Engineer By Design
  • Art
  • December24th

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    Setting Up Shop!

    Posted in: Art

    2010 is gearing itself to be a financially questionable year as I’m looking towards graduate school with, when it comes down to it, no means to pay for it. I don’t want to keep relying on student loans. While I’m looking for scholarships, fellowships, research assistance ships, internships, and every other type of -ship, I’m also facing the reality that I may have to pick up some temporary or hourly work to pay for my living and education.

    Ideally, if I absolutely had to do it, I’d like to try to do something that could actually run parallel with building up some of my own skills. One idea that I’ve kept in the back of my mind is setting up a shop with Cafe Press by making t-shirt designs and earning a small commission from it, and that in that way it could also help me with earning a little bit of money on the side, too.

    And so I actually did it — I opened up a shop, Team Fortress 2 Fan Gear!



    I’m going to aim for the next month or so 5 new items a week to post up. And also, it’ll also help build my portfolio, which is in desperate need of some more content. Eventually I’d like to branch out to more general geek and geek girl apparel and goodies, just for right now since Team Fortress 2 design ideas are the first thing that come to mind, I’ll leave the store name with the Team Fortress 2 theme.

    But I certainly hope you enjoy what I’ve posted, and will be posting up! I promise they’ll be quality designs that would be actually worth paying the price!

  • December16th

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    Since the deadline has passed for the Team Fortress 2 Propaganda Contest, here are the propaganda posters that I submitted. Go Team Demo!

    The first:

    Charlene Valerio - Demoman Propaganda



    The second, with a slight revision to the borders and colors for a “paper-y” feel:

    Charlene Valerio - Demoman Propaganda (Resubmittal)



    I heavily doubt I’m going to win or place since I’ve seen some amazing posters floating around the internet and also that I didn’t really submit “more than one” piece since, unfortunately, this week is my week of final exams. But, I am very happy with it!

    Right now the scores between Soldiers KIA and Demomen KIA are 4,923,531 and 5,056,134 — a near 100,000 difference. Hopefully, when the war is concluded tomorrow the Demomen make a come back, and I certainly hope that my artwork adds points to the Demoman side!

  • December13th

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    Amidst it being the week of finals at school, there is a war going on — a war between Team Fortress 2’s Demoman and Solider.

    The Demoman is currently losing, and even though I’ve contributed some Soldier heads to the war, drastic measures had to be taken. Propaganda artwork could count for extra points from Gabe Newell himself! And, since I’m totally and completely PRO-DEMO, I took the time to submit my entry to Team Fortress 2’s Propaganda Contest.

    I actually ended up submitting two, with the later one being a revision. In my haste, I didn’t end up liking certain elements of my first and I had spotted very small blotch with my vector art.

    I do like how my entry turned out, but I don’t want to post it online until after this contest is over until December 15th. In the meantime, you can assume that I submitted the following as my propaganda poster:

    Soldier Win = Do Not Want



    Go Black Scottish Cyclops Army!


    … omgomg finals omgomg

  • September23rd

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    The new release of Google SketchUp 7.1 came out recently!

    I decided to play with it a little bit yesterday for fun and out of curiosity. My impressions after using it is that it’s a pretty easy software to pick up and use for anyone from a beginner to an experienced 3D modeler. I believe it’s mostly due to the fact things are much more simplified compared to Blender and even CATIA. For example, SketchUp’s Push/Pull tool is an extrusion, tapering, bevel, cutout tool all-in-one.

    My first attempt to model with it was a hole puncher since it was something lying around my desk and thought it wouldn’t be easy to model, yet not too hard. (But yes, I’ll agree with you that it wasn’t the most exciting model to make.)

    hole punch iso

    hole punch iso2

    Personally, I think I made the model in a pretty sloppy manner, but I was learning. I have yet to go through the documentation and tutorials to get a full understanding of how to use it. Also, in this month’s issue of ImagineFX there’s a feature on artist Alex Jenyon’s use of Google Sketchup in 2D digital painting compositions.

    I’m certainly going to have to give it a try.

  • January29th

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    I got an honorable mention for my submission to the Guild Wars Wintersday Art Contest 2008!

    charlene-valerio-wintersday-art-2008

    I’ll have to repost later on my method and progression shots.

  • September30th

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    The Jarhead Update

    Posted in: Art

    The past two weeks I’ve been busy at work with shifts lasting 10 or more hours. So, it’s been hard for me to continue on with my art and music projects because coming home to be only in front of a computer more is just too much. But now with things have been easing down, I’m slowly getting back on track, first and foremost with the Meet the PANDAs series.

    The PANDA painting I’m working on right now is PANDA | Jarhead as the Heavy. I’ll be updating this daily to show my progress, and at the moment I’m guessing that this will take me until next week. But, by detailing it this way you can all see how I go along at different stages of these drawings, and “documenting” can help me see where I can make improvements later.

    Progress Shots

    Preliminary Arm Shading. 10/15/08

    I started shading the arm a bit so I could get an idea of how the light hits it.How I’d like the lighting to come from is to from behind the left of Jarhead’s face and from above. It is by all means not the final product, but it’s to get me started.

    I have a lo-ve-ly bunch of .. uh .. bu-bu-lets. 10/15/08

    Well, they’re not quite as “lovely” as I hoped, but this will suffice for now. These bullets will have to go through a bit more cleaning and detailing done later.

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  • September16th

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    When I look up online on tips of for artists, the one thing that I constantly run upon is having a good foundation on drawing human anatomy. And, I guess, this makes a lot of sense since most drawings contain the human figure in some way shape or form.

    Legendary Disney animator, Milt Kahl, was quoted:

    “The ability to draw and be able to turn things and the ability, the knowledge that enables you to caricature and exaggerate in the right direction and emphasise the difference between things is what you’re doing all the time. Any time you’re doing a strong drawing of anything well, your drawing is strong because you’re depicting why this is different from something else. You need that figure-drawing background in order to sharpen. Every animator should have this background and unfortunately, they don’t.”

    That being said, one thing that I’m going to start doing is trying to do draftsmanship and drawing the human figure. Hopefully over time, doing this as a practice could help strengthen my artwork in the long run.

    First off, the female form.

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  • September10th

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    Well, it took me about 2-3 weeks of trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my header image on my website. I knew that I wanted to draw a self-portrait of myself in there, but I had no idea on how to incorporate it in, nor did I figure out what style I wanted to use.

    I drew myself several times, though me being pretty critical about how I draw myself, I scrapped almost all of them. I then decided to deviate into more of a Disney-type look. Of all the characters I referenced myself as Mulan/Pocahontas, mostly because of me being Asian/Pacific Islander-ish. I also got the chance to incorporate my new haircut, too.

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  • August19th

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    Meet PANDA | Pyrrhus
    Tools: Adobe Photoshop CS2 + Wacom Intuos3
    Time Spent: ~15-16 hours

    (Click on image for full-size)

    Finally done! This is the first of what will hopefully be a series of drawings of the PANDAs who play Team Fortress 2.

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  • August15th

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    Over the past weekend I’ve purchased myself a tablet, which was one of the things I’ve been eyeing for a while on top of keyboard. So, for the past couple of days I’ve been playing with it and slowly getting more accustomed to its features. Lately I seem to be in a TF2 fan art-sort-of-mode. What I wanted to do was end up making a couple of drawings of the TF2 characters but making them more realistic face-wise while still keeping cartoon structures for the body. But as I was perusing the web looking for reference models (i.e., Stephen Colbert to reference as the Medic) I came across the idea of instead making art of our PANDA’s group with people being the characters that they enjoy the most.

    So of course, I had to start out with Sean being the Demoman.

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