I am... Learning!

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

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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

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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 »

A recent school project that I got to use my illustration skills on! The task was quite different from what I’m used to doing – I typically stick to characters and bold lines, but in this case I was designing environments and patterns and colour! So it was a great exercise. I’m super pleased with how it turned out!

For our Body Interface class, the concept for our project was that we were going to create an interactive performance system based on Dai minority dance. We had a member of our team who was trained in this style of dance, and another of our team members implemented our idea by programming it in Max MSP. I got to fill the role of artist!

The style of dance we were going to work with (truly beautiful):

Our idea was to live-capture the dancer on camera and convert their form into a silhouette that would be part of a virtual set (kind of a “living painting”). Their silhouette would show a pattern through it symbolizing that they are embodying an element of the Dai culture. Our software would also track the gestures of the dancer and change the set to match which movements they are currently doing.

I created the art for three different sets, working with the themes Fish, Peacock and Blossoms. I tried to make the art inspired by traditional Chinese art, but not try to pretend that it IS traditional Chinese art – I kind of interpreted it through my style. I tend to be wary of appropriating elements from cultures that aren’t my own because I’m afraid I’ll totally butcher it and offend someone, but my team member helped by providing reference photos and feedback and approved my images. So, great!

Here are the sets:

These are placeholder silhouettes I used to help me compose the graphics, the silhouettes in the final piece were dynamically generated from the performer. This is probably my favourite set out of the three! The orange & purple pattern is inspired by this dance costume.

For the final sets I applied paper, watercolour & pastel filters to make them look a bit less “computery”, but here is the peacock one with no filters.

It took quite a few tries for me to get the colour composition for the above set – everything kept being too light-coloured and the figures weren’t standing out from the background enough. I wanted a light blue background for the sky, but I had to darken it enough and lighten the figures enough so that they would be different enough. But it still looks “light” because of the greenish hue and in comparison to some of the darker elements on the page. TRICKERY! An overall Levels adjustment laying in Photoshop helped me bump up the contrast as well.

Here are the underlying patterns for the different sets in full:

Posted on February 14th, 2012
Filed under: Creating, Featuring, Learning, Living (All Posts)
Topics: art, dance, illustration, pattern, project, school

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I attended the Vancouver Global Game Jam this past weekend as an artist! There were event sites all over the world (Japan, China, Australia, Brazil, you name it!) where teams scrambled to put a game together in 48 hours! From Friday through Sunday I got about 8 hours of sleep. Gnarly.

My team working!

The jam’s theme was revealed to be Ouroboros (a symbol of a snake/dragon eating its own tail). The game designers I paired up with had the concept of “Carl Jung running inside a snake which is eating itself and he has to try to dig his way out.” OKAY!

I helped further develop the concept to get more out of it art wise – it would be Jung when he was a kid (Young Jung! Hohohoho), and the traumatic dream would inspire various aspects of his future work. He would have to evade obstacles while moving through the snake which represent aspects of his life/psychological trauma. He would have to find a tooth from the snake in order to dig himself out, and if he did he could wake up from the dream. Artwise, the game would have a creepy-cute/trippy-dreamlike feel.

We also had ideas for philosophical/psychological puns for various items and power ups he would have. :) I thought of giving him more equipment to make him look like a fantasy oneironaut/ghostbuster/adventurer, but we decided that he wouldn’t have any items to start with.

Friday evening was mostly spent on character design and ironing out our concept. I looked at photos of Jung and what children wore in 1885. I wanted to keep him simple since we would have to be animated/reproduced in various ways all within 48 hours. Here’s Young Jung:

Early Saturday was mostly spent on animation with some title screen design near the end. I prepped him for animation in Flash and made a run cycle while Carmen (the other artist on our team!) made jump and dig animations.

(The first sprite sheet I’ve ever made!)

Here he is running in the game world.  So cool! (Background painting by Carmen.)

Getting to work with Carmen was one of my favourite things about the jam! Our talents meshed well (I’m good with character design, lineart, and graphic design, while she’s good with painting, backgrounds, colour & lighting). We both gave eachother feedback during the whole process  and got to collaborate closely on the title screen for the game.

I came up with a number of composition sketches for the screen, and we both narrowed it down to this one as our favourite:

I drew Young Jung before handing it off for Carmen to start painting over it while I worked on the type.

Carmen in the progress of painting: I gave her feedback in terms of where the lighting should place focus in the painting and she improved my composition by having the snake’s body wrap around so it wouldn’t look like a disembodied head. Choice collaboration right there!

Type:

After merging her painting with my title/nav elements, I did final overall colour adjustments and darkened the edges to lift out the foreground elements. Here’s the final:

Unfortunately, while our programmers DID to their credit manage to get the circular game world, animation, player controls, destructable terrain and win/lose conditions going, there wasn’t enough time to implement menus, obstacles or powerups. We did do the art assets for them though. (Admittedly, the furniture are loose tracings of google images due to time constraints, shhh don’t tell anybody!)  I imagined that there would be piles and piles of these things that Carl would have to scramble over, all while running from the ever-advancing snake head of death and trying to find an empty spot of ground to dig through!

