The Ambush

Here's my final assignment for my composition class. I was planning on doing the whole thing in acrylic, but sick days and time constraints forced me to finish digitally. The composition theme for this assignment was subjective movement through the use of gestures (things pointing one way, eyes looking another way, etc.). For the concept, I decided to have a robot wondering through a rain forest and being ambushed by a monster with molten claws. The whole piece felt rushed, even after going back into the piece to push it a little more.

The Discovery

Another composition assignment. I decided to continue experimenting with an acrylic under painting plus digital. The composition theme for this assignment was space movement through the use of archways, windows, pathways, clutter, and empty space. I decided to illustrate the scrap metal robot, the robot I drew in my earlier assignment, discovering a strange rain forest.

Hybridization

This piece was done for my illustration class. The image was first created digitally, then outputted as a screen printed poster, which is three colors. I've known about the screen printing process for awhile now, but this was my first time going through the whole process and doing it with my own hands. You really do learn to appreciate the quality and craftsmanship of screen printed posters made by big name artists after trying to do it yourself. There was a lot of trial and error and a lot of messed up prints. I decided to make a small run of 12 to test the waters, but only 6 prints came out looking decent. It was a good learning experience overall, and I plan on printing some more of my stuff in the future.

The Everlasting Journey

Another assignment for my composition class, this time focusing on a serpentine composition. The serpentine elements are there, but I feel that they're pretty weak. The concept behind the piece was a group of nomadic robots roaming the desert in a sandstorm. The first image was done entirely in acrylic, while the bottom image was a digitally enhanced version. I could have pushed the acrylic painting a lot more, but time constraints forced me to scan my painting and finish it via photoshop. I like it though, and will experiment with this traditional underpainting/digital touch-up process in future.

Splintering Bird (Cycles)

Done for my illustration class. Something to do with life, death, and the soul and physical "shell" returning to nature.

The Scrap Metal Golem

This was done for my composition class. We had to choose an overall theme for all of our projects in this class, so I chose robots. The concept behind this robot is a small, spherical robot that manipulates scrap metal to form a body.

Some backstory (since my instructor wanted some sort of narrative to go along with my chosen theme): The actual robotic components of the golem are the little, metal spheres located at the center and at the joints of the golem. A single orb-shaped drone is able to form a clumsy, yet mobile, metal body while a body controlled by more than one drone can be highly complex and agile. Through the use of magnetism and coordinated teamwork, the drones are able to control their metal shells as if it encased a single entity. The drones are employed by a mysterious factory, which sends out the drones to retrieve valuable scrap metal and bring it back. The drones search for the metal, create a body out of the found metal, and walk back to the factory to deposit their findings and repeat the process. Several variations of the scrap metal golem exists and it is postulated that each drone has its own unique personality, which in turn affects the look and feel of its newly created body.

Endangered Cranes

Here's my first project for my composition class. We had to pick out a magazine article and illustrate the article using horizontal and vertical themes. I picked an article about endangered cranes wintering in the Korean DMZ. I tried putting a lot of strong horizontal and vertical elements into my piece, but they weren't noticeable enough to fit the assignment. My instructor was willing to overlook the fact though because the piece I made was so awesome. yay.

and yes, my eyes were hurting from drawing so much grass.

Sky and Trees

An ink painting I made for a family friend.

...and a digitally modified version of the same painting.

The Wonderer

A little project I started in order to practice drawing faces, which I'm terrible at. Female faces are the hardest for me, so I took that into consideration and went from there. I'm pretty neutral about this piece; I'm not too proud of it nor do I hate it. Oh well, practice makes perfect!

My life for Aiur!

More Starcraft inspired art. My own take on the Protoss Zealot.

Starcraft II Propaganda Poster Contest

Starcraft II is holding an art contest! The prizes are nice, but I'll probably not place in the top 10 (some of the other submissions are incredible)!







As awesome as it looks, the very first image was not the version I was able to submit into the contest due to time constraints. The image below was the version I submitted:

Not as detailed as the first image, but it was all I had by the deadline. The image I submitted took about 5 days worth of work, from start to finish. It took another 5 days to finish it all up.

Anyways, vote for it here! http://us.starcraft2.com/dominion/propaganda-contest.xml?i=53&s&a=5#inum=53&sk=&ap=5

Landscapes

Some landscapes I did awhile back. I churned these out pretty quick. The last one took the longest to finish just because I kept going back and adding stuff.

Lotus Hands

Wanted to revisit the figure eight composition again for a shirt design. I was also inspired to draw seven fingered hands!

