Sunset Blues

To change things up this week, I introduce:

The other hobby of mine: photography! Granted there's no way for my camera to replace my pencil and sketchbook, but whenever I'm out and about and my big eyes just so happens to catch something I'd call gorgeous (or "limited time only"), I go for broke. As evidenced in this picture, for me it's sunsets. This was one of the first examples I took while taking one of my late day city treks back in the fall. Since then, I've freed up my SD cards for more. So, allow me to show my progress. :D

I always thought that there could only be so many shots of the sun going down next to the cityscape that I can get, but luckily I like adventuring!

Until next time, folks!

The Intro Page

It's been a long time coming. I've debated months upon months throughout the year and here I go.

The name's Aaron and welcome to Blue Aura Oasis: The Quest For Cool! This is my personal blog, chroniclizing my artwork, thoughts, and adventures by the week. I've never had much of an outlet to showcase myself besides DeviantArt and Facebook (I call it Bookface for giggles) and honestly, it's not enough. And here's why:

I'm a COLLEGE GRADUATE.

It's hard to believe that my past five years of a college life has come and gone and now I definitely need to do more. During the last three months of my senior year, I've been thinking extensively of what the future will bring to me. A typical graduate would be hyperventilating for graduation's arrival and to let the party rock all summer. However, that wasn't me... I'm partially lying, but the other part of me daydreamed of this:

This scene from The Graduate (great movie, by the way!) always got to me. Why? Because more than ever it represents the deepest part of my conscience. And many of you who are reading this, I'm sure it affects you somehow too. Let's face it; many of us are either college students or recent college grads. And while we KNOW what we want to do, what's next and how will we get there? Through hopeless dreaming? By splurging/ window shopping every week? Wishing we can take control of our potential fling(s) of the week?

Well... those can certainly help your case on a lonely day! But in all seriousness, it's called progressing. As I type this, I'm in a very calm and collected manner. Many of my friends ask me this common question: "Aaron, life is so screwed up! How is it that you keep you cool so easily?" I could answer that 100% right now, but I'll save that for another day. I'll answer it 50% now:

I keep myself grounded in mind and heart.

The best way for me to do this is through my various experiences (saga/ episodes as I call them) and art practices. Every passing day, I learn something new and through some miracle light in my brain I do my best to apply those to my future processes. This blog isn't just to give others an insight into my art and adventures, but to inspire those who may not have enough willpower nowadays to keep themselves stressfree. I enjoy being a helpful guy; must be a Pisces thing. :D

To the future, folks! And thanks for reading.

P. S.- I'll leave this here to give a reminder of what many of my posts will be about.

The Kirby- Mario Connection

Hello there!

This is the week where I take sometime away from drawing a bit, readying for work and watching swarmy romantic comedies to bring you this:

Yarn Kirby and Paper Mario! Drawn by me. :D

If some of the past posts didn't make it somewhat obvious, Kirby and Super Mario are my two favorite video game characters! Yes, since the tender age of eight when one of my cousins let me play her bulky Game Boy... something clicked in me. Before that, everyone I knew was Mortal Kombat, PlayStation, or 'Sonic, Sonic, Sonic!'- thirsty and.... I didn't care. I saw too much of them that I wanted to play something different.

Hence my introduction to Kirby's Dreamland.

Sure, it's a simple  and short game; the cutesy apparence of the characters and audio were at an eleven. BUT... that didn't stop me from loving it. And Kirby himself. There's something about the simplicity of him and his universe. Plus, my SolStars mascot, RaiStar Twinkle slightly resembles him:

Look into his eyes!

Oddly enough, RaiStar was my first creation at five years old; I didn't play anything Kirby related until I was eight. Strange huh?! What became just as strange was that my cartoons even resembled the Super Mario games, too! Now granted, Mario I REALLY got into when my parents got me a Nintendo 64 when I was twelve (I was late to the game, I know). My first game was Mario Kart 64. A month later, Mario Tennis 64 came into my household. And at the beginning of that summer, the game that would make me love video games the way the Looney Tunes made me love animation came in: Super Mario 64.

