The One About the Update...

HELLLLOOOO!

Hey Everyone! How's it going? Sorry about the lack of updates for the past couple of weeks, I'm still trying to tweak the schedule of post and see what is best for my schedule. It looks like once a month instead of twice a month, which before was, once a week might work the best for me. It's allow me to collect the work and maybe give a bigger update. We'll see how this goes! I'll try for twice a month, but for sure, once a month. 

Small update with me, I've been working on a couple of jobs in the past couple of months which has been keeping me busy. I try to sketch as much as I can when I'm home or out and about, but sometimes I just dive right into work (which is what has been happening) or the study doesn't work out (the gouache painting horrors!). But the work is wrapping up and hopefully I can pick up some jobs, but if not, i'll have some time to work on some personal paintings, which is something I've been hoping to do.

On the other side of the art life, I have registered for a class at Brainstorm school over in Burbank !!!! I'll be starting in about a month, if things go well, maybe I can update more often with the class projects and what I'm working on during the class, if anyone is interested. 

Other than that here is the stuff that i've been working on! 

Here are some sketches I've done over the pass month or so just when I'm out and about.

 

I was bored at work and found this awesome Japanese building (insert correct term) off of a magazine and wanted to do a sketch of it. 

This was done while I was waiting for my family to arrive at the restaurant (they were an hour late)

This was actually done yesterday, while I was waiting for Suicide Squad movie to start. I actually enjoyed the movie, I enjoyed it more than Batman V. Superman. The problems were clear with the movie, but overall, I had fun.

After watching Stranger Things, I knew I had to do some fan art for the show, because it was such a fantastic show, if you haven't seen it yet, its definitely a show you have to watch and binge!

Like the Lady Olena warm up practice, I did this over a course of a couple of days as a warm up before I start my client work for the day. 

and to end the update, here is an illustration that I worked on a couple of months back. It's part of the token collection that i've been working on A Hidden Fortress. This time, I got to work on the Zombie token for them. I had a lot of fun working on it, trying to link pervious token cards that i've worked on and creating a story out of it. 

I hope everyone has been great! I'll try to have an update soon, but if not, I will see you all in a month! Thanks for reading!

Cheers!

The One about Game of Thrones...

Hey everyone!

Slow couple past weeks so far. Work is wrapping up so i'll have more to post in the next couple of weeks and i'll be doing some movie studies! Other than that, this past week was the season finale of Game of Thrones and it was fantastic! What a way to end the season, bravo everyone that worked on the show! But ever since Lady Ollena Tyrell was introduced, she has been just a baddass and in the one scene she was in during the season finale, she showed what a true baddass she was. She's the one that I want to see sit on the Iron throne when the show ends. So as a tribute, I did a study of her during the week. Worked about an hour sessions throughout the week before getting into client work. I wished I saved more steps, but there wasn't anything new with my process. Hope you enjoy!

Have a great and safe Independence weekend!

Cheers!

The One about the Warmups...

Hey everyone! How is everyone doing? I hope well!

Anyways, i've been doing some work over the past weeks and before I get started for the day, I try to warm up before work. I've been warming up with some figure drawing! Something I really miss doing back in college (and something I need to do more often...) Instead of looking for poses online, I found out about a youtube channel that have timed poses. If you're interested you can check them out here. 

On Air Videos

So far the videos have 1 min, 2 min and 5 min poses. I'm starting from the beginning and working my way up. Here are the warms ups I did, they're nothing special. 

And to break the routine, I wanted to do a painting of a husky, because huskies are baddass! but since I was to lazy to bust out the oil paints, I decided to do it digitally. 

I used all of Kyle T. Webster's fantastic brushes! If you love the feeling and look of natural media and you want to replicate it digitally, you have to get his brushes!

and to end the update, I had a dream a couple of nights ago, about me trying to purchase a bow and I ended up purchasing a super fantasy based bow at the local Sport Authority.... My friend was part of the dream so I told her about it and ended up concepting out the bow for her to look at, and here it is!

