Long time no see friendz! About the cafe press store..

Hey friendz! Wow...its almost 4 months I haven't posted anything to this blog! Its november now and soon be december, and I'm in the middle of rushing projects for my assessments on the 7th and 14th of Dec(well I 'm always rushing projects for the whole semester, assessment or not anyway.. :p).

Next year my class and a senior class will be starting our internships for 3 months...actually its 2 and a half months to be exact! I'm also in the midst of applying for internships and attending interviews. Actually I feel pretty nervous about it, because it will be my very first time working in an office/big company enviroment. Imagine the stress and pressure! I don't dare to think too positively about it, and I believe its gonna be tough. Well..because a little negativity is good, it will tone down the overconfidence and keep me up on my toes. I don't think I'm prepared so I have to tell myself that I have to work harder to keep up. I hope everything will be ok and it will be a good and steady 3 months!

Yeah now about Cafe Press..yeah why did I suddenly put my Cafe Press store back up again? Hey didn't I took it down months ago? Well I thought I wanted to give it another chance and try harder, earn some extra money while at it.....okay okay! I admit that I'm feeling emo about my future so I'm trying whatever I can to earn some money! =.= Geez.....but thats not a real answer and you know it. :p Anyway, all you need to know is....

Feral Friendz Cafe Press Store is now back up! Click Here!

Yeah go check it out before I close it back down again...just kidding! :p Please bear with the lack of products, thats what I get for using a basic Cafe Press account..hey I might upgrade to premium or look for other alternatives for my stuff...yeah who knows? Who knows what does the future holds for us. XD Do let me know if you have some advice for me or if you see something that is not right.Thanks for reading and supporting peeps. :)

REAL One Malaysia Fun Weekend - Feral Friendz T-Shirts for sale!

Hi friendz, I want to announce that on the 8th and 9th of August 2009, there will be a charity event called REAL One Malaysia Fun Weekend organised by the REAL group(which is Alfa College is part of) at Stadium Putra Bukit Jalil. The good news is Feral Friendz T-Shirts will be for sale for charity there! ^^ Also my senior Min Siew's Baoz Family T-Shirts will also be available for sale for charity. So if you like our character designs you can come and check out the t-shirt stalls by then. Other than the t-shirts, my college mates will also be there selling items such as handicrafts, food, drinks and other fun stuff! Hope you guys can come and support this charity event! Big cats and baoz waiting for you!

We are on the newspaper!

Last tuesday our designs appeared on the newspaper! Thanks to Alfa College for publishing our character designs on the Sin Chew Jit Poh newspaper. :) Also thanks to those who checked our blogs out. I'm pretty happy to notice increased traffic to this blog, but I haven't been updating the blog for almost a month due to projects, sorry peeps...now that I'm free I will continue to update the blog. Ganbatte! ^_^ Anyway here are screenshots of Google Analytics for this blog hehe..

New look!

Hi friendz, I've gave a major face lift for this blog and its unfortunate that I didn't manage to do it before the exhibition. ^_^; I think it looks much better than the basic black template and it gives more life to the blog, I hope you all like it!

Things I've changed :
1. New hit counter can be found on the most bottom at the widget's column.
2. New background - Previously I couldn't find a suitable background to go with the theme of Feral Friendz, and its not that I don't know how to put a background and so I left it black, haha.. ^^; Finally I decided to make a simple one with all the Friendz in Illustrator. The background is not fitting completely on bigger screens or too big on smaller screens is because everyone is not using the exact same monitor and screen resolution on their computers. I also want to avoid tiling the background. If you know how to solve this problem please teach me! ^_^
3. New banner - The FFZ family has grown from 2 to 7 and I feel they all should be in the banner. Also the old banner looks lousy and the colors don't look right anyway.. The new banner is much bigger and cleaner looking too.
4. The wrappers have their own background color now. Posts and widgets have their own boxes. Post and widget titles have background color too.
5. I made it so that everyone can post comments now even if they don't have a blogger account, but there is still moderation.
6. Blogger Nav Bar is out of sight now but it will still reappear if you hover your cursor at the top of the page.

