Kxuha's Doodles

Instagram and New Blog

2014-12-18T13:08:00.000-08:00

Hello there glorious people!
I'm making this as an announcement that I'm officially moving blogs to my new website:

At this stage in the game, it's still a work in progress and most of the site isn't up yet. It's basically my personal side project that can be used as a place where I can display my portfolio and write journals about my occasional art endeavors. Please come visit and see what I've got there!

Aside from my new website, you can also find me doing some nonsensical shenanigans on Instagram and YouTube. Unfortunately, I can no longer be found artistically neither on DeviantArt nor on Facebook.

Speaking of Instagram! A while ago I finished a drawing challenge that I would update from time to time on there. Not until recently did I actually sit down and make a compilation of them all to see as one image. Why does it say little? Because it was made in the smallest sketchbook I own. So this completed mini project is what I'll leave you guys with! As well as my warm wishes and many happy returns!

Bye bye everybody! We'll meet again in newer worlds and on more and more exciting adventures!

Edit: I realized that this image keeps getting compressed, so I put together a video to go along with it. Enjoy!

Another Video

2014-05-16T19:47:00.001-07:00

Hello there all!

I've made another video of a drawing in progress. I never realized how much fun it would be (no so much recording it all but more seeing everything sped up in the editing process).

When you make art, sometimes you completely forget what the image used to look like at the very beginning once you get to the halfway point. You find that you had one direction you wanted to take the image but somewhere in the middle you end up taking it a completely different one. This is especially true for larger images that eat up a lot of time and use a lot of tricky materials.

With traditional art mediums, you can't save multiple copies of your process work and undo and redo actions to your hearts content. You can take progress photos but it's not the same thing: you can't record the movements your mind and hands make on the paper in a still. If you make a mistake halfway through you have to live with it.

I guess what I'm thinking about now has to do with larger artworks, like the one I'm currently working on. The video I'm showing is still fitting though because the same rules applied, I went in thinking I'd do one thing and left not knowing what I was doing... or how I even got it done in the first place and looking the way it did.

I realized only well after I had uploaded it that it didn't render in hd. It was a trip and a half trying to figure out how to change the resolution without warping the dimensions, but well worth the effort for future attempts. This one was already too far gone to attempt to fix. But what can I say, you live and you learn.

I'm glad for these small mistakes like these that I make because they come with lessons that help better you for tomorrow!

And with that, everybody have a great tomorrow!

It all depends on what you do today.

-KK

Children's Illustrations

2014-04-19T08:39:00.000-07:00

I took some time recently to delve into the wonderful world of children's illustration, and recorded my progress as I went along, just for kicks and giggles.
I realized halfway through that the the subject matter was nowhere nearly as interesting as that which I'm already used to drawing. I crave detail, so I ended up getting much too lost in the backgrounds of the images. As a general rule, I'm just not very interested in things that are too "cartoonish" anymore, but again, it was a nice learning process and I feel like if I hadn't gone through it, I wouldn't have concretely realized it.
The drawings were both made with Prismacolor Markers as well as regular ink pens.

The process for the above sister pieces were both recorded in this video here. I call them "Festive Roosters".

The corresponding video to the above image is also here. I call it "Childish Thoughts" because I literally felt like a five year old kid drawing this again. Thinking about how awesome it would be to have an underwater kelp party with mermaids and farm animals. Awesome stuff right? Haha, Time to wake up!

Laughing Trees

2014-03-30T17:36:00.001-07:00

Good evening ladies and gentlemen!
I recently found a very nice, small stack of old parchment- style paper in an old portfolio I keep around. Finding just how entertaining and interesting it was to draw on these as opposed to other paper I'm used to working on, I decided to fill up the whole stack. The highly expressive illustrative images, that are all done in the same style, try to describe me as an individual, my life experiences (of course, put into a more metaphorical perspective), and more or less what goes on in my head in general.
This will be the first major and large scale series I'm going to be working on. (I've done other small series just for fun in sketchbooks, etc, but haven't documented them properly, so hopefully I'll have much more luck with this endeavor than those previous ones..)

I've set up a camera to document the creation of the first of these images, sped it up to better see and understand the way I draw (maybe analyze some things I was doing wrong and figure out how to fix them).
Overall, it was one of the best learning experiences I've had in a long time, and one that on many levels helped me to better understand how to progress onto whatever next level of art making I need to achieve.

Here is the video ladies and gentlemen!
Laughing Trees!
Enjoy!

