Lei Melendres

Ted Leonid "Lei" U. Melendres (October 2, 1989) is a freelance professional doodle artist and illustrator from Batangas and Laguna, Philippines. He is considered to be one of the well-known doodle artists in his country. Melendres started doodling since the age of 5 and pursued by means of practice and education. His works have been featured in several design and art related websites and have been exhibited in several local galleries.

He learned basic art/doodling through his mom and became competitive with his brother who was also good in art / drawing anime characters. Moreover, he learned more of art from school (specifically from his drawing classes and his classmates). He also took training outside school.

He has hundreds of inspirations when it comes to art but mostly fellow Filipino and Korean artists. Besides doodling, he also does paintings, drawings, illustrations and digital works, logos and flash animations.

Education and work

Melendres studied in several schools in Laguna, Philippines, which includes the Dominican College of Sta. Rosa, San Juan de Letran Calamba and Malayan Colleges Laguna. He graduated from a two-year certificate course in digital arts and design and then took up multimedia arts as his second course. He is was on the dean’s list from year 2007 to 2009. He worked as an illustrator but chose to pursue freelance work which he has been doing for five years.

He is currently doing commissioned artworks and sells t-shirts with his artworks printed on each.

Artworks

He calls his doodling style “Infinity Mix” which from the name suggests describes the intense endless details and elements interacting together to form a scene. The usual elements include monsters, creatures, robots, aliens, patterns, typography and more elements both common and weird. Melendres is currently the head of a big doodle community in the Philippines named Doodle Art Enthusiasts which consist of around 600+ young professional and amateur doodle artists.

He considers three types of doodling.

Type C

*these are artworks that are those which are manually sketched detail by detail. It is described by Melendres as a doodle he prepares for.

Type B

*these are artworks that are defined as semi-planned. By the description itself, it only takes minimal sketches and preparations. The details will be followed by using a marker.

Type A

*these are artworks that are the unplanned doodling. This kind of work is considered as real doodling as doodle is defined as a rough drawing and mostly scribbles.

Manila One of his works include the capital city of the Philippines, Manila, as a theme. The artwork showcases the different places inside Manila, which includes the Quiapo Church, Chinatown, Malacanang, Intramuros and the Philippine National Museum. The artwork also shows the “Big Thee” national heroes, Lapu-Lapu, Andres Bonifacio and Jose Rizal and also some of the public transports in the Philippines like the light rail transit, jeepney and tricycles.

His artworks are first drawn using black inked pens and markers, scanned and imported in a computer and cleaned digitally, and then colored. Melendres usually uses Adobe Photoshop for his digital works.

Adobo Magazine

Melendres did an artwork for one of Philippine's influential magazine named Adobo Magazine.

The artwork focused on the elements of the magazine, basically what is happening in every event. Though minimal colors are used, the details explained the artwork very well.

The back-end of an event production is basically an organized chaos of equipment and people who are working to make the event look seamless from the audience's view, which is the clean portion of the doodle. This "ray of light" is what the audience sees or at least what they are supposed to see from their perspective.

Got Nothing Elso To Do

This artwork by Melendres was made in 2011 and has been one of his most viewed artworks. This artwork was described as an artwork that should be put in a frame and displayed. It is also described as like nothing people have ever seen. This artwork is printed on a t-shirt and is currently being reproduced by the artist himself.

Other art

Melendres also did several large scaled artworks. He also did a painting demonstration of his doodle works using paint on plywood board.

List of exhibits

External links

• Deviant Art Lei Melendres
• Behance Lei Melendres
• Tumblr I Am Leight