New gallery for Feral Friendz artworks!

Hi peeps! I've created an album at Picasa Web Albums to showcase all FFZ artworks. If you wish to submit your own artwork, please feel free to do so and click here to see the instructions! ^^

Click here to go to the gallery!

Our Friendz So Far and Some Thoughts

Top left to right: Leopard, Black Panther, Lion, Tiger
Bottom left to right: Cougar, Snow Leopard, Lynx

During the holidays, I've added 5 more friendz to the family. We're supposed to take each other's templates and design/customize our own but I think that plan failed very badly! So what am I gonna do? I'll just have to make them all by myself, and college must pay me back 1 week of holiday! Just kidding.. :p




Our stuff will be exhibited in the college from tomorrow onwards until wednesday. Things that will exhibited are our blog and any merchandise we did for it. I managed to cough out 10 merchandise during the holidays, but it was stressful and tiring and I hope it won't happen again! Heres why: because I was in Taiwan for grandma's funeral. For 11 days, 60% is family matters, 20% is rushing projects, 20% is play/rest. Everyday is a tiring day cause we go out early in the morning and usually come back late, so I can't divide the time nicely to do my project. Also I wasn't feeling well during the stay; I had nausea from the flight/car/boat/train/101 evelator ride. The goose rice I ate made things worse and my appetite went downhill that I couldn't eat anything except for fruits. Finally I vomitted everything out before my flight back to Malaysia. x.x Also I think I put on weight and have serious water retention. :/ After coming back from KLIA I managed to rush over to Lap Soon to print my stuff before it closes! Yeah!




The 10 merchandise I did are: Notepad, mouse pad, clip, eraser, mechanical pencil lead, badges, t-shirt, calendar, bookmarks and clay models. All of them have lousy designs and layouts so don't expect too much. -.- I e-mailed the t-shirt and badge files to my dad while I was in Taiwan and he helped me to bring them to Pasar Seni to make them. There are some printing errors on the shirt and badges and I'm not sure why and what happened, but still thank you so much dad! Muaks!!



I heard that this project don't carry any marks. So was all these trouble worth it? To me eventhough I felt very dissapointed with my works but it was a good chance to improve one self. I have to say this was a great experience and I must admit that I've learn a lot a lot of new things. Furthermore all of these are a few more new additions to my port folio. But next time I hope the school won't arrange breaks+projects together. Breaks are meant for resting and destressing, please. :( Still regardless of that, I think this is all worth it..and I still need rest...zzzz..

Blank templates, make your own cat!

Here are some blank templates of the leopards in JPEG format:

Also vector files are also available for download:
Adobe Illustrator file
EPS file

I did one example a while ago using the very same templates. You just need to let your imagination run wild!


When you're done, you may submit back the file to me at littlecheetah_27@yahoo.com and I shall post it up for the world to see!

Babies have names now : Sonja & Nora! And Mobile phone wallpapers!

Hi peeps, due to time constrain(1 week or so left) I had to quickly select names for the girls and move on further with the project. Sweet and gentle leopard cub has the name Sonja and the mysterious black panther cub is named Nora. I hope you like the names, girls!

Recently my old china brand handphone died(FOR GOOD!) and my dad got me a new Sony Ericcson k770i phone. And hey I thought why don't I make wallpapers for my handphone. Here I present 2 animated wallpapers, in GIF format, 240x320 pixels in size(not all handphones will support these so check it's manual).

Welcome our friendz!

Happy chinese new year everyone!! After a stressful week our feral friends are finally done and ready to take out from the oven(I mean Illustrator, dummies)!


I'm glad that the designs are finalized and approved by my lecturer and I can start to think about what kind of stuff I can do with the babies. I think the designs are a bit complicated and I will have a hard time if I want to make animations of them. :( Also my mom and my maid said they looked like lions...sigh. =.= Well I guess I'll just have to try first........or can anyone help me? ^_^;

At the mean time, anyone got any suggestions what to name them? I think both leopards are girls, so feminine or neutral sounding names are preferred. I will put up a poll after I get a few choices.

