because I can

Merry Christmas. And here is something that has nothing to do with X'mas. I am drawing these days, because I can. :D

Leading man

Balthier

SO I'm playing FF XII now. I know, it's been out for like... 2 years (close to 3?). Damn, I am hooked.

Ashura

Loosely, looooosely based on a Ashura statue that I saw in Nara made in like... year 734. Ashura is god of war, has 3 heads and 6 arms. This particular statue is a little different since it is Ashura after he has been enlightened by Buddha and he becomes one of the guardians. Or something. This description is based on the plaque I saw. This is my take on this statue, and the main one is the war loving Ashura, the other heads are asleep and one is making a sad face, and the other smile.

Finally being more motivated these days... phew.

girl

ummm. I already broke the other goal of updating every day, but here is todays.. I don't really know what it is. I think I don't really know what I want to draw now.



300 px version of the pixel of Alayna's character design. I still need to make her run~~~~.

sketch

I think I will make it my goal to try to update everyday... kind of like a daily journal or comic-a-day sort of thing. So here is todays sketch... not under drawing done, just kinda went with it with my ink pen, and then colored in photoshop.

on other personal news, I got a pedometer! It's really cool because it gives you the amount of money you would be spending on a taxi along side how much you walked. I walked about 6000 steps yesterday and that was about 890 yen (about $9-$10?) on a taxi. It just makes me feel like I'm gaining 890 yen, or at least not using it, and it makes me want to walk more... Now I just need to keep it up...

Wise

Illustration Friday's "wise."

pixel animation....?

Another simple eye motion. I'm working one where she is actually moving (running) but... as I expected, it is quite hard. ^^; I think that might take a while.....

le sigh

But I'm learning so that is always a good thing!

Pixeling

This is a small pixel version of the last character design I did. Just a simple eye motion. I'm not too satisfied with the pixel job so I might redo him someday.





This is based off of a character design done by Alayna, and I made a pixel version of it. The chibi is done by me, and then I started doing the pixel version for her looking straight forward. But then I remembered I'm going to do an animation of her walking so I started doing the version of her from the side. Both the lineart pixel and the side view done smaller then shown. Now I'll see if I can actually animated her! ^^;

Other stuff on my to do list:
Card designs (personal project)
Picture book
More experimenting with Pixel
Illustration Friday
Maybe doing stuff my homepage again...

and many more!! (I hope)

another cat

Based on my friends cat!

concept art?

He is a merchant who especially specializes in weapons. He can actually repair guns and other weapons, and he can also use them. He can also get items cheaper from shops in town. He can also sell items more expensive then usual.

Character design for a made up RPG game.

tour poster, and t-shirt

Continuation from the last post, a fake band "MODERATE DAY"'s tour poster. I had fun doing the last CD cover concept so I thought I'd go ahead and do other things which includes a tour poster, and a tour t-shirt. I'm also thinking about doing CD pamphlet...

The dates for this tour is taken from the band, Keane and I think they are actually having a tour this year with these dates and these locations, so if your interested... (I think some are sold out already) I took the special guest (fictitious) band name from my friend, Tara (mediochre red), and the other I just created on the spot. Tour poster idea inspired by Topher!!!

strings

This is for illustration friday: strings. I pretended that it was a CD jacket of a fake band (sorry if it does exist) MODERATE DAY and the album title being string. I wanted to make her hair be like strings but I'm not quite sure if that really communicates well.

sugary

Illustration Friday topic: Sugary.

She is a mascot character for a candy store. :D

been sick...

so stupid me, I was wearing my summer pajama even though it is clearly becoming fall.

Anyway, I've made a wallpaper out of request, it's wallpaper of one of the speed painting I've done but I thought it was boring just adding more background so I added another figure. The fairy to the left is what those other little lights are in the picture.

I should also add that my mermaid picture is finally done and it has been sent to the competition... the link to the image is here

island

So here we are on the island where we are suppose to find treasure...

Young brother and sister playing pretend... The couch is their made up island, using one of the cushions as a boat, they have finally arrived at the destination!

My take on "island" given by Illustration Friday.

fashion

I'm not too keen on fashion (if you know personally you know already) but this fall fashion seems like it would be really really cute. Not like frilly pink dresses cute but like poofy hat, red scarf, checker skirt kind of cute... So this is a sketch I drew while looking at a hosiery catalog (atsugi catalog to be exact).

still working

I thought I'd update on my personal work that is to be turned in to "illustration" magazines competition. As I have mentioned before, I felt like the mermaid made the tsunami happen, and I have decided to change the story to make that what happen. So now it's based on a Japanese folklore, but not exactly.

