This summer has been life changing for me.

I’m not even sure where to begin. I’m sure I’m already forgetting some things, but here’s a list of:

Happy Career-ish Things That Happened This Summer!

Met Camilla d’Errico at FanExpo! She is one of my fave artists and she’s inspired me since my senior year of high school. I may have possibly creeped her out with awkward fangirlish vibes. But she was super nice!

Joined Cloudscape Comics and the Vancouver SkyTrain Sketch Group and had plenty of fun & interesting times!

Participated in my first art show with Cloudscape!

It was such a cool experience seeing numerous strangers young and old looking at my work. (I politely asked these folks if I could take their picture, hee!)

Dedy brought me flowers! Hnnnng! <3

Had an awesome time working at Kibooco this summer! Go team!

Learn a bit about Kibooco and see me draw and jump and do things in this sweet video:

So sad I won’t be seeing them on a daily basis this semester! ;__;

Squishing heads with founders Molly and Earl.

Completed character designs, illustrations, various graphics and designy stuff for Kibooco:

Illustrated and published my first book! Which you can get for free here! Yay!

Got gift art from a 5-year-old. Aww!!

;-; <3 Weep.

Through all of the Kibooco publicity (!!), me and/or my work (tiny snippets in the video and screenshots at least) have appeared in numerous places such as VancouverSun.com, the IndieGoGo newsletter & blog, TechVibes, Tech Cocktail and Village Gamer.

(In the above pic, I did the pirate – the background illustration of the island is by author/illustrator Elke Weiss.)

Made the SFU SIAT front page twice! (Once for FLOCK, once for Kibooco).

Also had my work on the Always facebook page by riding on Dedy‘s fame! :D

Completed some super fun character designs and illustrations as part of my freelance endeavors:

Began negotiations for a character licensing contract!

Got my first BUSINESS CARDS! (Something I’ve been meaning to do but put off forever! But I has them now!)

Learned so much about business and totally leveled up in that area!

Made my first $3 of passive income from my illustration work. (Small, but a solid start. More on this later hopefully!)

Painted something with actual paint for the first time in forever. Behold my mastery of real media (not really):

(Okay, so it’s not exactly hyperrealism, but, um….. rainbow tailed unicorn fish?)

Painting in bed. Genius.

Did an awesome photos-for-art trade with Jenni! These are just some of the photos Jenni took of me while we were adventuring around Vancouver (she is so talented!) I still need to figure out where & how I am going to use all of these. I just haven’t had time to put them up!

Whoosh!

“Why, hello up there!”

This is what I made for her in return, I was going for a storybook feel:

Sorry for keeping all of this from you until the end of the summer… I know, it’s inexcusable!

On a personal level, some other things I did this summer: saw and caught up with Heather! Vegan spa party with Jenni! Tried Ethiopian, Sri Lankan and Lebanese food! Got interested in actually doing stuff with my hair involving pins and braids! And plenty more.

Coming up:

This semester I’m taking 3 classes – Intro to Game Design (with my beloved! <3), Speculative Design (the entire class is gamified, we have ‘puzzles’ instead of quizzes and ‘EXP’ instead of marks), and Capstone (independent graduation project where I’ll be making some sort of interactive visual narrative thingamajiggy of my own conception).

I have three more semesters until I graduate and become a Real Adult. WHOA! It’s sort of scary, but I think I’m ready. Bring it on, world!

Posted on September 4th, 2012
Filed under: Creating, Featuring, Feeling Awesome, Living (All Posts)
Topics: art, book, Cloudscape, design, drawing, fan art, freelance, gallery, illustration, kibooco, me, news, paint, photos, show, skytrain sketch group, work

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I have super exciting news!!

If you’ve been following my blog you’ve probably heard me mention my comic FLOCK a number of times. Well, it’s going to be in an art gallery! And you should totally come see it!

What is FLOCK? It’s the story of four friends on a camping trip, and how friendships are tested when you start to grow up.

It’s also an exploration of what space can mean in comics. It follows a branching pattern, where the readable paths are arranged in the actual landscape of the forest. You can ‘listen in’ on characters talking about each other behind their backs when they’ve split up.

