Art Battle L.A. - Brian Luong VS. Kevin Luong

My brother, Kevin, told me about Art Battle L.A. a while ago and said that I should sign up for it. "Watch, they'll totally pair us up to go against each other!" he said. Sure enough, we both received an email asking if we were brothers and that they would love to have us compete against each other for one of there upcoming competitions.

After setting up a deadline that worked for us both, we set out to pick an overall theme for our pieces; We figured that there would be a more leveled playing field if we picked a single theme for both of our illustrations. Numbering off the list of themes we came up with and using a random number generator, the theme that won the raffle was "sea life/marine life". I decided to go with the idea of a hermit crab that grew large enough to wear a treasure chest and have corals and anemones growing all over it.





At first I wanted to just have the hermit crab living in an overly elaborate shell, but that seemed too natural and kinda boring. I jumped to the idea with the hermit crab lugging around a treasure chest for awhile, but then I later played around with the hermit crab lugging around half of a pirate ship as a home. The pirate ship idea was a little far out there and if I went with it I wouldn't have been able to add all the cool little critters without super sizing them as well, so I went back to the treasure chest idea.

I wasn't sure about this illustration as I was starting it out. I knew the deadline was really short, so I had to nail my concept down quickly and get started on the piece as soon as possible. I didn't like what I had and pretty much figured I was gonna lose after I laid eyes on what Kevin was working on, buuuuut I still worked on it knowing that I needed to give the competition my all. Sure enough, the illustration took a turn for the better as I kept working on it and it started to come together nicely. I'm fairly happy with how it turned out in the end and I'm really excited about the competition!

You can vote for Kevin's awesome piece and compare it to my sad excuse of an illustration at ARTBATTLE L.A. I'll update this post later when the winner of the competition *coughkevincough* is announced!

Update: Updated the colors. Thanks for the helpful critique, Christina! It looks more coral-y now and a lot less like Christmas!

Detail shots can be viewed over here.

Update: The voting period has ended, and the winner issssssssssssss... me! Yay! This was a really nice challenge; thanks for putting up a good fight, Kevin! Thank you to all who voted!