Painting redo

As stated in my last post, here is a rework of the Baby Mika receiving gifts for walking down the hallway illustration. I basically rebuilt the hallway, this time actually creating a vanishing perspective point. And instead of starting with color, I first painted in black and white values. After that, then I started adding hues. Future note to self: if you’re not going to use layers, start with items in the background first and work your way up to the foreground.

I think the colors, shading, and perspective are more convincing now. But I still feel like the painting could be livened up…. Don’t know how yet. Some day, I would love to be able to add crazy colors and make really beautiful moody scenes. At work, we have a guy currently producing mood paintings for the renderers. I tried. I sucked. I did some research online. There are some amazing concept and viz dev artworks. The ones I took interest in used really vibrant lighting and colors…. I don’t even know where they came from in the scene. But they looked delicious.

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The Adventures of Baby Mika #1: Mika receives gifts while walking down the hallway

Earlier this week, the Baby Mika chat group posted a photo of four random items: a Hello Kitty keychain, a paper hat (or boat?), a flamingo puff ball, and a 100 Thai baht bill. The description: “Mika’s gifts that she received while walking down the hallway and back.” So I speculated…

This is an example of a painting with bad colors. And perspective. A good example will soon be in progress and will be posted when I have succeeded.

 

Happy 2017!

Thought I’d start my first post of the new year with a fun family moment. When I became a yee-yee (which is Cantonese for “aunty from your mother’s side”), I had no idea how interesting it would be observing little humans grow up.

Here’s my nephew again, perhaps revealing a slight grudge, or trying to discipline me, for not allowing him to leave the bedroom to rewind a dvd, aka “pressing triangles.”

For context, his mother was on a conference call in the living room by the TV and needed it quiet…

Coming up next: the quickest transition from laughing joyously to crying in distress! Stay tuned!

Inkcember #1

Oh, kids say the darndest things. I heard this story from a coworker by one of the 7 year olds. Their perception of marriage is so innocently simple…

It’s December now so I’m starting a new series of inked comics called Inkcember. I’ll aim to crank out at least four this month.

I’m glad my sketchbook inspired someone but…

At work, I deal with a 5 year old kid who has the worst frustration. EVER. It makes her cry, hyperventilate, and say gibberish. Gibberish that translates to “I’m completely hopeless. Help me. Do everything for me.” Her brain gets stuck on “I can’t! I can’t! It won’t!” or, “I’m still hungry!” so reasoning with her is ineffective. Today she cried because one of the kids was not playing with her. Any solution suggested to her resulted in a “I can’t!” accompanied with a ton of sobbing and hyperventilating.

When she calmed down, she joined some children at the drawing table where I also sat, of course. Since there was no more scratch paper to draw on, I had pulled out my homemade sketchbook which I normally kept with me in my fanny pack… basically a few sheets of paper bound by string. Well, she noticed this sketchbook and then wanted to make one. I mean, really wanted to make one. First of all, there was no blank paper available to make one. Secondly, we would need string and something to help string it through the pages. Third of all, it was almost time for her to go home anyway. I could tell she was becoming frustrated again as I was trying to convince her that we’ll make it another day, but then her mom arrived to pick her up.

Wow. Even though I’m pretty sure she will have forgotten about the sketchbook when I see her the next day, I think I will make her one anyway. And the cover will be this: 

So whenever she gets overwhelmed with frustration, I can just tell her to read the front of her journal. Yes!

I thought this was an actual quote, but I couldn’t figure out from who. I only found variations that weren’t quite the same. If anyone knows where this one came from, please share!

…

Ah ha, of course, it’s a variation of John F Kennedy’s quote, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” So perhaps I should change it to read “Ask not what other people can do for you, but what you can do for yourself.”

Inkvember 4, 2016

Hunger. I had the perfect work-inspired story for this prompt:

In fact, looking through all of the latest Inktober prompts, I think they’re all great for recalling moments with these kids. Let’s see if I can draw something from work for each prompt…

Inkvember 2, 2016

Today a coworker brought up an excellent idea. We work with groups of kids aged 5-11 years, and out of this we’ve had so many great moments… great moments, stories, quotes that would be worthy of collecting and compiling into an illustrated/written collection like a yearbook.

“Noisy” is a very apt description when it comes to working with little children in recreation. Noisy also happened to be the prompt for the 2nd. Here’s my attempt to kill two birds with one stone:

This was supposed to represent moments from our music enrichment classes. Just imagine what happens when you give a group of kids percussive instruments and ask them to play to the beat. Well, you find out very quickly which kids actually have rhythm. And which kids don’t.