Spring 2012

So... it's the end of yet another semester! After eliminating the ones that will probably hurt your eyes, only 6 miserable images remain.

An Ordinary Summer's Day 

Still working on getting over my fear of drawing from life...

I seem to only ever make decent drawings when Connie models.

More work on my personal project (animated-short-to-be):

Passenger

 

Sailing with Fish Kites 

I feel like such a disappointment to everyone (and myself) this semester... *sigh*

College-Ruled Universe

My crazy, talented friend, Leo Dasso is making a totally bad-ass game with its graphics drawn entirely with ballpoint pen on college-ruled paper. The game is a side-scrolling space-ship shooter that will be playable on Android systems, as well on PC and Mac. (Beta release date: July 2012) College-Ruled Universe has a Kickstarter page and it needs enough support to become real, so if you think it's a cool idea that needs to happen please help out!

Some delicious gifs as samples of what the game might look like:





For those who aren't familiar with how Kickstarter works, it's like this: You may pledge any amount of money to help back the project with a total goal of $6000. If this goal is achieved by April 7th, you get the rewards listed on the page (eg. the game, artbook, soundtrack, original artwork... etc.), the game becomes a reality, and love will continue to make the world go round. If the goal isn't reached, well, you get to keep your money but there will be no rewards, the world will be a less awesome place, and the game won't happen for a while. ):


Game soundtack: Doc Prop (Isn't the album cover just beautiful?)
Kickstarter page
Leo's blog
Playable demo on Newgrounds

Only 17 days left; spread the word!

Last update of the year

Merry Christmas, everyone! Phew, this semester was a roller-coaster. My body literally refused to function for a week. (Me: Come on! Body: Nope.) So after many days of sleeping, eating really yummy food and catching up with friends, I decided that I should at least update my blog...

some rough character sketches


These are all for a story that I'm writing. I don't wanna give away too much, but it involves a girl with a birthmark, fishes and birds. :D


Definitely still trying to figure out the kind of look that I'm going for...


Book Arts completely knocked the wind out of me this semester. I wasn't expecting such a heavy class! However, I did have a lot of fun and Macy Chadwick is one of the sweetest and kindest teacher I've ever had. Here are some of the stuff I made for that class:

Everyone's gone home! D:

He loves me.

I made a book that's also a daisy. It's not very big, but it contains all of my heart and my love. Hope you'll like! :D




To address the many requests for tutorials, I did not invent the folding technique used for this book. This structure is commonly referred to as the 'star book' and I learned it in my bookbinding class. I came up with the idea of turning it into a daisy and did this by rounding off the corners and using more pages (9) instead of the usual 5 or 6.

There are many tutorials online that you can find if you want to learn how to make your own star book. These are the best ones that I had found:

http://poppytalk.blogspot.com/2011/10/star-book-tutorial-by-roughdraftbooks.html
http://billiescraftroom.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/video-tutorial-star-book/

Last sketch of the summer

Here's a little sketch for y'all. 8D


Summerbreakiscomingtoanendwhyyyyy.

SCBWI conference starts tomorrow!

I hope everybody's enjoying their summer break! I had the opportunity to visit Hokkaido with my family but fell quite sick on the trip and lost my hearing in one ear for two weeks after that. Still it was absolutely wonderful - the people, the air, the water, the flowers, the food, and bathing in the hot springs... it was exactly what I needed. Here are some pictures I took on the trip!


I'm in LA right now with fellow artists Isabella Kung, Arthur Lin and Lois Wang. The SCBWI conference officially starts tomorrow and everyone's excited! For review purposes, I had put together little portfolio of work mostly done in the past year including some silly sketches I did over the summer.




Oh and here's a little something I painted to cheer my dad on for his swimming competition. He had just turned 60, and was born in the year of the Rabbit. He hit me on the head when I gave it to him! Haha, I could tell that it totally made him happy though.


He won. 8D

Koi Dreams

I've been trying to develop a story around a little girl with an imagination. (Vague, I know.) I'm not sure if anything's going to come out of that yet, but here's a painting based on the idea.


Koi Dreams
Tools:
Pencil (Initial sketch), Photoshop CS4

WIPs:

I'm also working on a book dummy of Hans Christian Andersen's Princess and the Pea for class and here are some characters from that project! These are some nice princesses the prince meets early on. In my version of the story though, he likes them! Unfortunately they fail the pea test :( and he marries a chubby, snotty princess at the end. I'll have to thank my friend Pétur for giving me some great ideas in varying them up while I was designing these. They would've looked totally boring otherwise.


Princesses! (work in progress)
Haven't been sketching as much as I'd like to in the past month, but here are some that managed to come out looking quite alright.


Some quick gestures (pen and markers)


Randomly random randomness
And... more school work stuff!


Oil studies


First Venture (digital)


Valentine's Day mailer (reworked)
Children's Book Illustration class is such a joy to be part of! My classmates surprise my every week with their creativity and Angela's such wonderful and dedicated teacher. She has helped me a great deal with some of the pieces here. If you go to the Academy and are interested in children's books at all, I highly (highly, highly x10) recommend her class.

I hope all's well with everyone!