Last minute group photo (with two of our team members missing, arg!) Yeah, we’re all sleep deprived here.

Overall it was a great experience – getting to see my art implemented into a game, working with Carmen, meeting people from local game studios, and getting to introduce myself as an artist to so many people! Not to mention an awesome t-shirt. I’m glad I pushed myself to get out of my comfort zone. I want to keep going to more event like this! I felt really good to blast through an entire project in a concentrated period of time, alongside others!

Posted on January 31st, 2012
Filed under: Creating, Featuring, Learning, Living (All Posts)
Topics: animation, character design, event, global game jam, illustration, videogames

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I’ve been settling more into the idea that yes, I’m going for a creative career and yes, I’ll be out of school soon (about four more semesters!), so I have been exploring the corner of the web centered around art and drawing and design and animation and being an artist and making it.

Conventional wisdom says that since competition is high you have to work hard, really hard, so hard, harder than anyone else if you want to stand a chance. You have to practice for hours a day even when it’s the last thing you want to do. You have to be your own worst critic if you want to get better. Also, you never end up feeling like “yes, I’ve made it!” because by the time you’re at a professional level you’ve developed such a critical eye that despite all of the improvements you’ve made, you will still only see the flaws in your own work. Forever.

Pretty much every source out there enforces this idea of what it’s like to pursue a creative career. Basically that it’s hard and painful and anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves.

Is that how it has to be?  What’s the point if all the while you’re forcing yourself to do things you don’t want to do? Is it worth feeling perpetually dissatisfied and like you’re not enough, and you’ll never be enough? (In fact, this attitude of “not enough” can pervade many other areas of life as well. Didn’t you know you’re not hard working enough, good looking enough and that you don’t own nearly enough stuff?)

So, yeah. Thinking like this has really gotten to me lately. And I have been feeling a bit depressed about it.

Here’s what it took to get me out of it:

I am already perfect. I am perfection incarnate. It doesn’t matter if I never improve anything about myself ever again because I’m already super-special-awesome. I am exactly the way I’m supposed to be, right now, and I’m doing everything right.

Before you tell me to get off the coke, hear me out. Which of the following attitudes do you think actually makes me want to make things?

1. “My work sucks and this is pointless, why even bother.”
2. “Hell yeah I’m about to make me an awesome picture!!”

Which attitude do you think will result in more work being done and more overall improvement over the course of a year? Yeah, I thought so.

What if reality actually worked like this:

Making things is easy. There is room for everybody. No need to be the best, no need to rush. Slow down and enjoy yourself, because in the end that’s what matters. If you enjoy drawing, you’ll eventually get better without having to end up with carpal tunnel. If you have fun, improvement is inevitable. But you don’t have to worry about improvement because you are already good enough. Even if you never improved a microunit more, you already have what it takes. Someone out there already loves your work. Whatever your work is like right now, there’s a market for it somewhere, there is someone who can enjoy it or be helped by it. It’s okay to be proud of what you’ve made. In fact, the most important person who should like your work is YOU.

And even if it takes a long time for people to buy your work or hire you, or even if it never happens, so what? It’s not like your happiness is dependent on it and it’s not like you’ll die. There are plenty of people out there with fewer skills and advantages than you and maybe their jobs aren’t glamorous but they’re happy because they read and they exercise and they tell the people they love that they love them. Remember that in the end, it all comes back to whether you’re feeling good, and getting there exactly the way you think you’ll get there is not so important.

No pressure. Don’t worry. Just enjoy making stuff.

That feels a lot better to me. It actually doesn’t make me want to curl up in a ball and never leave my room again, which is fantastic.

But is it going to make me go too far in the other direction? Does thinking “I’m already good enough” really mean that I never plan on learning anything or getting any better for the rest of my life?

Of course not. But maybe it’s possible for improvement to happen naturally over the course of doing work. It’s definitely more likely I’ll improve if I actually do something rather than sitting paralyzed in fear. Thinking about things this way has actually helped me relieve a lot of stress and it’s helping me finally do some things I’ve been meaning to do. “I’m already perfect” is my mantra of the moment.

I want to draw and tell stories because it’s fun, because I have something to say, and I want more people to feel like I do when I see a Camilla d’Errico or play Portal or when I read The Arrival or Sky Doll or Scott Pilgrim, or watch Coraline or Castle in the Sky or Kung-Fu Panda or even K-ON. I guess I also want to prove to myself that I can make something like that.

I can’t wait to make many amazing things in 2012!

Posted on January 10th, 2012
Filed under: Creating, Featuring, Feeling Awesome, Learning, Living (All Posts)
Topics: art, career, drawing, positivity, thinking

5 Comments »