CNY spring cleaning is usually THE only time of the year where I throw, recycle, donate, clean and reorganise a lot of things. It sort of feels like constructing noah’s ark, where you choose only the necessary and essential items to move on to the new year with you.

Sometimes you find things you thought you have lost, sometimes you locate physical evidences of your past self.

What I found during spring cleaning:

PETS Small Books!!! Who can forget these short stories? It was one of my proudest collections during my primary school days. I liked all the different illustration styles for various story books.

(My first encounter with illustrated upskirt viewing was in primary 1, I guess)

I’ve always liked the Arial Rounded lookalike font used in those books. It screams primary school-ish-ness!

I hate free keychain giveaways with a passion. Reasons being:

1. I don’t even have so many keys to chain them with.
2. They are usually ugly with blatant marketing/advertising.
3. Useless. I don’t like using it, nor evil enough to give it away as donations or gifts.
4. They are quite a waste of Earth’s resources and energy, really.

These reasons are also applicable to fridge magnet freebies.

MY SEC 4 UNIFORM! I miss those days (where I had fun with classmates, not when I wore the uniform).

Putting on that uniform made me realise that I haven’t physically grown a lot bigger nor taller since Secondary 4. That’s a bit sad. -.-

The important cards in my life! From primary school to national service, from beige to greeeeen.

Ah, back to spring cleaning!

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Site updates:

I have updated my portfolio website! Do look around that website and give me some comments (on the works, the interface, the demoreel). I’m going to try to change the selected uploaded works quite often so I need to find out what I can improve on.

I have also created a doodle blog. (As if I will have time to post entries there frequently when I already find it difficult to update this blog weekly)

Well, nowadays I draw more than I write; I speak more than I type. So the doodle blog will serve as an online platform for me to gather feedbacks on my ideas/drawings.

I’ve always liked speech bubbles (thought bubbles, too, you are not forgotten!). It comes under a category of shapes that aren’t exactly circles, triangles or squares but are immediately recognisable when shown to people, even kids.

It’s my favourite shape to draw. Friends who have received greeting cards from me must have seen it as I like to contain my well wishes in these useful containers (I’m still referring to speech bubbles btw [who still spells out 'by the way' nowadays, btw?]).

Speech bubbles are like the extroverts. They are outspoken and sharp. Thought bubbles, on the other hand, are the introverts. They are disconnected and yet their presence can be felt and seen.

They are better than normal bathroom bubbles in so many ways. Firstly, the arrow of the speech bubble can be used to break a liquid bubble.

These speech bubbles have come a long way to evolve to what they look like today. In the past (around 13th century), before speech bubbles were used, people used to depict speech in bands, flags, scrolls or sheets of paper.

For those who aren’t aware of this practice, they may think that the guy (in picture below, on the right) is magically spitting out endless supply of toilet paper with text on it.

Hundreds of years later, in around 18th century, speech bubbles began appearing in several political cartoons from the American Revolution and printed broadsides. Their shapes started to resemble the modern day speech bubbles that we use now.

(I’m not going to give a detail history lesson about Chapter X: Speech Bubbles at this point but you can read a little more about it at wikipedia [how did the I survive 18 years without this?!] and find out some of the information and pictures here were stolen from that wiki article)

Speech bubbles are so cool because they are not even shapes that you need to explain or really give a name for. People just know what it means.

But of course there are informal guidelines (not really rules, you see) and principles to look out for when you use speech bubbles in your comic drawing. Like how you cannot draw a speech bubble and drink bubble tea at the same time because you will choke to death slowly.

Why is that so? What other rules are there? Read more about them here.

Have you read? I bet you must have searched up and down the web page I linked up to for that piece of bullshit information I typed above. I was just kidding. But the pointers highlighted in that page are rather useful though.

Will be doing some major revamp and additions to my website very soon. Watch out this space!