Bears

2014-03-02T15:51:00.001-08:00

Wow I haven't updated anything in such a long time!
Let's start small and basic for now. Just so that we have something to work off of,
I really like bears.
Here is an old picture I drew of some very gentle and hospitable bears accepting a traveler into their humble forest.
I drew the bears from my head, so I don't know if they look like a specific species or not.
Her costume is also mostly from imagination, but primarily based off of Slavonic Belarusan traditional dress.

It's a simple ink drawing done entirely in biro pen on regular sketchbook paper.
I hope to get into the regular rhythm of drawing and uploading again.
Enjoy!

Memories from Florida

2013-08-13T21:24:00.000-07:00

This year, my mom and I decided to make our birthday presents to each other a trip to Florida. I was born just a few days after her so technically the very first birthday gift I ever gave her was myself! And we've recently made it a habit to celebrate our birthdays together as much as possible to make it one big bash for almost an entire week as much as possible!
I was recently having a conversation about the trip with some friends and realized that I haven't written about it yet or even put up artwork from then yet. It's a shame since it was an incredibly inspirational experience for me not only because of the relaxation and places we've visited but also greatly because of the people we met.
Many of them were incredibly talented individuals and prestigious in their own paths.. from exhibiting artists to Olympic trainee gymnasts... everything seemed like a festival of flowers.
And so here is my first completed drawing from my time there:

"Tropic Gazes" ~ This is a drawing of two sisters symbolizing my mother and me.. she has an incredibly young complexion, enough so that wherever we go, we are mistaken for sisters.
Here are some progress shots:

I would have loved to portray the colorful atmosphere that everything I came into contact with held, but even if I had the time to sit down and colorize all of my experiences, I wouldn't have found the time to scope out a set of even the most indecent of colored pencils or pastels (watercolor is too messy for trips like these).. so I had to make due with a simple makeshift sketchpad and a hotel pen, which of course I didn't mind at all since regular biro ink pens are one of my favorite mediums of all time. No matter how bumpy the ride, I will always have a steady hand!

This is one of the views from our hotel. On either side of this street was beautiful beach and clear water. (A last minute photo I pulled up from instagram)

Our hotel had a very show-girls/Great Gatsby feel to it, which inspired me to start drawing this image actually: (more instagram photos to which I only started adding the background to recently)

The reason I soon abandoned this image after finishing the foreground (the magician's assistant- type girl with all of the birds of paradise) was because I started drawing and became obsessed with an image that was even more inspired than the one before.

"Air Swings", I call it. And like all of the other drawings in this post, it was drawn entirely with a ballpoint pen. It's been my absolute favorite for the longest time.. But now I'm onto bigger and greater things and feel I can do better.. once you get over your general sense of accomplishment with such things, you definitely start seeing all of the mistakes you've made and you vow to learn from them as well as make up for them in your future works. Let the inspiration never end!

Here are some work in progress photos:

That's it for this post!

Stay happy and healthy guys!

Cheers!

Ode to the Little Trio

2013-07-23T07:38:00.000-07:00

And here we have a perfect example of me sitting myself down and getting together yet another entry to show for you guys.
Yesterday I got in touch with an acquaintance and we started talking about our portfolios. Though we were both going on about entirely different things (modeling portfolios are in many ways very different from art portfolios) I still realized that I haven't updated my portfolio seriously in maybe close to 2 years now. (I feel like I've done next to nothing online in any case.) It's a bit shameful on my part especially since I have been doing a lot of work in the meantime, just not putting anything out.
So here's to me finding all of my digital photo files of my work and displaying them in chronological order for your viewing pleasure.

I call this "Ode to the Little Trio".

It was drawn clean after the "Soft Snow" image, because I remember getting so excited at how that drawing came out that immediately I wanted to start pumping out more and more drawing like that one. Meaning that they would all be draw entirely from start to finish with nothing but a regular pen, with no meddling from any other art medium... like a giant doodle!
The main inspiration for this piece were my very much gone, old aquarium mates. They were little Tiger Barb fish that lived in a trio in an aquarium at the side of my desk back when I was still a lot younger and living with my parents. They were school fish, following each other around the aquarium the entire time, with all of the other guppies just rushing out of their way nearly constantly.
What got me to draw them was actually inspiration from a great friend of mine by the name of Sammy who is really into aquatic life and aquatic themes in her artwork. Just being around her got me into pursuing an aquatic theme in my work.
And don't tell anybody, but the girl in the picture is actually inspired by one of my male friends. Nobody will ever see that resemblance there but me and it makes me internally laugh every time I look at her. It happens this way a lot when I draw. All of my images end up looking a bit like whatever is most influencing me at the moment. So aside from the obvious inspiration I've noted above I subconsciously also incorporate the people I hang out with on a daily basis.
In that way, this image can be an ode to everybody who's every influenced me in my life- period.
Every image obviously is.
With this one it's just most prominent.

