Character Illustration: mafia wife

trying my hand at a semi-realistic, illustrative style. this is one of my better attempts.
she's an original character for a furturistic mafia story... i drew her first because all the other ones will be a total pain in the butt to draw. -_- (I suck at drawing guns...)
here's a couple of progress pics for this piece:
i like how in the beginning the block-in was so skewed and off balance that I had to rotate the whole canvas... thank god for digital tools like "lasso" & "free transform" to counteract my utter lack of planning =P

Emperor concept sketches

here's some tonal concept sketches, once again for the chinese fairytale project. i'm trying to plan out my pieces more (and just do more studies in general) to improve my composition and tones.it's IS helping a little, so far... i just need to remind myself of that constantly so i can keep plodding on and not get discouraged!

this blog needs some color

okay, so i just realized that my last few posts have no color in them... D: AHHHH what a travesty! in fact, this bothers me so much that i'm going to post some color doodles/WIPs right now to remedy this grievous error. (nothing against b&w studies, it's just that i've been doing them so much lately and I LOVE color too much to have a monochromatic blog!)

this is for the "chinese fairytale project," it's the goddess with a white dragon swirling around her. i think i made the pose a little TOO sexy.


i really suck at cityscapes. but there's no way around it, i just have to practice... i'm trying to work out all the basic shapes/composition in this picture right now.

i really love painting mountains! gonna add a figure, and a bunch of architecture to this

man, it's gonna suck to finish all these pieces, doing all the detailing is always so hard for me... i love the initial "spark" of inspiration that makes me attack a blank canvas with so much confidence, but it always tapers off once I have to start adding detail! -_-

A Chinese Love Story: character designs

posting the finished b&w concept designs for the Chinese fairytale project that I've been working on. these two designs are for Niulang (cow herder, the mortal) and Zhinu (weaver girl, goddess from the heavens). they're characters from a very ancient and well-known chinese love story.i really want a top with gold embroidered dragons like the one that ZhiNu has...

busy busy busy

well, once again it has been a while since i've posted here, but in my defense the past 2 weeks have been some of the busiest days of my life. I had to move out of my apartment (am now in the of searching for a new one -- the suspense!), plus my best friend got married and I was the maid-of-honor, PLUS my parents are in the middle of selling their house so i've been helping them prepare. so yeah, i've been kinda burnt out lately due to lack of 'art time' (art = best de-stresser ever). this weekend's gonna be like a vacation for me with all the art i'm gonna do. :P

in other news, i finally received my amazon order for Henry Yan's Figure Drawing book, and it's simply AMAZING. *__* For those that don't know who Henry Yan is, he's a long-time instructor at the Academy of Art University in SFO, and he's as good as they get when it comes to figure drawing:
this is one of my favorite drawings by him... very classical, yet so loose & painterly. he's seriously skilled at handling charcoal, so I'm trying to learn from him... I even bought a bunch of vine charcoal a few weeks ago and tried out his technique at the AA model sessions. i'll post my attempts after i get a bit better! (right now I kinda suck at charcoal :X)

will get some new art posted soon! it's always so hard to get around to it D: