Inspired

A couple of weeks ago, my friend shared a link with me that has become my new source (or fix) of inspiration. The website is CHIUSTREAM and it's a series of interviews with professional entertainment artists run by Bobby Chiu. Very cool stuff, especially if your interested in character design, storyboards, comics, animation, etc.

I listened to the interview with Alvin Lee at work the other day and was really inspired. So I went home and drew Street Fighter characters all night. This tough guy in the image above is Akuma. His teeth are even gnarlier than his hair!

Good stuff, man :)

New Job

OK. So I wanted to share what I've been up to as of late. Since moving back to Minnesota (about 5 months ago) I've been fortunate enough to continue making a living as an artist. It's pretty fun too. The company I draw for now is called Embroidery Library and we sell embroidery designs over the internet. In a nut shell, we create the art work, digitize it and then sell it on our web site. Then customers can buy and download the designs to their sewing machines. The projects I work on range quite a bit so I posted some rough drawings, vector art and a few what the final product turns out like. After I create the vector art, the drawing is handed off to a digitizer who figures out how the design will be stitched out. What I really like about it is that there are different rolls with the job. Some days I'm an illustrator, others I'm more a designer and along with that there are design planning meetings where a group of us get together and brainstorm ideas.

In the short amount of time, this job has helped me grow as an illustrator and work faster in production. I've always liked to take my time and make things look really nice, and I still do, but that's not always a luxury and so you get good at cutting corners and still making good designs.

I'm really grateful to be apart of this team, to say the least. :)

Friends... and more Drama!

Here's a couple recent drawings. To start it out, the top one is another celebrity caricature of Kevin Dillon's character, Johny Drama. I started this in October when I just moved back to Minnesota and just never got around to coloring it.

The second image is of two friends of mine, Dan and Natalie. They're both caricature artists at Legoland and super cool people. Natalie loves food and we used to talk about our favorite taco shops in Encinitas whenever it was slow at work. Dan, well, he's pretty much the man. They have been friends for a while but it was around Christmas time when I saw on Facebook that they were dating now and became inspired to draw this.

The last drawing is of another California friend/artist... Ricardo Vasquez. Another good man to say the least. To contrast his love for death metal music, Ricardo is probably one of the kindest guys you'll meet. A friend to all and a lover of life I can't say enough good things about him and his family. This was a warm up drawing before working on a freelance project today.

Finally... I've been listening to some art(pod)casts of Stephen Silver. Very inspirational and great food for thought, especially if you're into animation, caricature and passion for art. Check it out if you get a chance and thanks for stopping by!

Food For Thought

Here's some kind of new art from the last couple months. The top image is another from my sketchbook inspired by Joshua Middleton. I remember seeing his work on X-Men covers when I was younger and recently fell in love with his work all over again. The second image is a caricature of Will Ferrell from the movie Anchorman. Couple of my friends from California are drawing celebrities for fun so that's our new thing. Finally, the last image is of an adult actor Jessie Jane done for a friend. I like how the ink in the background turned out, and as always, drawing sexy woman is a plus.

There's something that's been on my mind and apart of my focus the last couple months that is worth mentioning. If anything, I just want to talk about it more because I've kept most of it to my self and it's worth sharing . What I'm talking about is the laws of attraction and positive thinking.

About two years ago my mom gave me this book called "the Secret." It's a group of professional teachers, philosophers and speakers that share how they have come to understand the laws of the universe. It has a lot to do with gaining control of your thoughts and getting what you want in life. The ideas shared in this book are closely related to the New Testament from the Bible. What's really interesting to me is the more I research, the more it seems all other ideas, practices and religions that are out there all have many similarities.

I could talk about this till the cows come home, but for what it's worth, I'm really grateful to learn and practice from these teachings. I owe a lot of my good fortunes, relationships, health and wealth to this way of living. Each day is a blessing and there's a lot to be said about gratitude. Each day I look forward to learning more about these teachings.

Ooofda! That was a lengthy one. Thanks for stopping by! :)

Sketch Book Stuff

Here's some of my favorite drawings from the last couple months since moving back to Minnesota. The sketch book I've been using has this middle tone for paper, which is great for working with darks and lights. One of my favorite new things to sketch with are white out pens. This sketch book (to me) is about experimenting with value and having fun. Some times I find that my favorite drawings come from experimentation or just not caring about how the final drawing will turn out. These were all drawn from photographs which were used as inspiration. Hope you guys enjoy them as much as I had fun drawing them!

Studies

The top drawing is study from Charles Bargue. This was a great way to sharpen the eye. The image on the left is the Zerox copy of his and the one on the right is mine. There's a certain procedure to follow when drawing these and the process took around 60 hours to complete! Well worth it too.

The bottom painting was study of Chuck Close's work from 2007. It's a self portrait (back when I had spiky hair) and the idea is that color isn't as important as it's value and the placement of it on the canvas. This was a fun experimentation and a chance to just mess around with paint.

Random

This post is pretty random but I wanted to share some of the things I've been up too.

The top drawing is a portrait study from a Yim Mau Kun drawing. This was a nice way to study an artist's technique and to get some drawing time in, especially when the luxury of a model isn't available.

The second drawing is a caricature of Kevin Dillion's character, Johnny Drama from Entourage. It's a good series but I don't watch often unless I'm with my brother. I'm always asking my brother what happened last weekend and follow the show through him.

Finally, the last drawing is of a swimsuit model from a Sports Illustrated magazine. I found this when I was cleaning my room at my mom's house, and since I wasn't employed at the time, between the Yim Mau Kun, sexy lady drawings and teaching a drawing class at my old high school, this kept me pretty busy. I used india ink with really florescent colors for this drawing... but unfortunately the colors didn't translate through the scan so I'm still trying to figure out how to get those really bright, saturated colors through digital media.

Thanks for checking out the blog!

Environment Thumbnails

Here are some environment thumbnails from my sketchbook. They're all from photographs and took roughly 45 minutes each. These are fun to me because they remind me of a caricature, in the sense that you're playing with shapes and their relationship to each other in order to make a picture. Also, I'm not huge on rendering (all though I do appreciate it) and since these are thumbnails, you can crank them out fast like a theme park caricature.

more graphic studies

A couple more drawings from DVD covers. I try to take the subject matter and then do my own thing with it. Like in the bottom image, I used the Batman symbol to as part of the composition. These are nice ways to limber up to a bigger drawing and be creative at the same time.

Sin City Character Design

The other day I was looking through my roommates' dvd collection for something to draw. Anything related to comic books interests me so I saw this one (Sin City) and did some studies from the back of the dvd cover. I love the play of lighting in this movie with the black and white contrast. These were fun to draw and play with the positive and negative spaces.

Wedding Caricature

This is a recent caricature commission I did. There are a lot of artists that inspire me, and it shows in my work. Alphonse Mucha and Adam Hughes were the big influences for this piece. The line art is colored, which is something I've never tried before and was pleased with the results. I am definitely looking forward to another project like this.

Michael Jackson Drawings

These are a couple MJ inspired drawings I did about a month ago. The first drawing is from my sketch book and the second was used as demonstration art for Kaman's Art Shoppes at Legoland, CA. 

Drawing Michael Jackson as a caricature is like shooting fish in a barrel... especially in his later years with all the plastic surgery. But that's not how I wanted to portray him. These drawings weren't  meant for ridicule, but to remember the king of pop... and for myself.