Blog

Four years ago, I partnered with a friend to design an interactive Web experience for Disneyana.com to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Disneyland®. Hence, the Disneyland® Memory Album was created. Until now, there was only a screenshot of the album. All but my own album entry and the bonus nostalgia have been deleted. Still, you can get a sense of what it was. There were a lot of nice Disneyland® stories and photos when it was whole.

Nava Designs is now officially up and running! There are a few last-minute things to include, but certainly nothing that would hinder the use of the website.

New to the site is Paper Engineering: Designing a Paper Model. The new section explains what I go through to design a paper model for the masses. It’s still a work-in-progress as I continue to work on the current paper model with the most current techniques. I hope it answers a lot of queries that I’ve gotten over the years. If there are any unanswered questions that anyone has, feel free to contact me.

Speaking of contact, I do have a brand-new email address. If you have the old one in your address book somewhere, toss it out.

Now I need new business cards, stationary, customer invoices . . .

Here’s a new paper model that I’ve been working for the past few weeks. It’s already proving to be a monster with over 109 hours put into it, and plenty of more work to do!

I have many interests. I have an interest in pirates. I have an interest in board games. I have an interest in bookmaking. I have an interest in coins. I have an interest in antiques. I have an interest in old-world charm. I have many interests.

Last year, I created a set of fake Hawaiian Airline tickets based on an image that I found on the Internet. Everything was done from scratch, and it took a while, but it was fun, and well worth the time.

A nice little surprise dawned on me today. A lot of my digital drawings are very reminiscent of the Brandywine style (although my technique still needs work).

The Brandywine style puts a little more emphasis on brushwork, and usually has dramatic lighting. I fell in love with the style a few years back while browsing through my book, Treasure Planet: A Voyage of Discovery. The Disney artists used a variation of the Brandywine style for their background artwork, though they often had to tone down the brushwork so as not to distract the viewer’s eye too much.

Perhaps I’ll play with some different Photoshop brushes to get a better recreation of this beautiful art style. The Brandywine style also uses more dramatic lighting & poses, and focuses less on details.

Here’s another early drawing. It’s an alien character that I sketched only a couple of times.