Dear Chibi,
Yesterday I started the “Study Anatomy Daily” self challenge over at Chibi’s Doodling Canvas. Today, I start the “Drink 4-6 cups of water a day” challenge. It may not be a challenge for you, but for Chibi, who drinks more milk than water- it is painful, lol. It’s a fact- I haven’t been drinking much water ever since I can remember. I don’t really like water, unless I’m dying of thirst. I don’t get thirsty very often. The challenge runs for a  period of 2 months, seeing if I can keep it up and hopefully reach 6-8 cups of water each day (and if I’m lucky enough get stuck in the habit for the rest of my life)
This will be a challenge for me.. so far it’s 3pm and I have drunk two cups- each time I drank a cup I felt like I was gonna die, lol. I wonder if it’s okay to eat chocolate right after it?

I just think that if I don’t push myself like this, nothing will change. Wish me luck =) I don’t want to lose to myself.

Dear Chibi,
This year I had quite a few Xmassy celebrations with different people over a period of a few days-weeks.. so I’ll count all of them as “Christmas” =) Plans were made for every other day but not on the 25th Dec itself, lol..funny aye? Instead of having a big Xmas Party over at our place like we did last year, we thought something simple was all that was needed- time to spend with some family and friends. Mum and Dad spent the day at Taronga Zoo, whereas Markos, Kazzy, Michael, Davy and I enjoyed some ‘gambling’- lol..(not quite since we didn’t play with money, ahahaa…) We end up playing one “round” of Mahjong that last for several hours….must have been the longest round ever. I still made two biggy wins so I’m happy. After lunch and dessert we played Big 2 while munching on junk food and some (out of the many) chocolate we got for Christmas. There is so much chocolate I’m not sure how we’re going to eat them all, lol… it seems although ferrero rocher was highest in supply, the raffaello was most popular amongst us. It disappeared within seconds!

The winner of each round can draw on the loser’s arm for 10 seconds…or the loser had the choice to drink vodka (which only Davy really took) You can kind of see the marks on my right arm in the picture. XD Who got the most drawings? Not sure.. our arms were covered anyway, haha.
Thank you to everyone who celebrated it with me one way or another, for the presents, cards and best wishes. =3 Enjoy the rest of year and look forward to 2008~

P.S On a random note… how come I look so different this time last year?

Dear Chibi,

Yesterday we had a BDM get-together-kris-kringle-thingy-outting. Flora, Somps, Burpy, Nicolette and I met up around 2pm and randomly saw MZ for a bit  before heading to Karaoke World for some singing! Emily joined us earlier than expected so that was good too. I haven’t been to this one before but after checking it out, my preference still lies in BigEcho and K-Mix (lol, sorry) The reason for going here was ’cause it has a better selection of English Songs, but it costs $5 more, no free drink and the place is older and has no reception for phone. Nevertheless, we did have an awesome time- people sung what they wanted to and there was some crazy roaring going on =p . After 3 hrs, we met up with Ray, Marcus and Rachel and headed to Akenaya for dinner.

The place looked decent, food was good though more pricey than other Japanese restaurants I’ve been to around the City. We did the exchanging of our-last-minute KrisKringle game and I got a bendable-person-keyring thing and a box of JellyBelly, teeehee.. thanks Rachel. Marcus end up getting my present, hope he finds some use of it.. good thing I left all the “caution” notes on it. I fear he may burn his house down. However, despite the dinner going well and all… I will never come back here! NEVER. People.. this place may look decent on the outside, but the INSIDE… >.>

The female bathroom was..atrocious and disturbingly scary. . …not only did it have the most foul smell, and that the cubicle didn’t lock properly.. there was a MAN inside!! I had not realised this person was in here until I saw him in the mirror reflection *faint* I dashed out in the speed of light and became spaced out for a few seconds before passing the keys to Rachel and even forgot to warn her about the man inside -.- Yes. She was horrified, probably moreso than I. Apparently he was…crazy and hitting his head against the wall @.@ Well, I would agree. Anyways, I will not go into further detail about the OTHER cubicles T_T Ray and Marcus wanted to check out the guy.. in the female bathroom..too.. so.. ..yerr..ehe..

