Topic: illustration!

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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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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Super quick self portrait I drew this morning. I wish my hair was this huge in real life! Or maybe not. Haha.

If your girlfriend’s birthday (bat mitzvah, first day of college, you name it) is coming up, talk to me about drawing a portrait of her! Chicks totally dig them.

Edit:

Crayonification!

Posted on August 27th, 2011
Filed under: Creating, Featuring, Living (All Posts), Making Money
Topics: drawing, illustration, portrait

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Some of the graphics I made for my team’s animated short! Most teams didn’t even bother with making interesting titles or credits, but I thought it would really add to the overall package in terms of professionalism and graphics are more my thing anyway so I volunteered!

The main character hermit crab’s name was Kerp. The title logo and our team logo were placed over a montage of the scenery. The movie is basically about Kerp giving away a whole bunch of items that he has collected on his shell, and getting the girl once his true self isn’t all covered up. Apparently, ladies dig minimalists. Bling is not the answer!

I made our team logo a parody of the MGM lion. ;) An epic whale sound plays when this goes up. I kept the style fairly minimal since these graphics were just a nice extra.

For the credits, I created three illustrations of some of the characters in the film showing ‘what happens after’, inspired by Disney/Pixar/Dreamworks credits. They were a big hit!

(Heeheehee, my sea slug!) During the film, Kerp gave these items to these characters. I originally thought of drawing the turtle trying to play chess with the sea slug, but they wouldn’t have had enough pieces so it didn’t really make sense.

For the drawings, I tried to show a bit of character development in them rather than just drawing the characters standing plainly. The ones with the crabs are probably the most successful in that.

Posted on August 13th, 2011
Filed under: Creating, Featuring, Living (All Posts)
Topics: animals, animation, drawing, graphic design, illustration, school

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Yay, cute monster things! This derpy little dude is my inspiration:

Ever since I saw this photo in the google image search results for ‘sea slug’, I’ve been obsessed with it. LOOK HOW CUTE IT IS! It looks more like a pokémon than a real animal!! I’ve been drawing little monsters based on it since then and even modeled it in 3D. Last night I created a proper drawing of it, and then went crazy and made a bazillion freebies out of it because I love you.

Download & Print:

8.5 x 11 inch art print!

Print your own stickers!

Download Wallpapers! Adorify your desktop.

1280 × 1024

1600 × 1200

1920 × 1200

Buddy icon!

100 × 100

Enjoy! Share with a friend! You might also like my free Unicorn Portal stickers.

Any ideas for other downloadables I could make in the future? Bookmarks? Stationary? Greeting cards? Paper toys/crafts? What would you like to see?

Posted on July 12th, 2011
Filed under: Creating, Featuring, Feeling Awesome, Living (All Posts)
Topics: drawing, free download, illustration, sea slug, stickers, wallpaper

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