I have started to cutout the scales of her:



This is the finished hair/wave:



More to do still, it must be done by 24th...
This is a revist to the one posted before, "hello, hello." I have added color on the background, which I think helped the speech bubbles to pop out. I'm also going to add humans in this.

clutter

So this is my first entry to Illustration Friday. The word was "clutter," and I illustrated a person doing work having a cluttered mind... All done in photoshop.

something I'm working on

After I got some advice, and with the upcoming magazine contest, I decided that maybe I should really look back into doing the cut paper. I always enjoyed (which is probably a surprise to a lot of you) to do this technique. I've had a mixed relationship with it since I knew I got most of the scholarship based on this but I didn't want to be limited and just known for doing this...

I went and searched for few Japanese folklores that sounded interesting to me and sketched out few of them. The one I decided to do was about a mermaid. The story is about young fishermens who hear a beautiful voice near the sea. They go over to where they heard the song, and they catch a beautiful mermaid. She pleas them to let them go, but at first they do not want to. They were thinking about showing the mermaid for money or selling her. Then she says she will tell them a sea secret. They say okay, and she tells them that a big Tsunami is coming, so they better flee their town. The young fishermens hurry back to their town and tell them what just happened. The towns people believe them and flee, but the town near them do not. Just as the mermaid said, the Tsunami comes the fishermens town stay alive.

That is the jest of the story, but somehow, I feel like perhaps the mermaid made the Tsunami come... although it doesn't make sense about how the fishermens lived.

Here are the sketches and the piece I am currently working on. It is hard to see what it would look like. The 3rd sketch is drawn opposite because when you cut it out it turns the other way...

personal projects

I have been trying to do some personal project as well as my work as I have written before... and this is one of them.



I don't really know what to think about it... I guess I don't really like it. I have been getting some good insight about my art and one of them was for me to find some thing I truly like to do... I don't think this would count as one of them. I feel like I'm too young and it's too early to determine what my style is but at the same time I understand what they are saying...

I guess it's trial and error.

Oh, and my homepage has been updated. The link to it can be found on the right (under links) or here: http://www.mieillustration.com . :D I like what I did with the wave thing (on here as well, to the left) so I'm thinking about doing more things such as those..

coming soon....

Is my new website! I know I have been trying to fix and revamp it for awhile.. and this time I finally got to it! It took me awhile to come up with a new look I like, but I have forgotten how much of a pain in the neck (literally... my neck hurts from all the computing) making website is.... le sigh. Until then, here are some stuff I've done:

re-do

I fixed some parts and added stuff to the old speed painting because the person's thumb was bugging me.... alot. I hope it looks a bit better now..



Other then that, I got some tips from my friends about homepage. I seriously need to work on that soon. >_<

speed painting and sketch

The speed painting I just had fun doing the extreme lighting. I realized that I really do enjoy playing with light...

The sketch is a compilation. The guy on the top left (the face) I was really intrigued by his nose... the boy on the right is kind of from life (not really because his mom was with him and I didn't want to look like a creepy person). For him I was intrigued by his eyes (hence the one eye floating near him).

Adding to what I wrote before, I have also decided to enter a competition on a magazine called "illustration." Each month they get an art director to lead the competition, and many illustrators who is chosen in this competition get jobs from this exposure.

I went to miad.edu and the featured news was Orientation for up coming foundation students.

Wow.

Time passes....

cutsey!

Here are some stuff I worked on like a week ago, playing around with PS brush. One is loosely based off of my cat and other is a sheep desktop wallpaper.




I am currently working on re-designing my webpage, as well as Fight Asthma Milwaukee illustrations and concept work for a comic book idea. I also want to submit work to some magazines, and I already submitted work for a cat illustration contest (should know the results soon...). My side project (other then the webpage or magazine) also includes some t-shirt ideas and maybe participating in Illustration Friday weekly topic. Until then, maybe I can continue the speed painting!

Oh, and I recently went to a museum and saw collection of old Japanese art (which includes, but definitely not limited to wood block prints) and I continue to be fascinated by how well they painted birds... especially chickens. I would like to do some kind of bird illustration (or sketches..) in the future...

Let's see what happens. ^_^

me and drowning girls

So I was looking at a very talented artists site (loish.net) with very nice and inspiring "speed painting" and I wanted to do the same. However, mine turned out to be not-so-speed painting, since I worked on it for like.... 5 days (I mean, short increments each day but..) So here is my not-speed painting:



I had a loose idea of it being under water, and it turned out like this. It ended up being a goldfish girl. I tried to work on one layer for the most of the time in hopes of creating some accidents (hopefully "happy accidents"). I'm moderately satisfied with how it turned out... More to come!