As a parting, I'd like to gather together some more practice runs of me taking photos of my old doodles.

The first one I'd like to put up because It makes me laugh almost to the point of tears at my younger self:

When I was younger, I severely raised the contrast of this image on the computer and darkened it up and called it "Fortress Aglow".. I am now renaming it "Highlighter Towers" because that's exactly what they are. Illogical, poorly made, with no apparent perspective or depth perception at all, highlighter towers. A pen doodle drawn on top of me testing which of my highlighters worked and seeing that it kind of looked like a building.

Those years were incredibly fun. Because everything was loose and interesting. I am way too technical and perfectionist at this moment in time, but many aspects of my childhood still make me laugh.

Maybe I'll even remake and update this piece later on.

Architecture is always super fun to draw.

(I don't do it enough..)

Doodle.

Doodle... more imaginary architecture... and some Spanish (one of my favorite classes from middle school till the end of high school...)

...And then this abomination:

Don't get me wrong, I love this image to no end, but back then I had a rather terrifying camera that would catch colors incorrectly (as you can see from the links above-- they were barely Photoshopped back then.. the camera was just partially colorblind) and I thought it would be a fine idea to completely bleach out the image, leaving little more than to colors to keep this poor girl going. The result being this.
I feel I have a need to do all of my old drawings justice with the aid of my new camera.
Because that poor old thing was just disgraceful.
(I loved it though because it was an underwater camera and I liked putting it into my aquarium and chasing my fish around with it... it belongs to my little brother now)
Oh the happy memories!

Cheers everybody!
Enjoy your days, the days that are yet to come, and the days that are already long gone!

Relearning Adobe PhotoShop

2013-07-10T09:52:00.001-07:00

Hello there ladies and gents!
I am here to proudly announce that it's been some weeks now and my new computer hasn't exploded yet! This is wonderful news and means that my new Transformer is a keeper!!

Sadly for me, I realized that I've gone without Photoshop for way too long and have pretty much entirely forgotten how to use it (that fact was aided by the newer version of Photoshop changing it's entire layout on me...)
So I've finally upgraded and as a quickie review, I must say that I'm loving the new black skin it's got going. It's looks incredibly tasteful and professional and the new features are so much fun to play with (sometimes I even pretend I know how to use them all!)
I've really missed PS, and I'm really happy to have gotten into the whole creative vibe all over again. And don't worry about me not knowing what to do. This program's been one of my play things since I was a tiny kid, it's like getting on your old bike; you never really forget how to ride.
Observe one of my first practice exercises.

I got so excited I ran to all of my old sketchbooks and took photos of every doodle I ever made, and went over my friends' houses and took photos of ever drawing I ever gave them just so I would be able to practice with them on PhotoShop. In my haste I've left my camera at a friends house for over a week already and every time I've tried to get it back, all of the wonderfully creative minds there got me so sidetracked that I completely forgot what I came there for... thrice already!
I'd be so exhausted by the end of the night I'd just fall asleep on a couch and nobody would bother to move me. At times even with music blaring!
Most mornings I'd wake up with a note beside me similar to this one that I got last night (while once again trying and failing to retrieve my camera).

I'd leave in the morning all fed and happy for home, only to realize all to late that I completely forgot my camera all over again... as well as, magically, a set of 10 drumsticks and a giant box of Stewart's ice cream. Oh well, there's always next time! Maybe then we'll finally get to grilling those drumsticks too.
In the meantime, I took enough photos before leaving the house of my old sketchbook and notebook doodles to practice with.
The following (as well as the dragon up top saying "hello") are them.
Enjoy!!

Something from a car ride a long long time ago.

Something from maybe Junior year of high school. Or senior. I don't remember.

I started making a year of the horse one for somebody else that looked just like this one but I never finished it. I think that chicken looks incredibly strange on this one.

I never really finished this one either... not sure why.

Another random doodle that took up an entire page...

This was drawn in a notebook on liked paper that later I pasted into my sketchbook. Some sort of vampiric mermaid perhaps? I have no idea what I was thinking.

I thinks that's about it for now. More will be coming soon! (Hopefully a lot more than you could even bargain for if I can get my camera back!)
Stay cool in the summer heat and enjoy your watermelon good people!
Cheers!

The move from phone to computer..