Not only that, but it’s been printed at SIX. FEET. WIDE. So it’s longer than I am tall. Though I’ve showed this at different events (on laptops, tablets and projectors) this will be the first time anyone has seen it in this format – to be honest, I never really imagined printing it.

The show was only meant to include comic pages, but since FLOCK is one long unbroken story, there was no natural place to chop it up… so the curator is allowing me to show the entire thing in all its glory. I’m pretty sure mine must be the biggest piece in the show.

(I won’t claim to be the best, but I can say I’m the biggest, hohohoho.)

The event is also doubling as the book launch of Cloudscape’s newest book, Giants on Main Street. I don’t have anything in the anthology, but maybe someday!

If you’re in the Vancouver area, you should totally come see it, hang out with me, and see the work of a host of other awesome local comic artists.

It’s at:

The Cultch (1895 Venables Street Vancouver, BC)
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
6:00pm until 8:00pm

Check out the facebook event too and click ‘Join’.

See you there!

Posted on July 24th, 2012
Filed under: Creating, Featuring, Living (All Posts)
Topics: art, comics, event, FLOCK, gallery, show, vancouver

1 Comment »

As I’m starting to take on larger paid illustration projects, I’ve been noticing a weird feeling that sometimes makes it hard to start working on them. I love drawing, and it’s not that I don’t want to do the work, so I think I can ascribe this feeling to fear.

“What if I can’t do it? What if I make something and it sucks? What if I screw up my crucial first professional opportunities? What if I’m really just a skill-less poseur?!”

And then I find something else to occupy my mind for a while, and then I notice that one, two, three hours have gone by and I haven’t started my assignment. Arrgh!!

If I’m going to be a real pro, I’ve got to learn to just do the work. Building professional working habits and increasing my drawing stamina now will help me a lot, immediately and later on.

One thing I’ve been trying lately is starting my illustration work sessions with some warm-up sketches. I just let myself draw whatever I feel like for a while with no expectation of quality and no pressure of having it be judged by someone else. It helps me loosen up and remember “oh yeah, I can make marks with this tablet thing that coalesce into things that look like drawings”. I mostly end up drawing girls, girls’ heads, and cute animals. Unsurprising!

Here are some of my recent warm up sketches:

Another side benefit to doing free form sketching like this is that often I end up liking a few of the sketches, and they might become the basis for finished pieces later. For example, in the second group of sketches, I really like the girl in the top right corner, and the fox thing in the bottom middle. And I kind of want to continue drawing squirrels in yoga poses now. (Maybe I could make a series and post them on a tumblog, hahaha.)

Other ways to kick fear in the face and get to work:

• Show your work to someone who you know will love it, such as anyone who can’t draw. Or your mom!
• Remember that there’s no such thing as mistakes or failure in drawing! Everything lives somewhere in the middle of a massive gradient with ‘noob’ on one side and ‘god-like’ on the other side. Every mark you make is an iterative process of refinement.
• Remember that even pros feel this way, but they still end up doing the work. In a comic creator panel at FanExpo last weekend, Len Wein (a comics/animation writer/editor with a pretty impressive range of titles under his name) said that every time he starts a new project, he worries that it’s all been a fluke up until now and he actually has no talent, and a few of the co-panelists nodded in recognition. That’s… kind of depressing (the fact that even pros don’t seem to overcome this), but at least you know that what you’re feeling is normal.

Now get to work!!

Posted on April 26th, 2012
Filed under: Creating, Featuring, Learning, Living (All Posts)
Topics: confidence, drawing, how to, sketching, warm-up, work

2 Comments »

The things I do for school!

I had the fantastic opportunity to work on StoryTails, an interactive, electronic garment as part of one of my classes in SIAT called Body Interface. We wanted to see if we could create the experience of touch from a “socially acceptable” distance. So someone can stroke one of the stroke sensors on the ‘tails’ of the garment, and the wearer will feel it around their waist and neck. Tingly!

My main roles were conceptual/visual development and research, but I helped with other stuff like the programming or sewing when needed. Huge kudos to my three other team mates who worked so hard on this!

