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.