Wine Label Project

For a school project where we have to design a wine label.

Done in distilled gouache used as watercolor.

Something I Threw Together

It's me surrounded by just a few of my characters.

Acrylics on Cardboard

I made a new painting yesterday. Done simply with pencil, a Sharpie, and black and white acrylic paint. I did it right on the cardboard backing that came with the frame, so no need to worry about sizing and all that.

It looks better in real life.

New Painting & Comparison

So I found a good digital painting tutorial on the web and I decided to test it out.
I had to practice anyway and I came up with this.



Compare it with something I did of the same character 5 months ago.



and hopefully I will only continue to improve!

New Character

2 more characters to add to my increasing list. They're mercenaries.


I'm thinking of painting these on Photoshop. I found a tutorial and I'm eager to try it out.

New Sketches

Two sketches of my characters out of boredom.
Who says you can't draw and shade with a mechanical pencil?

How I Learned to Draw

I started to draw when I was about 4 years old. I mostly drew things that I'd watch on T.V., The Simpsons was a big inspiration for me. I remember one of the first things that I drew consistently was a circle dog. Which basically is a dog composed of circles, loops, and lines.

I then began to branch out and started to draw my own versions of various Sesame Street characters. Many people say that practice makes perfect and I suppose that after doing this for so many years they are correct in a sense, but I'm far from perfect.

New Pen Drawings

Here are the two main characters of the series featured in my animation. The drawings were done yesterday with a ball point pen.

I would say that ballpoints are my preferred medium. They're cheap and they can make fairly fine lines. I like the pen I used because it was a little runny so that it sometimes left ink blots. Sometimes, the little imperfections can add an effect that greatly benefits the mood of a piece.

Western Comics

I'm aware that a large share of Japanese manga lovers have some sort of beef with American comics and would never pick one up. But I would say that they are missing out.

I'm not a huge fan of the classic costumed superhero, and pretty much the only franchise I like is X-Men, but there are other things out there beside Batman, Superman, the Fantastic Four, and all the other big-name series.

I recently went to a local comic book store with my friend (It was my first time going into such an establishment)and discovered limited series. For people who don't want to catch up on an on-going story line that have say spanned two decades, limited series are for you. They're like any other comic book except they have a set number of installments, so you know how much you're buying or will buy. I picked up one limited series (5 issues in total) called Immortal Weapons from Marvel. It's a separate story for each issue, (save for an ending bit where it's a totally separate story that's stretched between all five issues) and each contains contributions from multiple artists. I initially bought them as reference art, but when I began to look at them though I thought to myself, these stories are actually pretty good. Needless to say I was happy with my purchase.

So I suppose this post has turned into a defense of American comics from the crazy rabid Japanophiles who care for nothing except manga and possibly a few Korean manwha. If you can't find any western comic that you like then perhaps you are not looking hard enough. I would say that their is some variety to choose from, the store I went to had Archie, Halo, Stephen King adaptations, and freakin' X-Babies; and there's always some abstruse little book out there that won't follow the comic format as strictly (Shaun Tan's The Arrival for instance). Western comics can be just as varied in plot, art, length, and format as Japanese comics; it's just probably harder to dig through the big-names to find the obscure gem.

Other Old Things

Oh yeah, I do watercolors too.


This one is my interpretation of dawn and dusk. I suppose I was inspired by Alphonse Mucha for this.


This is another of my characters from another one of my story ideas. She's a part of a tribe of indigenous peoples who lives in a canyon. Their particular tribe suspends their dead from the lofty ridges; that's why you can see coffins in the distance. This practice was inspired by something I saw on the Discovery channel about a group of ancient people who left the deceased on ledges in China.

I like how anything that piques my interest can end up in one of my stories or even inspire a new one sometimes.

Little Red Riding Hood

Here's a pic I did last year that was inspired by one of my friends. She had a class that discussed the origins of fairy tales and other children's stories. One day she told me about the different interpretations various cultures had of the Red Riding Hood story. Supposedly the wolf represented the bad men who would prey upon little girls according to one story (from France I think it was).

I like how there are multiple versions of stories we hear all the time. I suppose what version we hear depends on our environment and the people we are around.

First Ever Animation

This is the first actual animation that I ever made. I was done in April of 09 and created with Windows Movie Maker. Somehow I found the time to draw each frame on printer paper, scan them, then assemble it all.

The characters are from one of my more serious stories. I won't go into detail in the interest of space but it's basically about two guys who defect from the army and a side story about a few of their friends.




