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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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:
- Make the background dark so the characters can pop out.
- 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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!