I don't update often

yeps. I need to update more! >.<



This picture is actually pretty old... this is actually from my sketch of one of my thesis pieces. It was also one of my t-shirt idea :D

Fit for mac desktop.... once again!

NNOOOOOOOoooooooo......

My PhotoShop CS2 doesn't open on my mac anymore...

"Unexpectedly error" it says, and it tells me that every time I try to open. I erased preferences, restarted my computer... nothing worked.



For now I can use Painter and of course I can do things traditionally (gasp!) but more then just not being able to work on PhotoShop, my brother (who is the family tech guy) says it might be my hard drive....

:sigh:

Hello hello

I actually have been doing other things but I'm afraid I don't really have the right, or feel right, to show them in the open just yet... But, I did do something new and it was for a deviantART contest. Long story short, devinatART is an artist community (that has a lot of anime artists) and they decided to have a booth at Anime Expo (the biggest anime convention ever) and they are holding a contest for someone to design their poster. The criteria: 2400X3600, includes words; "deviantART" and "Anime Expo July 3-6 2008", and it should represent deviantART community and the event, Anime Expo.

So here is mine:



Tell me what you think, and critiques too. I can fix it until the 29th. :D For me, doing the type was the most difficult part.. I hope the design it self isn't half bad. I chose the colors white, red, and black because I noticed those were the main colors AX uses on their website. More then focusing on a certain anime, I focused more on just being more Japanese (hopefully the "anime" part comes through with the style drawn ;) ), and tried to pay attention to the importance of type.

Wallpaper....!?

I'm going to try to be more regular with my postings!

Well, I just kind of sketched myself and made a make-shift wallpaper and I don't really think people would be interested in having it but I thought I'd share (don't have anything else to post *cough* *cough*)



Oh yes, and it's for the wide screen ones.

Haven't Posted In a While...

Here is a pic I drew when I was waiting at the airport in Chicago. The airplane ended up being an hour late (the other one after was 4 hours late! so I guess I was lucky). She was sleeping on the waiting benches. Sleeping people are the easiest to draw...

sketches of friends and...?

So I had couple ol friends over and decided to sketch. 2 are not from life (which one of them is super obvious) and they don't exist or is my friend.



I kind of need to explain my cute animey girl one, because I'm actually quite amused. I was on youtube, and there is this girl who calls herself "Magipon" and apparently she is an American girl who wants to be Japanese. She speaks (although she doesn't speak much on the video) Japanese, and as far as I know in most of them she just sits in front of her computer/camera and nervously (shyly) smiles and looks around. Sometimes she brings in inanimate objects such as coke and say "Co-ku de--su (this is coke)" or bring pizza and say "Piza de~~su (this is pizza)" and end the video with her waving and saying "bai bai (bye bye)." I didn't understand at all in what she was trying to do, and I still don't, but it was in my head.

so

in the lower right hand corner, I have her saying "ha-i Magi de-su (hello I'm Magi)" "co-ku de-su" "piza de-su" ".... bai bai"

Back from Anime Central!

Anime Central: The biggest anime convention in midwest, a huge fun geek fest. :D

Not really art related, but mostly went for fun. Actually there were quite a few people who were really good at the Artist Alley, makes me want to do more things!!

I also went really geeky and dressed up as a character. Fuu from Samurai Champloo. :3

Graduated....?

Yep, I just tweeked the same images as before. I thought it was funny. :D

The graduation ceremony was today. It's still kind of surreal that I have graduated...

Starting new

My graduation is this Saturday, it is coming up quick. Pretty surreal...

I drew a girl influenced by Taniguchi Kazuko, a girl surrounded by sakura pedals... it kind of represents a new beginning because in Japan new school starts in spring when sakura is in full bloom.

I will miss my college years, but I hope my new beginning is a good one.

School is finished.....

My school life has officially ended yesterday! I am out in "the real world" now....

I'm posting the finished version of "The Skillful Huntsmen" illustration, and some sketches I have done of my classmates. I am pretty satisfied with the illustration; I think I will continue trying to play around with traditional media for awhile. :D

In progress

As I mentioned before, I am kind of longing for more traditional work, so this is one of my experiments of that. It is for my Entertainment Design class, which we have focused on making concept art for Grimm's fairytale, "The Skillful Huntsman." This is our "finished" illustration for this story. My take is asian mythical story.

The scary and fun part is I'm not quite sure what I am going to do next to this piece. I'll post the finished work later.

Stressed

School is almost over and I still feel stressed.

I now realized it was because I have stuff I need to do like packing!!!
...........I don't like packing. D:

Side note: I really want a job.