Life Drawings (pt.1)

so my Uni hosts a free "open studio" life drawing session every weekend at the art school, and I've made it a point to attend every single time for past few weeks.  and as a result my contour line drawing skills have improved A LOT!  all of these are made with a Cretacolor charcoal set in a 18"x24" sketchbook~ working at that size really helps you control your arm and wrist movements!

All of these are 20 min poses:
The proportions were HARD so this is all I could do in 20 minutes. normally my drawings look a little more complete.

This is the first time I've ever drawn a pregnant woman - and I swear, she was positively glowing. So I tried to capture her likeness in the last 10 minutes instead of working on the rest of the figure.

I really liked this guy's dreads, they were fun to draw. :p I worked on this for a few minutes after time was up b/c it wasn't dark enough.

Anyway, it always feels great to make big strides in just a few weeks, so I'll keep attending these sessions. =) Hopefully I'll have some real art to post soon, though...

Warmups + Character Design

So I've been taking quite a few commissions lately, just for single character concepts/illustrations. I should probably figure out a price table for this soon so I can start doing it on a larger scale...

Anyway, here's the piece that I'm working on right now. The initial sketch phase went super smoothly, and I like how it looks overall, but now the details are gonna be a HUGE pain to finish.  I really want to finish it tonight though~

edit: here's the finished version, totally forgot about posting it lol

also, here are a few 15 minute doodles that I do to warm-up before I start drawing.  I got the idea from going to regular figure drawing sessions at my Uni - they really help me get into the "fast sketch" mindset! :D
heh, I just needed to draw something to get me into that "fantasy swordfighting" mindset :D

Samurai Champloo fanart

oops, it's been too long once again since my last post... I've got some commission art in the works that I'm not quite ready to show yet, but for now here's a fanart for one of my favorite shows ever:i have a lot of awe for extremely well-animated action sequences, so this show really hit the spot the first time i watched it. then once i got into it, there was the amazing characters, story, music--the whole shebang!  This took a lot longer than usual (usually fanarts are pretty quick for me), but I learned a neat coloring trick while making this, so... things balance out. :)

Character Illustration: mafia wife

trying my hand at a semi-realistic, illustrative style. this is one of my better attempts.
she's an original character for a furturistic mafia story... i drew her first because all the other ones will be a total pain in the butt to draw. -_- (I suck at drawing guns...)
here's a couple of progress pics for this piece:
i like how in the beginning the block-in was so skewed and off balance that I had to rotate the whole canvas... thank god for digital tools like "lasso" & "free transform" to counteract my utter lack of planning =P

Emperor concept sketches

here's some tonal concept sketches, once again for the chinese fairytale project. i'm trying to plan out my pieces more (and just do more studies in general) to improve my composition and tones.it's IS helping a little, so far... i just need to remind myself of that constantly so i can keep plodding on and not get discouraged!

this blog needs some color

okay, so i just realized that my last few posts have no color in them... D: AHHHH what a travesty! in fact, this bothers me so much that i'm going to post some color doodles/WIPs right now to remedy this grievous error. (nothing against b&w studies, it's just that i've been doing them so much lately and I LOVE color too much to have a monochromatic blog!)

this is for the "chinese fairytale project," it's the goddess with a white dragon swirling around her. i think i made the pose a little TOO sexy.


i really suck at cityscapes. but there's no way around it, i just have to practice... i'm trying to work out all the basic shapes/composition in this picture right now.

i really love painting mountains! gonna add a figure, and a bunch of architecture to this

man, it's gonna suck to finish all these pieces, doing all the detailing is always so hard for me... i love the initial "spark" of inspiration that makes me attack a blank canvas with so much confidence, but it always tapers off once I have to start adding detail! -_-

A Chinese Love Story: character designs

posting the finished b&w concept designs for the Chinese fairytale project that I've been working on. these two designs are for Niulang (cow herder, the mortal) and Zhinu (weaver girl, goddess from the heavens). they're characters from a very ancient and well-known chinese love story.i really want a top with gold embroidered dragons like the one that ZhiNu has...

