It's been a while since my last journal here in deviantart.
Now that I'm in the mood of typing something, I'm going to share about my experiences when I attended a Conceptart.org and Massive Black Workshop down in Dallas, last March.

Basically it's an art and design workshop/conference for animators, illustrators, concept artists, game designers, and other fellow artists.
They had a lot of great artists, such as all the Massive Black team (can't even say one by one since they're a lot!), Marko Djurdjevic (a concept artist for Marvel comic), Bobby Chiu and Kei Acedera from Imaginism Studio, Irene Gallo, Greg Manchess, Justin Sweet, William Whitaker, Jason Felix, Aleksi Briclot from DontNod Entertainment, Phil Holland from Rhythm and Hues, David Levy from Steambot, Jenova Chen from That Game Company, Mikko Kinnunen from Bioware, and many many more.

Seriously, I was blown away by the amount of experiences I got in 4 days, and it's ironic since at some point I felt that those 4 days worth more than a semester of school here!
Maybe because I got specific mentoring in what I need to learn and improve.

For example, I've gained so much knowledge by just watching Jason Chan (my fave illustrator) did his demo on digital painting. Even though now I'm still figuring out things to work in Photoshop, but at least I got a better understanding on how to do a painting with great execution in limited amount of time.
Another great thing that happened, Bill Whitaker who's a master of oil painting did coach me one by one. He explained a lot about how oil painting works, and what to do for newbie like me. It was just amazing! Even though I don't have a proper training in oil-based medium, but by listening to Bill's talking and paying attention when he did his demo, it helped a lot.
The way I sketch now is also different. I used to sketch only the line art, and if I was motivated enough, I would do some hatching and cross hatching to shade, without having any specific thoughts on where I should put my pencil mark down, and where the plane changes were in my drawing.
But since I looked at Wesley Burt's sketchbook, and saw the way he did his pencil drawing, oh boy... I knew at that moment that I needed to adjust the way I draw.
Seeing his sketchbook was a complete change of mindset. There wasn't a lot of pencil marks here and there, his drawing was so clean, it felt like he always thought before he put down any single stroke on his paper.
Exactly what Bobby Chiu said in his lecture: "Don't rush when you draw or paint. Give yourself some thought, 1 stroke for 1 thought."

I tried to imply things that I learned from that workshop, and yea, now I can see the difference!
It was such a privilege to attend such great event, and I'm definitely going to another one next year, if time and money allows me to go!

Oh, go check out Wes Burt's and Jason Chan's website, then you will know why I love both of them so much

PS. bakalan gue bahas panjang lebar di blog, di sini agak2 malas musti mikir pake bahasa inggris