July and August were eventful. I applied for a table at Doujima 2026, as I described in previous post. To my disappointment, though, I was not accepted. I still have a theoretical chance to get a table if enough applicants would cancel their tables; but the chance is slim. So I moved on and applied to table at EOY 2025. This time I was successful.

Meanwhile, I had an episode of sharp, painful toothache. It turned out that I got a cracked tooth. The best alternative was to extract it. It was not so bad but it did make me unable to think of anything else but the dull pain for a few days. It definitely affected my enthusiasm.

Thankfully, my wife was on board with tabling and she got busy planning the booth. She designed the booth structure and got as far as creating it (see the image below). I rode on her energy and got myself together to finalize a set of images to print for our EOY table.

Booth structure and packaging material

First, I drew the booth name and logo. This took me 2 weeks to finish. I felt that I was too slow; but perhaps I was just impatient.

Booth logo

Next, I am polishing the images I have to a quality I feel good enough to sell. I have been working on this ever since I decided to apply for a table. I described how I polished "Dream Bedroom" in the previous post. In this post, I will cover the largest print, "Infinity War".

That's right, I am reviving an old image I drew back in 2018. I intended the image to be a product, so it was only appropriate to finalize it. Here is the image.

What I considered finished in 2018

Something was missing. The characters look interesting, but the background looks static. I experimented with color variations and action lines, as shown below.

Red for Scarlet Witch, green for Dr Strange, orange for everyone else...

I did not like it, though. I felt the bright colors of the background took away interest from the characters. I spent a few days looking at group images, looking for an inspiration.

I noted down the idea I arrived at as follows:

Dark background. Painterly style. Like classic painting.

My intention was:

1. Make the background dark so the characters can pop out.
2. Add some elements to suggest lines from the borders into the painting.

I began by painting a new background. I put a horizon line; then painted a sky and a ground. The sky was dark with cloud and smoke; the ground... I was not sure about yet at this stage.

Making the background dark and the characters popping out

Next, I experimented with adding foreground objects an the ground and smoke trails. These would serve intention #2.

Adding lines from the borders into the painting

At this stage, I knew how this painting would finish. All the elements this painting needed were there; I simply needed to polish and render. In other words, I still needed to work more, but the direction was clear. Here is the state of the painting at the time of writing.

The latest state of the painting

There are some trails I am not happy about, so the trails may change, but there will be trails. I want to make the ground look damaged from all the fighting... But as a whole, this painting works much better than the one I started with.

You can get this image as a print from my table at EOY. The event is on 27 and 28 December 2025, Saturday and Sunday, at Raffle City Convention Centre, Singapore. The print is huge: 117.65 cm ⨉ 33.86 cm (46.3″ ⨉ 13.3″). It will come in one of those tube packaging in the photo above. Hope to see you there!

An Attempt to Table at Doujima

I went for a holiday earlier this month and had some time to get away from work and arts. I had a disconcerting realization that I did not have a real goal for a while now... One of my goals is to table at a convention, so I applied for a table at Doujima 2026. It was time to reflect on my past artworks, evaluating if they are worthy to be prints.

In this post, I will cover "Dream Beadroom" from 2022.

How it started...

I thought this image looked unfinished, thought I could not yet tell what was missing. Perhaps the bedroom portion uses too many similar colors. I began by making the colors more varied. While I was at it, I experimented with darkening the girl's hair.

Varying colors on bedroom section

Darkening the girl's hair

I found varying colors helped, but darkening girl's hair took the attention away from the bedroom. This informed the next iteration: how can I keep viewer's attention to the bedroom area? One way is the add a frame.

Adding a frame

The frame gave the feeling of a manga chapter cover, which I liked. However, the rim light around the girl's hair was now attracting attention. It needed toning down.
I also found the lighting on the flowers look strange, so I removed it.

Toning down rim light on girl's hair and removing lighting on flowers 

At this point, I felt the itch to refine the rendering of the bedroom elements. While painting, I thought the girl's face look too different from the bedroom elements. Making her closer to pink should be better.

Refined rendering and making the girl more pink

Finally, the top half of the image looked empty. I could introduce either a title text or graphic elements. I decided to go for the latter. I experimented with different shapes and colors before settling on the final image.

The final image

Robo Rider is Born

Final painting

I described drawing process for this piece in an earlier post. Basically I watched Kamen Rider Black RX on TV growing up and wanted to draw Robo Rider because I remembered how cool he was. After drawing the pencil art though, an idea struck me for a Bio Rider piece and I drew that too. Despite getting caught up in the excitement of drawing this new idea, I did get myself to finish painting this piece.

When starting, my main inspiration was a piece by Jake Parker titled "Sentinel of the Fifth Sun". The idea was painted background with comic-style figure in the foreground. However, my goal this year is to create images that evoke emotional reaction. I had to aim for something more striking. What was it about Kamen Rider and other Japanese tokusatsu shows in the 80s that I found striking?

The image I started with was one shot in Jiban opening. I can find only a low res image of the shot, shown below; my memory was even more blurry. I remembered the contrast was more dramatic. Main ideas I wanted to capture were (1) dark background, (2) overall low key image, and (3) strong rim lights. 

The shot in Jiban opening

After some searching and head scratching, I gathered the following reference board. (The image of Janperson head was a surprise find. It looks good and is high res.)

References for painting

It was time to start painting. The opening steps were as expected: adding base color, lighting... and not liking the result.

Opening steps. Lineart; base colors; lighting; glow.

I was struggling at this point. I followed my plan but I did not like how it looked. Still, I started painting the rim lights, making the fill light white color (instead of red) and it started to look the way I wanted.

Rim light added

To make Robo Rider stand out, I added rim light to the head as well, effectively giving him a white outline. Next, I darken RX head in the background to improve the contrast.

Making Robo Rider stand out from the background

Finally, I painted RX eyes, adding dark core shadows. I soften the outer edges around RX to give the illusion of depth of field. I painted in colors using a sparse brush; but the result does not look good. I probably should have used the smudge brush...

Working on RX in the background

At this point, the painting was mostly done. Only small details on Robo Rider remained: highlights on the eyes and belt gear details. (While working on this painting, I realized how different Robo Rider belt was compared to other forms. I wonder if the designer was different.)

Final painting

I hope you enjoyed this process post. Next I will paint "Piltover's Finest" while continue drawing "Bio Rider".