So a small update before I leave you all, I think posting every 2 weeks will be better. I think once a week would sometimes lead to having nothing to post about other then warm ups, and having 2 weeks to build up will have a meatier post. Let me know what you all think! Until then, I hope everyone has a great weekend! 

Cheers!

Oops! Heres an extra! a little study I did when I went camping with my family a couple of weeks back. 

The one about the post before a weekend vacation...

Hey everyone! This one is going to be a small update! I've been working on some client work for the past couple of weeks and i'll show a tease for one of them (I'm super happy with the direction the illustration is going). 

I did a couple of warm up's this week before I got started with work and here there are!

This is a gouache painting of the view through my studio window. I stole this idea from Nathan Fowkes , he did a study of outside of his studio window and I thought it was a great practice to do. This is the first one that I thought looked "good" so thats why I posted it, but I'll be posting all of them in a single sheet when I have enough of them. 

After watching Captain America: Civil War, I had to do some sort of fan art! Spider-man has always been my favorite super hero of all time and Marvel totally got him right in just two scenes! I can't wait for the Spider-Man movie coming out next year. Captain America: Civil War was loads of fun and you don't have to be a comic book reader/fan to enjoy the film, it's a strong film by itself, but you do need to catch the other movies to really have the best experience!

Here's a study of a little horse statue I have chilling on my desk. 

and here's a tease for the upcoming token illustration that i've been working on for A Hidden Fortress 

I'll be on a mini weekend vacation with my family! I'll be trying to do some plein air painting as much as I can and i'll post them here! 

I hope everyone has a great weekend! 

Cheers!

The one about not posting for a while...

Hey everyone! How's everyone doing?! Yes, it's been a while... time just flew by and there has been a lot of things going on. One of my best friends got married so planning the bachelor's party, being part of the wedding/the actual wedding, it's been a crazy beginning of the month for me. Now it's the end of the month and I feel like it can finally catch a breath. 

So i've been trying to do more warm ups before I start my work, just to keep practicing remind me of things before I get to work on projects; keeps me sharp. The momentum has been good, and I really hope to keep up with it. Sometimes when the momentum kicks in, you really have to do extra work to keep it rolling, because you can easily slow it down or even get burnt out; trust me, I've been at the end of both spectrums. 

So I totally never posted my portrait for this year. I made a GIF that doesn't really demonstrate anything, but it was fun to see the progression of the painting. I try to do a self portrait at least once a year, towards the beginning of the year. I think it helps show you're progression as an artist, because it's a time capsule of the style/method that you work in. When you look back at you previous year's portrait, you can see how much you have developed and how different you might look! It's a fun exercise and I believe everyone should try it. Here's the GIF and the self portrait. 

This was a lot of fun because I really tired to use a traditional oil approach and I think it was a successful piece. 

A couple of weeks back, my sister asked me to create my niece's birthday card invitation, and since I created my baby nephew's invitation last year, I figure I should do it. I also already accepted the job of creating my other nephew's birthday invitation this year. 

Like the other one, I took out the personal information, since I don't want you all having my sister's information, haha. My sister already had a concept in mind when she asked me. This invitation was pretty rushed, she needed it within couple of days to have it printed and mailed out to everyone invited. I had two deadlines, a wedding and my Sunday job, so every spare time I had, I worked on it.  Thankfully she had the concept that she wanted and all I really had to do was to render Kaylie. 

So this warm up came from a conversation I had my cousin's boyfriend. He really like Metroid and Dave Rapoza recently did an awesome ink/marker illustration of Samus, so I sent him the image and we ended up talking about Metroids and he told me that there was different species of of Metroid and that no one ever really illustrated them. So I had this stupid idea of drawing a Samus Metroid. 

So what I thought the story of how this Metroid became is that, while Samus was fighting with Ridley, Ridley knocks off Samus' helmet and it lands on top of a wondering Metroid and now that Metroid is SAMROID (stillworkingonthename)

So for my final update! I finally finished up the Destiny Hunter Illustration that I worked on previously. I was working on this illustration with my good buddy, Daniel Wong. He made this awesome Destiny Hunter Logo Animation and I was going to create the illustration and pair it up with his logo animation. But after a while, he suggested that I should just finish up the illustration and post it. So after taking his advice and some fellow advice from my friends, here is the final illustration.