2013-07-02T11:02:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody!

As you guys may very well know, I've been on and off the internet recently because my computers have been experiencing some fun times with constantly breaking and reviving themselves just to mess with me.
I've finally said enough is enough and got the best computer for my situation possible so that it could last me many years to come.

In the meantime, I've been using mostly my phone to communicate with people, and I would never have believed it but I ended up joining Instagram, which is where the above images are from. I mostly uploaded tiny sketchbook, diary and work-in-progress pieces on there though. Here are a few examples:

As you can see, they're interesting images, but extremely filtered and poor quality so I can't wait to start editing and uploading my images from my computer after they'd gone through a better camera and processing program.
Till then (which will hopefully be soon), take care and enjoy!

-Kseniya

Hopping Back into the Habit of Posting

2013-05-10T09:43:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've groomed the enormous pet that is my online presence. All of my art community accounts as well as blogs look a little bit old and stale now and it doesn't help at all that the endless list of artwork I need to upload keeps on growing.
So lets start small and quick so that I can get into the habit of doing this again and hopefully I'll find it more enjoyable than a chore.
After all, they do say that you'll never work a day of your life if you really love your job!

So for starters lets show off a very very old piece done on some thicker brand of copy paper adorning one of the family rooms of a dear family friend of mine. There is a difference of quality in the image and a bit of a reflection because she took the photo for me when it was already displayed behind glass.

I have a wonderful feeling that this particular drawing is exactly a year old at this point and was drawn during either midterm or finals week of the second semester at my lovely -practically resort- of a college.
Great times, great memories, and great images are a result!
It was done using a mixture of different colored pencils (some which I kept from my elementary school years - it's the the materials you have but how you use them!) and a few regular drawing pencils (4b, 3h, etc.)
To explain a bit more what's going on, this piece is a metaphor of how I felt finally being able to walk with nature after being cooped up in a polluted city for four years. The peace and serenity as well as incredible freedom from people is a direct contrast to my old life and I decided to illustrate my new-found wonder by nature bringing a broken statue to life .. as if gently waking from a long, cold sleep.
As the girl wakes, she begins to grow with an incredible fire.
I hope that glow continues and never dies.

Keep on your glowing dear readers and art appreciators!
Find what makes you most alive and keep living it!

Slavonic Things (Among Other Things)

2013-03-13T09:15:00.001-07:00

Hello you wonderful, wonderful people.
As I mentioned in my previous post, March is the absolute holiday month for me. And in my last post I primarily attributed that to the fact that everybody near and dear to me (mostly everybody) was born in this month.
Today I'm going to tell you that there's actually also another reason. There's a Belarusan holiday that will be celebrated on the 25th. It's literally called "March 25th" and is the Belarusan Independence Day.

I was asked not too long ago to make a greeting card cover to serve as an invitation for an event that will be held nearby for the holiday.
Here it is!

Happy Independence Day Belarus! I hope you truly become free and independent one day.

Here are two progress shots along with all the pencils that I used in the making of it. Nothing special at all, but some were so used up that they were almost stubs.

Most of them became stubs after this. That's what happens when you press really hard and use only a "limited pallet" of color. That my favorite kind of pallet though, if brings more unity and balance to the image.

Here are two more sketched that I made a while ago on the same Slavonic topic. They got lost for a while but are now safely glued into my sketchbook. Enjoy!

March Birthday Madness is HERE!!

2013-03-02T07:12:00.002-08:00

Hello again after a long drought of no new content (I promise, I'm trying to quit doing nonsensical things and starting to upload more of my work... at this stage, it's in the camera!)
It's the second of March today! Happy March everybody! (I was meant to post this yesterday)

The reason that I'm so so excited for this month is not just because of a fun little something called "spring break" but also that most of the people near and dear to me have their birthdays in this month!
My mother, aunt, grandma and brother are among some of those in my family that celebrate their birthdays... then their are some of my friends too. And what would I be if I failed to mention my own birthday as a highlight? And to top it all off, March is host to a holiday widely celebrated in the Eastern parts of Europe known as "Woman's Day". It's sort of like Mother's Day here, but in Woman's Day, all women are appreciated and showered in gifts, not just people's mothers.
So regardless, this month would always be a party month for me!

And now for today's entry I thought it would be fitting to show you guys a drawing of one of my close friends who was born in this month.