Why seven fingers you ask? Four fingered hands are too prevalent in today's cartoons, and five fingered hands are normal and boring. If I drew a six fingered hand, people would think that I added an extra finger on accident and laugh at me. Adding two extra fingers should be enough to let people know that I mean business and added extra fingers on purpose. Seven fingers also felt like a good amount; not too high and not too low of a number.

Simple, but this actually took a lot of work. Mainly because I didn't have a set idea of what to do and planned as I went along.

Aerial at Teefury!

I have another design featured at Teefury this upcoming Tuesday (the 29th)! You can get it for $11! The sale will start at 9pm (Pacific Time) on Tuesday the 29th and end 24 hours later at 9pm on Wednesday the 30th.



Link to the site: http://www.teefury.com/

S'more Digital Paintings

I've been working nonstop as of late, so I have a lot of work to show!.. but I'll save some of it for another post. I'll start off with an updated version of an older piece.


Lately I've been fond of adding little floating particles to my pieces. It adds more dimension to my work and it keeps the piece from looking too clean and flat.


This piece was inspired by my D&D human rogue character from long ago! My character liked to throw knives. Took forever to get done, but I'm glad that I stuck with it till the very end. I learned so much while doing this piece (Note the dust particles floating in the air and the use of blurring). I also approached this piece differently than my older pieces in that I worked in gray scale and then added color afterward; this way gives me more control over the colors. I'm proud of how far I got with the piece, but the composition feels a little weird to me.


Here's another game character, but this time from World of Warcraft (that's right, I gave the 10 day trial a try). I tried painting this guy by using a solid black silhouette as the base. The final image turned out a lot darker than planned, so I had to lighten him up. It would have been easier to start off with a mid tone. I traced the solid-base silhouette from a screen shot of the character, so the proportions look weird because of the character stylization, not me! However, I think I really really messed up on how really knees and elbow joints are suppose to looke like :p

Yup, he's missin' his jaw! And eyes. But that's fairly normal for an undead.

Ponder

I always like to record my process on my pieces from start to finish, but I always tend to remember to do so when I'm already halfway through a piece. Luckily, I remembered to do it for this piece! This piece took around 6-7 hours, which is pretty fast (it usually takes days for me to get stuff done). Those 6-7 work hours were divided into two sessions, with 3 hours in between the two sessions for sleep/break (I ended up getting no sleep and pretty much stayed up all night).


I was extremely proud of myself and impressed at how fast I was able to get this finished. I thought the overall piece looked too much like Aaron Horkey's work (the drop shadow idea was inspired by his work), but my brother said that the overall piece was my style. His statement has validity due to the fact that he is a die hard Horkey fan, owning a couple of Horkey prints and spending too much money on prints altogether. Coincidentally, it was my friend's birthday the day that I completed this piece, so she got it as a birthday present!

Not coincidence, actually. I felt like drawing a gift for them, haha!

Artifacts

Took forever to finish, mainly because I kept forgetting about it! Check out all the little symbols on the beads! I threw in a skull, an eye, and some stars on one or two bead segments for kicks.

Stuff I completely forgot to post.

Here are some assignments I did for my illustration class last semester (the semester that just ended). I was meaning to post these right after completing them, but whoop dee doo I forgot.

Assignment: Using only reference sketches and memory, complete a drawing that demonstrates the moods and/or feelings of a particular place or area.


I took the easy way out and drew my room. Not only was it an easy location to visit ( sarcasm, I'm always in my room), I practically know my room inside and out, making the need for reference sketches almost obsolete. I wanted to convey a warm and cozy feeling, but I don't think that worked out too well. I wanted the finished piece to have a sketchbook feel to it, so I drew out all my lines and then scanned the drawing up so I could thicken some of the lines in photoshop. I'm fond of using minty green colors, so that's why I decided to color my walls in said color. Next!

Assignment: Pick an editorial article and create an illustration for it; Narrative illustration project. (Somewhat bummed out that we weren't going to actually illustrate a story. I was looking forward to drawing knights and dragons).

The article I chose to illustrate was about stem cell research. The finished illustration was pretty straight forward; A stream of stem cells flowing from a petri dish, changing into nerve cells. It didn't really illustrate the article specifically and could have been used for any article about anything relating to stem cells. I had a different concept that had a scientist surfing on a stem cell with student interns surfing behind him while he led the way, which would have worked with the article better since the article was about students interning with real researchers, but I scrapped the idea because it wasn't serious enough for the publication.

Looking back at all my assignments from my illustration classes, I can conclude that my style was all over the place and I didn't do too well when it came to picking a style and sticking with it. I can tell, though, that the stem cell illustration shares similarities with my past illustration of an unraveling brain, meaning that I was starting to settle down with some sort of style.