I also put up a new section at the side with links to our classmates' blogs. So please visit them and support them too! ^_^

The Birth of a Feral Friend!

A new life forming in Illustrator!

Hello everyone!

Welcome to feralfriendz.blogspot.com and this is the very 1st post of this brand spanking new blog! *blingbling*

Wow, this is the first post.....I think there are too many things to introduce since everyone is very very unfamiliar and don't know what the heck is going on. Well let me introduce myself first and then what is this project about.

My name is Chen Hui Wen, I am a 23 year old female living in Malaysia. I currently study Visual Communication majoring in multimedia in Alfa College, Taman Paramount Petaling Jaya. This is my 2nd year in this lovely college and I belong to the crazy class of VC08A/B, yeah!

I believe most of the readers of this blog will be my fellow classmates and lecturers who will be checking out any progress and maybe posting comments(please be nice -.-). As you all (probably) already know, this is a project for the subject Intro. to Multimedia taught by Mr. James. We are required to design a character/mascot and create a blog for it. Other stuff we need to or might do is making dolls or models of our character, animated MSN emoticons, calendars, wallpapers..etc. We also might have an exhibition of our class' work if everything goes well. Wow, sounds like a lot of work but I believe it will be great fun and I look forward to learn how to do all these. ^_^

So after the briefing of the project, I start to look for reference and see what other designers' works are like. The library has a collection of Play magazines which is perfect for my research. There are great examples in the magazine and very related to the project, but extraordinary, monster and alien like characters is just not my thing. Some of them have exaggerated shapes and face expressions, some are also violent/brute and bloody looking too. I don't find them cute at all(please forgive the girly o' me) and I think it will be difficult for me to work with something that is not my style and don't have passion for. Since I like animals, so I thought why not just stick to animals? Animals that actually *look like* animals, ok?

I chose the african leopard as my character design. Why? I really don't know. I was randomly flipping through a book about wildlife painting and it struck me that I should draw a leopard. I think cats big and small, wild and tame have beautiful eyes. To me, I think one of the most important feature of a character is the eyes. How the eyes are drawn will also influence how attractive the character is to the audience. There's a saying that the eyes are the windows to one's soul and I believe that. The eyes can also tell the personality of a character.

Some sketches.

The major problem for me is keeping the character design simple. It should be simple because one of the reasons is we're required to publish a empty template/outline of the character for people to download and they can customize the character with a different look anyway they like. Also it will be easier for us to create dolls/models out of it. Second, the character should have some unique trait that clearly identifies itself(things like a hat, scar, torn ear, accessories...etc), not just like any ah beng ah lian ah gou ah mao in the street. The lower right sketch is the one approved by my lecturer, as you can see it is the smallest out all of them(about 1 head and a 1/3). I gave my character a flower on her head as an unique trait because she is a sweet little leopard cub. I know it's so....unspecial. =/

My worry is that my design is not outstanding enough compared to those designing monsters/aliens. Among the websites I've gotten from the Play magazines, one of them catches my attention instantly. It is about 3 husky characters called Husky X3. I like the concept and design very much. I don't think it is a complicated design. It is simple and effective, most importantly, it is attractively cute. Its the same like Kelu we saw in class. So I think I can try out designing animal characters and hope it turns out alright.

To clarify some things before I end this entry: I don't plan to name the leopard cub Feral Friendz. Feral Friendz is just the name of the website, and click here for the defination of the word feral if you need it. :P I will give a cute name for the cub later, and maybe if time allows, I will make a 2nd cub? Friendz are not complete with just 1 cub.

That's all for the long winded 1st post. *dies* I appreciate any comments or advice so if you have any, please feel free to post! You can also post links to your blog so I can look too.

Arigato gozaimasu! Ganbatte everyone~!