It was great to get out of my comfort zone with this project, but I still found a way to work drawing into the process. Most of the coursework at SIAT doesn’t involve drawing, unless I can find some way to make it relevant. In this project, I developed the form of the garment through iterative sketching and helped explain the piece with some illustrations.

Here are some of the sketches I made throughout the project!

I also wore/modeled the garment at various points, either to get some first hand experience with what it felt like to wear, to serve as a mannequin while others worked on it, or for photos.

An early prototype! I had way too much fun prancing around wearing these things…

Beep beep boop.

Me with team lead & all around awesome conceptual artist person, Winnie!

And lastly…

While we were taking photos, I noticed that the tripod happened to be wearing pants. … Photo op.

Posted on April 25th, 2012
Filed under: Creating, Exploring, Featuring, Learning, Living (All Posts)
Topics: art, concept art, interactive, photos, project, school, sketches, wearable

1 Comment »

I’ve had a personal facebook profile for quite a few years now, and I thought it was high time to get a public one so anyone can choose to follow me on there! You should totally go on it, press the Like button and say howdy! :D And we’ll have an awesome Facebook party!

Posted on March 8th, 2012
Filed under: Featuring, Living (All Posts)
Topics: facebook, social media, website

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This is something I do all the time now when I doodle. I first started it in late highschool and explored it more in the past four years, and it has really helped me both expand my capabilities and explore my style as an artist and designer.

Everyone has certain biases and preferred ways of doing things that become habit, but it’s always good to expand your visual vocabulary and practice seeing things in different ways!

The idea is to just pick a subject and see how many DIFFERENT ways you can draw it. It doesn’t have to look like what you would normally draw – in fact, try to draw as differently as possible from how you would normally draw it! And it doesn’t have to be good either. Who cares! It’s just for fun! There is absolutely no right or wrong, just variation!

Consider:

• Line thickness
• Line smoothness
• How do the lines connect? At what angle? Do they even connect? Are there even lines?
• Simple or complicated shapes
• Varying levels of realism
• Exaggeration
• How would it look if it were drawn by Disney? If it were in an anime? If it were on Cartoon Network? If it were from the 60s?

Just get as many ideas out as you can. Don’t worry about being too careful and don’t bother erasing if you make a mistake. It doesn’t even matter if you don’t like what you drew. Just draw another one!

Example Time!

How many ways can you draw a heart?

The pink one in the middle is the first one I drew. That’s my “default” heart, what I automatically think to draw when I go to draw a heart. Then around it, I slowly filled up variations trying many different methods and styles and exaggerations. This also made me realise that I don’t know how to draw a real anatomical heart. :P

Anyone can easily get started with drawing a simple shape like that. Next:

How many ways can you draw a face?

Again, the middle is my “default” face, that I immediately think of first. I’ve drawn that exact face hundreds of times. But as you can see, that’s not all I’m capable of! :) Of course some of these are more interesting or more appealing than others, but I wasn’t trying for awesomeness, just variety.

It’s really fun to do this with a friend too because odds are they’ll come up with completely different stuff than you do!! In fact, if you do this I’ll love to see your results!

Other ideas for prompts: Eyes, mouths, hands, monsters, birds, cars, trees, dragons, buildings… just about anything!

Q: But how do you know what to draw?!

A: If you’re really stuck, go to a corner of the internet that you rarely visit and see how different artists do things. Try mimicking them (just for practice!) to see how it is they achieve the style that they have. Do they draw the eyes really high on the head? Maybe their work has no sharp points or angles? Maybe they sneak some shading into their linework? Perhaps they always draw the nose connected to the eyebrows? That should get you rolling, then just try different combinations of things. Don’t be afraid to make your drawing look ugly or weird. You can always scrap what you don’t like later. Loosen up!

Then the next time someone accuses you of being a one-trick pony, you can pull this out and their jaw will drop. ;)

Posted on February 16th, 2012
Filed under: Creating, Exploring, Featuring, Learning, Living (All Posts)
Topics: design, drawing, exercise, faces, practice

4 Comments »