The video is cut short from the original 9 minute-long version, and since you're all busy people I'm just showing you the best bits.
Also, in the original, there is a soundtrack (it was intentionally a music video, hence the lip sync) but I've excluded the song here to save the trouble with copyrights and such.

My Beef With 3D

It seems that 3D features are everywhere nowadays and I am a little disheartened by it. As a child of the 90's I was used to 2D, and then when 3D came along, it seemed that everyone was immediately sucked in to it and its potential.
I feel that today, the general look of a movie or TV show is paid more attention to than the story it is trying to tell. Audiences are gobbling up the special effects and super-realistic cloth swishing but they are left hungry because of the lack of a story (though, Pixar is very good at 3D and very good at stories).
It really gets on my nerves when a TV series comes out in 3D (first experienced with "Cubix"), especially when the graphics are second rate (eg. the people's hair looks like they're carved from one piece of plastic and their cotton clothes fold like a raincoat). Lately I've been seeing less of this, which makes me glad only until I happen across something like "Chowder" and then I get irate again but that's another story.

Anyway, I'm not here to bash 3D, some of my favorite movies were computer generated (Pixar stuff, Shrek), and as for video games, I'll allow it since a major part of playing a game is immersion and 3D gives a more "realistic" quality. I'm just saying I wish people won't go overboard with it. For crying out loud General Car Insurance also climbed onto the bandwagon! And Nasonex! And the bee/wasp thing keeps changing designs every two commercials!


In short, I would like people to focus more on the story aspect of a project (2D features need to listen to this as well. Chowder!). And if the story warrants 3D animation, then the animation better be damn good. Too much bad 3D and bad stories is just too much.

3 Styles

For my cartoons, I basically have three basic levels of complexity in my drawings.

First is my most simplest style.


Then I have the medium difficulty example. It includes more details.


Finally I have my most detailed level.



I believe it's good to have a variety depending on the context in which you set the characters in. Basically, more detail = more serious story.

American S(c)hmoes

Here are the 9 main characters of my series American S(c)hmoes.

This was the first of my major series which I began in the summer of 2004 when I was just about to enter high school and completed in my senior year.

Never have I created a series that I spent so much time on. Over the course of writing and drawing it, I have filled up around 40 Mead spiral-bound notebooks of various lengths (1-3 subjects) and compiled them into 30 volumes.

It follows a group of kids (of an undisclosed age group but it is assumed they're tweens) and their sometimes crazy and sometimes mundane adventures through life. The series itself is an episodic comedy and has no real overall plot line. I basically made it to record any funny event that happens to me or anything funny that I think up. It also served as a platform for social commentary, though the only person to ever have read it was my dad, whom I coerced into reading sometimes. Perhaps, in a way, it was the first real journal I ever kept. Things would happen and the characters' dialogs would be my response to them.

For this particular series, I've made up a slew of characters (over 230). I even made a spin-off though it was less successful, since I did not put as much effort into it.

I was never much for diaries so I suppose drawing things out, putting in a story line, and adding humor was how I would express my feelings about things. Each character would have their own personality but I'll admit that if a little bit were taken from each of them and the bits were compressed into one being, that would be me.

Stories just make sense to me.

What I'm About

As trite as it sounds, I believe that everyone has a story. I am but a simple observer in the world. I watch the things that happen around me, human dramas that never engulf me personally. I only take part in the show when engaged by others.
Of course I have my own life and I enjoy it as well, but I feel that my main purpose is to document others and have fun while doing it. If the others are not interesting at the moment, I will create my own others.

This past summer, I decided to make a list of all the characters I've ever created (in this sense of the word I mean character design on paper). So far I've listed over 530 of them; and those are the ones whose names I can remember. I've got all sorts of characters from 60 year-old men to anthropomorphic bears to talking newts. Each one is part of a distinct series and has their own story and background. I must sound absolutely mental by now.

I began coming up with stories around the time that I started to draw (around 4 years). Their creation has given me countless hours of entertainment that was needed since I am an only child. Every character I've come up with means something to me, like old friends and acquaintances. For 15 years I've been doing this and I only hope that the world enjoys my creations half as much as I do.

Art, Design, and Their Relatives: My Introduction

Art and Design have been married for a number of years now and have quite the extensive family. There's Uncle Systems and Auntie Intuition. There are the cousins, Drawing, Painting, Photography, and Lithography, among others. Then there are the friends and neighbors, Materials and Processes. And of course, Art and Design's children, Impressionism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Pointillism to name just a few.

But there's one oddball kid who doesn't know which older sibling to follow if at all. He is called Cartoons.

This blog follows the story of one artist and her friendship with Cartoons and shows how together, some of the stuff they make is pretty neat.