Topic: art!

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

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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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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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Come see my work and vote for it at the SIAT Spring Showcase!

Location: SFU Surrey – it’s by Central City Mall (Surrey, British Columbia, Canada)

Date & Time: Saturday, January 28th, 2012, 12:00-5:00pm

Facebook Event

I’ve got two projects in the show: my infinite-canvas multilinear comic FLOCK, and an animated short that I made with my team called AWAKENING (I did the human characters).

I won’t be able to attend myself (arg!) because I’ll be at the Vancouver Global Game Jam that weekend, illustrating up a storm, and I can’t be two places at once unfortunately (but if I could be in two places at once, this is where I’d be). Still, go take a look at the quality media/design/interactive projects from my classmates and say hello to my lovely assistant who will be monitoring my comic project!

( And vote for me! ;D )

Posted on January 26th, 2012
Filed under: Creating, Featuring, Living (All Posts)
Topics: animation, art, comics, event, school, show

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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

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