busy busy busy

well, once again it has been a while since i've posted here, but in my defense the past 2 weeks have been some of the busiest days of my life. I had to move out of my apartment (am now in the of searching for a new one -- the suspense!), plus my best friend got married and I was the maid-of-honor, PLUS my parents are in the middle of selling their house so i've been helping them prepare. so yeah, i've been kinda burnt out lately due to lack of 'art time' (art = best de-stresser ever). this weekend's gonna be like a vacation for me with all the art i'm gonna do. :P

in other news, i finally received my amazon order for Henry Yan's Figure Drawing book, and it's simply AMAZING. *__* For those that don't know who Henry Yan is, he's a long-time instructor at the Academy of Art University in SFO, and he's as good as they get when it comes to figure drawing:
this is one of my favorite drawings by him... very classical, yet so loose & painterly. he's seriously skilled at handling charcoal, so I'm trying to learn from him... I even bought a bunch of vine charcoal a few weeks ago and tried out his technique at the AA model sessions. i'll post my attempts after i get a bit better! (right now I kinda suck at charcoal :X)

will get some new art posted soon! it's always so hard to get around to it D:

character sketches (Chinese fairytale)

The bamboo illustration I posted earlier is giving me some trouble... the problem is with the leaves. i absolutely LOVE the way bamboo leaves are painted in traditional Chinese watercolors, but I don't seem to have a good PS brush that can emulate that sharp, tapered look. if anyone has any suggestions or a brush they could give me, i'd be eternally grateful!

i've been working on a few character sketches, once again for the Chinese fairytale project... trying to nail the designs for the Peasant (Lang) and the Goddess (weaver girl) before I tackle Emperor Jade's design. I love doing the "sketch" step the most... it's fun trying to get a good silhouette/pose before the detail rendering. gotta love the spontaneity of it!
this is the goddess/weaver girl... definitely the better of the two designs.

the peasant boy, Lang... no detail yet, just trying to get the pose to look laid-back

for the love of Batman

I *finally* saw "the dark knight" today in an IMAX theater, and i'm struggling to avoid just gushing praise and sounding like a fangirl. so i made this real quick, just had to get it out of my system! (also got a chance to try out a couple new custom brushes, wanted to keep it rough & painterly)

i can't get over how amazing this film was... this movie had my #1 favorite incarnation of Batman ever, save for that incredible animated TV series back in the 90s, which i LOVED as a kid and would watch everyday after school.  point is,  i don't think i'll ever get sick of Batman.  :p

Bamboo forest (chinese fairytale)

well shoot, I'm already way behind on posting in this blog! it's kinda funny how motivated I was to set aside time for art back when I was totally swamped with school, cramming for exams and standardized tests. quite frankly, my work ethic since the beginning of summer has been abysmal, and there's just no excuse for it. -__-; so it's time to get off my ass and make some portfolio-worthy pieces!

here are a few WIP illustrations i'm making for my Chinese fairytale adaptation. i'm sooo excited about this project!


more to come soon!

more sketches

got some more art to post, 'cause I really wanna fill up this blog! here's a quick fanart I made when i was taking a break from original art:

my friend jeremy recommended "Kung Fu Panda" as one of those super-cool movies that one needs to check out...  i haven't had a chance to go see it yet unfortunately, but i did watch every clip i could find of it and it looks AMAZING!! very authentic scenery, and the character expressions/designs are top notch!

and there's also this kinda sad excuse for concept art:it's an wip for my adaptation of a famous Chinese fairytale, but I accidentally lost a ton of progress on it (stupid laptop ran out of batteries). it's just as well since it looks like crap anyway... composition/scale is totally off. I wanted the dragons to look HUGE, but the composition just doesn't work for that purpose.  oh well, I'll start anew and see if i can do better~

first art post

so I've decided to start an artblog! i'm gonna try to update this thing as regularly as possible so that I can gauge my progress over the next couple months. I'll start with posting these sketches I made a few weeks ago in ArtRage, this nifty new program I bought 'cause my Painter trial ran out (NOOOO D=). i'm still trying to get the hang of it, but from what i've seen it's a fairly decent program to use until i can shell out the money for Painter~
this one is my take on a famous chinese love story, was trying to go for a "sad" mood because he's waiting for someone who's not showing up. gonna make a whole series of illustrations on this idea that i have, so more to come later!

here's a warm-up piece i did when i was trying to learn ArtRage... i need to do a LOT of anatomy studies before i'm up to speed. the proportions are ok for the most part, but i got really lazy and didn't finish her hands, sorry!