So, here I am eleven years later.... wondering if it was such a coincidence that these two characters influenced me somehow someway. The greatest fact of all this? It was all unintentional! I didn't care to take influences from video games in my youth. During my teenage years, my personal artstyle started to truly form (all this time more Kirby and Mario were being played), and my classmates would do nothing but critisize my cartoons because 1) 'They're too kiddy!' and 2) 'Looney Tunes and Nintendo are played out! Waaaaah!' All I said was, "At least I HAVE a style!" Then, my smirk was born. ;)

Most of those people (or critics/ jocks) stopped drawing, let alone caring about the visual arts. It's strange that so many of my artsy friends fell into the realm of "EVERYTHING I DRAW MUST BE FROM A COMIC BOOK AND ANIME!" and yet.... I just kept drawing influences from everywhere art related and developed my still- growing cartooning style. I'm not even shameful to say this; Kirby and Super Mario helped that.

And to end this, video game soundtracks began helping too! If any musician or band can make an original theme similar this:

I will GLADLY pay to use it as a SolStars theme song! Until next time, folks!

The SolStars Introduction

Happy Wednesday, folks!

I've been in and out of the loop (as in, the Internet) for the past few days and I thought: 'Before my router crashes again, let me do this now!' So as I said last week, sometime in June I am going to begin posting details, pictures and "studies" of my cartooning project SolStars. What started out as a self- proposed idea of helping me break into the animation industry as a character designer and storyboard artist, became a full- blown franchise in the making!

To start off, I'll introduce some posters and character visuals I feel were "good enough" in 2009.

I created this poster back in February 2009 newly entitled The SolStars Originals. Quick disclaimer: The "u" in the title was dropped a few months ago, thanks to Sol making more sense in the grand scheme of my cartoon's setting (Sunshine City= Sol; the characters surrounding it= Stars). So why did I put the Originals put in? These are the characters that compose most of the founding lineup of the SuperToons; clearly their villains couldn't fit so they'll have their own post! Everytime I've looked at this poster, I always said to myself 'I hope I got better with anatomy!' And eventually, I did. Here are a few more examples of earlier work. These I created after this initial poster.

And recently, I made two new Originals- related posters.

The SolStars 2012? Why not?!

Smoke never clears. It just rises back up!

As you can see, some of the designs were altered a bit (Hint: all the animals have 4 fingers now). And thanks to many experiments, I've gotten better at coloring and picture composition. These are two of the pictures I showed off as penciled sketches two posts ago. Both of them took me three to four days to complete, so at least I'm able to work faster now!

There are so many pictures to show. I'm saving them for future posts only because I'm going to attempt to tell brief character stories along with their up- to- date profiles. Plus, I've just signed onto carbonmade.com courtesy of one of my close friends. This way, I can make a portfolio of my best work to complement this blog where I do more talking/ typing. Great idea, right?!

There are my cartoons, folks. And since it seems to be a running theme that I post a picture at the end, I'll post this one. Have a good one!

Kirby's Pocket Monsters!

Good afternoon!

Last week, I detailed two temporary projects I'm currently up to off and on and my main project. This week, I'm going more in depth (somewhat) with my requested project: Kirby's Pocket Monsters!

I'll start off by describing the project a bit more for those who are unfamiliar. Kirby is my favorite video game character, hands down. I would explain why, that's going to take up an entire post! One of the main reasons why I love that pink puffball is how he manages to take on the appearence and powers of his enemies, just by inhaling them. So I took the liberty of seeing what would happen if he inhaled different types of Pokemon. Here are the current results:



So far, I've made seven character visuals. All of these are based mostly on a some of the Pokemon I feel Kirby can take on the most. Based on some feedback, I'm doing a better job than I was expected to do! Then again... when people are comparing your cartooning style to not only Warner Bros. but Nintendo, something's gotta give! I'm not planning on making all 600+ Pokemon into Kirby (that'd take me a year at MOST), so I'll make seven more to conclude this project for now.

I hope all of you enjoy this posting, and tune in for... next week's. ;)