 

I posted this on the Destiny Reddit page and people really enjoyed it and requested for a wallpaper version, so if you're interested, here is the link for them!

http://imgur.com/RGwfIJU (5120x2880)

http://imgur.com/91aruVN (3840x2160)

After the reaction from the fans of the illustration, I'm super pumped to start illustrating the other classes and subclasses!

Well! I have a couple of more warm ups/work that I did, but this post is getting pretty long so i'll save it for next week (hopefully). I hope everyone has a great weekend! and keep on drawing! Cheers!Also! I saw this video this morning about not giving up on your dreams, it really hit home for me, so if you have 2 mins to spare, I would totally give it a watch.

The one about the Lunar New Year...

Hey everyone! How has everyone been? Sorry about the silence. I've been working on multiple projects this past month and it's been busy! I'm working on something that I would love to talk about but I think I'm going to keep this one close to the chest for now until I think its cool to talk about. Other than that, it was Chinese New Year (Lunar New Year) at the beginning of the month and I wanted to continue my series of illustration of the Chinese zodiac animals. This year is the year of the monkey!

(deleted the other post, I wanted to add something to it but didn't...)

Besides on working on other projects, I thought it was time for a new portrait and i've been dabbling with it during my free time. I haven't gotten far, but i'm having a lot of fun with it. I'm really trying to stick to the "Oil painting" technique instead of my usual digital painting method. 

I have some other WIPs saved. I'm hoping to compile them and make a GIF of the process, but I'll have this one be the tease for the finished one. 

I've been having some health problems in the last couple of months and last week was when it got worse. Been going to the doctors to get X-rays and testing done, but it seems like I have recently developed asthma. I won't know for sure until I take my breathing test, but exercising has been miserably because I haven't had a good workout in a while, because I would have to take a break and catch my breath. But while I was waiting to see my doctor, I drew this!

Ron Swanson is the best! 

I hope everyone's week has been great! Have a great weekend!

Cheers!

The one about the New Year

Hey everyone! How is everyone doing so far?! I'm so sorry about not posting for the past month or so, its been a pretty hectic past couple of weeks for me and my family. But I don't want to bore everyone with my life, so we'll jump into the ART stuffs!

During the month of December, I was asked by my friend, Patty Metoki if I would be interested in submitted an art piece for her 2001: A Space Odyssey show, ohHALno and of course I would want too! Since I first saw the movie, I was blown away by the beautiful cinematography! My approach for the piece that I wanted to submit, was a collage of key points that always stuck with me when I watched the film. I watched the movie again to get some inspiration flowing and I finally came up with a composition that I liked. Here is the sketch.

This was the sketch and I knew this wasn't all the ideas that I wanted to include, but it was the bulk of what I wanted. (My sketches are really weird, because I don't include everything and I sometimes to a spontaneous idea to pop up while i'm rendering/designing, but this is only when it's personal work and not professional work). I didn't log all the changes, but the final looks like this. 

The main ideas were still executed and I did know I wanted to add the crazy color spectrum scene. I wanted HAL to be in the original sketch, but I just didn't know where to put him without just throwing everything everywhere. Playing with some ideas, I finally though of the simple idea of adding him in the background and being part of the sun. The fetus was a problem I had from the beginning until towards the end of the piece. Everything felt so linear, especially with HAL being placed in the background. So I came up with the idea of just having the fetus being part of the earth so that it can echo the very last scene of the movie. I overall really enjoyed creating this illustration, theres some things I would totally want to change now that is out for the public to see, but again, I'm all about moving forward now. But I think I would have lesson the color spectrum part of the illustration because I think it kind of muddies up the background.

This an promotional piece that I did for At The Edge a couple of years ago but I was never really satisfied with the finished illustration and the band allowed me to do some changes and update it! So this is a WIP for the illustration. 

and!

This was just a gouache painting that I did on Christmas day while my family and I were waiting to be called in for Dim Sum

Cheers to the New Year!