Heres another coloring Job I did over one of Digmaang Salinlahi's newer artists.

THE DAWN....(Part 2)

The transformation of the epic-adventure Kahimanawari to the love story / action adventure tale Minsan Ako'y Nanaginip was not instant. It did not happen with a snap of my fingers. The characters and storyline our group made during the long ardous nights of brainstorming for that group thesis were for several months to a year left aside and almost forgotten. Then came the senior thesis season...

Ever since I enrolled at UST-CAFA I already knew I was going to do comicbook illustration for my thesis. My regular plates were a good percursor, almost all of them are somewhat related to comicbooks. During our Comprehensive Techniques class on our freshmen year my thumbs for re-layouting were often ads for comicbooks seen in Wizard. The plates I did for Advertising Production were often merchandises for comicbook related products. Even in Typography, Mechanical Drawing, Anatomy, Drawing from Life, Composition, etc my work screamed comicbooks! The big picture was I wanted to do a comicbooks that badly but the question remains that was nagging me then was what will it be and when will that be?

As luck would have it, all the materials for the past year's aborted group thesis were all stored in my house. Looking at them while thinking what my thesis would be, a plan popped in my head. Why not continue it as my thesis. I asked the guys and to this day I dont know if ever they didnt want me to do it, all I got was go right ahead. So Ive got character designs and a basic plot about an evil sugo that is threatening the lands of Kahimanawari, what now?

The first thing that happened was the addition of the love story set in modern times. A boy with the power to open Kahimanawari fell in love with a mortal girl who broke his heart and caused tremors within the mystic land. Many people upon reading that first chapter often suggest, humorously, that Jon Dimasalanta was me and the story about the breakup was based on my real life. All the characters in Minsan has a little bit of me and most often than not I draw inspiration for my stories in real life, wether or not it happened to me or others close to me. I finished that 1st Chapter about Jon and Kat in a very crude manner, in fact looking at it now I wished I'd practice more back then.

With Jon being heartbroken in the 1st chapter, that opened up the story about his dreams that the Sugo has broken free. Using the setting for Kahimanawari the characters we created long long ago were finally alive in sequential boxes. The main premise in this 2nd chapter was: In the mystic lands there was a war ongoing and the losing side unleashed the evil Sugo trapped in their land. That was the end of Jon's dream, waking him up and questioning himslef if his momentary lapse of strength due to the break up has caused tha anarchy in the land he was suppose to safeguard. That ended my thesis as well...

To Be Continued....

THE DAWN.... (Part 1)

Well Minsan Sa Panaginip started out as a group thesis project for a subject on our 3rd year at UST-CAFA. Back then it was tentatively named as Kahimanawari, an old native term for letting God decide what's best. The group was seven members strong, made up of my college buddies; Carlo Cruz, Nate Legaspi, Lucas Luchico, Paolo Villanueva, Huge Cordova, Jojo Villegas, Charlie Teodoro (who jumped ship from another group) and of course myself. We were young creators giddy with the anticipation of finally being able to make a comic book, with having a deadline and our grades being on the line we were pretty sure we will finish this.

The pebble that started the rock slide rolling was the thought of what would the Philippines be if Magellan or any western folk never found us? What if the creatures our elders often use to frighten us when we were kids were real? What if our culture was based on magic and stuff like that? Admittedly we were greatly influenced by the Age of Apocalypse and other reality altering storlines in the X-men Mythos. Anyway with that in mind we were off to do funnybooks.

We started by designing characters for the book, each of us turned in several designs, each of us wanting our characters to be the star of the book. But take note this were just designs, sometimes without thought to who they are, where they come from, they just looked uber cool to us. After gathering a dozen or so of characters we then turned to writing the mythos that will be the foundation of the book. The brainstorming was crazy, from porno references to nanites and silicon based villains even to the point of the absurdity of a sex crazed half god bent on getting supreme power over the land in exchange for his left testicle. Those were fun times, endless retreats (what we called overnights) to Rizal, Manila and Malabon to work on the comics. Sadly the the group thesis project was scrapped by our professor since he said there was not enough time to finish it. So Kahimanawari never saw the light of day... atleast not in its original form.

To be Continued...