher league. I suppose this time the transition from gold to platinum was a lot earlier than when I was stuck in silver and bronze. I’m not sure I’m good enough to be in platinum level yet. I felt like I was just sitting on low gold (with about a 27 wins, 21 losses). I guess we’ll just see how I go. It is an encouragement though since I thought gold was the highest I could reach :)

I didn’t think I’d end up having 2 blog posts about Starcraft in a row… please, don’t mind me 8D

Dear Chibi,

Back again for a progress update on my journey through the SEA battlenet  ladder. A few weeks ago, Season 1 concluded and during the lock-down period, I played a bunch of games with hopes to improve my division rankings (You can get a pretty star and wings on the icon). I was quite pleased with what I achieved (well..apart from the 4v4 bronze division which I regret I ever played :p)

Since then, the ladder was reset which meant we needed to complete 1 placement match in order to be placed on the ladder again. Surprisingly, I was promoted up a league in most of the matches :D

As of 17.04.11

I’m really happy I finally made it to the Gold league from rank 100 in Bronze. I have been trying to improve, watching my replays, watching streams and reading forums. Now to stick around here and slowly improve on my mechanics :D Sadly, most people on my ‘friends list’ don’t play anymore.. so I guess I might play more random team games. I wonder if I’ll be able to make it to Masters in 3v3? XD Pushing my luck here, but it is possible. I played a game today where a player was in Masters in 3v3, but Bronze in 1v1…funny aye?

GLHF :)

Dear Chibi,

Yay! I’ve finally completed my latest digital painting.. a portrait of Hong Kong singer Charlene Choi (Twins) which I named “Chocolate Princess” :) I started this a week ago and spent about 25-30 hours on it total- pretty crazy huh? I based this image entirely off a reference image- so nope, I didn’t make her up. Maybe one day I’ll be good enough to paint without a reference (though that will be super tough!)

This artwork is my personal best so far so I hope you like it too!

Special thanks to Maki who gave me a crash course on how to blend colours yesterday (when the painting was almost done! haha). I was having a lot of trouble blending colours and it gave me an idea of how to tackle it (though I didn’t follow it exactly, I adapted it to my own style) You can compare the difference with the 2nd picture above with the one below.

Close up of the finished painting at 100% scale.

My favourite parts: Her eyes, her hair with the melting chocolate and the left side of her dress
Most difficult aspect: Her face (in particular her lips), painting/blending skin tone and colouring her dress

Final comments: The fur on her back was fun to paint (though very tiring since I drew every stroke)
I like how she looks in the end, except her face is slightly more chubby than I’d like (it looked thinner in previous revisions but in the end the lighting made her more round.. and I couldn’t fix it, haha)

Dear Chibi,
This is just a little progress update from my previous Starcraft2 blog entry. Recently I started playing in 3v3 random teams to see what it’s like co-operating with strangers. I won 1/5 of the placement matches and landed in Silver (I will never forget the horror of my “allie” who was gas stealing off me >_>) . However, just after 2 days I was promoted to Gold with a mere 11win-12 loss ratio~ O_o..err yay!

Today I end up playing a few more games and got promoted to Platinum! lol
Current Ratio: 26 wins-17 losses, Rank 40.

It sure is a lot easier to climb the ranks in a random team than with friends~

Dear Chibi,

Yesterday I completed this piece of fanart for K-TVB.net, featuring Wayne Lai and Sheren Tang from TVB series  “No Regrets“. I love being able to portray characters in this doll form and I’m pretty happy with how they turned out :) I love Sheren’s distinctive look and she was quite a lot of fun to draw.

Embarrassingly, the last time I updated this sketch blog was almost a year ago. Sadly, the reason is that I haven’t drawn anything since then.