After dinner we went to Darling Harbour to get icecream and gazed at the huge xmas tree lights and listened to some Christmas Carols. It was a good evening but there is someone I’m still missing. Wish he was here.

Dear Chibi,

Today I completed the Japanese live-action series based off the manga Hanazakari no Kimitachi e. I found it very amusing and the characters are so awesomely lovable (The fact most of the characters are hot guys had nothing to do with it *cough*)

(Call me blind but.. where’s Nakatsu Shuichi in this picture?. XD… thought he was standing next to Mizuki in the Opening shot)

A lot of people would call this drama cheesy but hey, it works so well =) They are hilarious, and the bizarre characters really grow on you too. It really looks like it’s based off an anime (though there isn’t one) with all the craziness and silly lines. I’m probably a tad bit biased too since it’s shoujo- but if you like a bit of romance comedy, you’ll like this.

There’s also a Taiwanese Live Action based off this too, but I probably won’t see it.

Dear Chibi,

Yesterday I joined Kazzy and 50 other volunteers to lead refugees on the Red Cross Treasure Hunt! The aim of the event was to help these kids become a little more confident in speaking the English language and familiarising Sydney’s city location. We were to lead these kids and act as a guide to them as oppose to telling them immediately where they’re suppose to go. At first I was thinking.. “Do I know the City well enough myself…?” (laughs) I was relieved to know we got maps!

Kazzy and I randomly ended up being paired together in the same group.

The “Fruit Bats” Team (I say its short for Fruits Basket, lol)
Dooah (though she was eventually changed with another girl), Chi, Lien, me, David, Ryan, Kaz.
Well anyway it was a lot of fun and good exercise running around the city. We didn’t start off with the right direction so we didn’t end up finishing the race. The time was up so we opened the ‘emergency envelope’ to get our final clue which lead us to Circular Quay to catch a ferry to Taronga Zoo! Funny how only 2 groups out of the 26 managed to reach the end in the time limit. We got free lunch, free daily trippers and free entrance to the zoo.. what more could you ask?

I don’t ever recall going to Taronga Zoo before.. except when I was in year 2 I vaguely remember going to the zoo (not sure if it was Taronga) So anyway, I was excited just as much as the kids (though they were most curious seeing kangaroos while I was keeping an eye out on the Giraffes ^_~)
My legs were dying by the end of it all, haha. worth it though :)

Christmas songs to share ^^ Enjoy!

「Only Love」 2007 Winter Album
› artist (s) SMTOWN – Various
› release date December 7th, 2007
› language Korean/English
› genre Holiday, pop, ballad

Download Full Album (65mb)

Selected song:

Track05. CSJH The Grace – We Wish You a Merry Christmas & Feliz Navidad (5.1mb)

Dear Chibi,

After much thought, I’ve decided to start a new blog (in addition to Dear Chibi, that is) I’m not sure how I’ll go managing two blogs, but hopefully they’ll be balanced, plenty to read and see. Dear Chibi is my personal blog where I put in EVERYTHING, and as a result, entries may vary on topic to topic on each post (One day you’d get something about anime, then a song plug, then some random story, then site updates etc) While there’s nothing wrong with this (IMHO XD *cough*) I think it would be good to separate drawing stuff from this. I want to get better at drawing and want to force myself to draw more and as a result–>

Just for doodles and sketches.

More about seeing than reading.

Dear Chibi will remain primarily the same as it always was- place for thoughts, rants and randomness, that is my life. Chibi’s Doodling Canvas is exactly what the name says =) Feel free to drop by. (I know.. currently CDC looks terrible on Internet Explorer.. XD..use Firefox ^_~)

Dear Chibi,

Here’s some photos of work-in-progress I took using my phone while working on the animation. Some were never used in the final thing. Every frame was drawn individually using a wacom tablet in Photoshop (at 100% scale), inked, coloured and shaded. They were then sequenced using Adobe Image Ready, then all brought into After Effects to composite.

Some earlier prototypes.

Originally Ethy had a larger role in the opening.

Some Chiasa sketches.

Every frame, no matter how similar were coloured separately.

The protagonist who was never named…

And the sequence I spent longest on

Drawing and colour which was never used. They were completely redone afterwards.

Used for final project.