I'm not going to mention his name because I'm not sure he'd be ok with that, but he's been one of my closest friends for quite a while now and he'll be celebrating a birthday on March 22nd!
The image comes with a weird sort of "epic-failure" type story on my part... mostly because this was meant to be his birthday present a year ago. We had to make something based on our talents and I decided to draw him with his favorite animal, the white Siberian tiger. (He's indifferent to regular orange tigers.)
But both of us got so caught up in work and school that we dragged out the deadline sort of towards Christmas. I ended up making maybe 4 different versions of this same drawing.. each of which I wittily messed horribly up in one way or another.
He already has a pre-edited version of this image in his possession, but here is the final digital copy, almost a full year later. (Yes, this drawing, in essence, is a year old.)
Anyway, as a final thought, I would just like to wish this awesomely incredible guy the most wonderful of birthdays he could ever imagine. Go out, have a party, have a blast, then get a full night's rest. Try not to stress yourself out to much and then get back into your work like you've been a pro at it all your life and nobody could ever mess with your sheer willpower and concentration. Beat out all the odds and come out on top man!
Here's to another great year! :D

Soft Snow

2013-02-03T08:20:00.000-08:00

It's another day and up here in the mountains another snowfall. I finally decided to upload an image that had to do something with the subject.

It's a regular pen drawing from my sketchbook that I made on Christmas day (2012). The title is written in the lower right corner. "Soft Snow". It's technically the most recent thing I've uploaded to date. While making it, I was telling my brother stories of Santa and Saint Nick myths and the magic of my Christmas's past.

It was truly a wonderful time, getting to visit my parents again and seeing my siblings. I think that that magic is translated well here. I got lost in every single snowflake.

Seeing this snowfall outside makes me want to visit again. Especially my brothers wide eyes and gaping mouth as I told him about flying reindeer. Ahahaha!!!

As a more technical side note, here I made a list of art resolutions for myself which I actually came up with as I was making this image. I was reflecting on all of my art throughout the years and realizing what I needed to better and fix and what habits I needed to either take up or get rid of.

This was my elementary start to realizing these resolutions and I hope that, for true, I'll start putting up art that's only greater and better from this point onward.

Happy snow days to you all! And may you all realize your resolutions in the New 2013 Year!

Doodle Time!

2013-01-27T13:40:00.003-08:00

So I was looking through my old notebooks and sketchbooks and random projects that were given back to me after the end of last semester... And here are a few that I've come across worth mentioning!

They ranged from doodles such as this one from my planner... to ones that were larger than half of my height:

That above is of course my hand. And yes, upright standing, this image is above my waist. It was made using different types of charcoal. An incredible amount of fun.
Below are some doodles in my sketchbook made after I ripped out some digital homework assignments and splashed watercolor over them.

Two Old Paintings

2013-01-11T09:39:00.003-08:00

So alongside my doodles and that Photoshopped self portrait piece I showed last time here, I thought it would be wise to show some work, though very very old, that actually shows me trying to be a good student and learn something.
The first is of a Paul Cezanne and I named it exactly so... "Paul Cezanne Master Copy". It's from exactly one year ago in painting class.

It was done in under an hour with an extremely fast oil paint layering technique... So I might call it rushed.. But I won't since I felt perfectly relaxed while making it.
I really do enjoy oil painting and usually love my outcomes (like this piece) but sadly that class left me at my wit's end for reasons other than my performance and I feel like now I'll be taking a very very long break from painting like this simply to allow myself time to recover.

This second piece was definitely rushed, and I feel like you can see it too. It wasn't for a class but was to be a very in depth, overworked looking and detailed landscape study I started almost two years ago. Then somehow it was buried in my portfolio under a pile of other work and was forgotten in the process of me moving from location to location. When I finally found it, I had no desire to work on it any longer because I was no longer anywhere near the area in which I started working on it... but I still felt guilty about leaving it because of all of the great plans I had in mind for it.
So I sort of hurriedly finished it and this is what was the result was:

Happy 2013 Awkward Rainbow Image

2013-01-01T21:03:00.000-08:00

This is the "masterpiece" I created in photo class last semester after multiple frustrations and finally settling on the most carefree and "I give up" sort of topic.
It was sort of a funny little panorama I made that I eventually ended up pasting all over my Facebook timeline cover and profile, but apparently it was a lot more entertaining to other people than it was to me even.
My professor seemed to have liked it, most of the other students chuckled after all, and my dad called it "plain genius" and asked for it to be his New Years gift.
I think it's absolutely amazing how a complete frustration of a piece of artwork (or at least what emerges from that frustration) can attain such viral results from the viewers.
I think that's all I want to say for now.
It's been on my mind all day today, and I finally got to voice my thoughts.
I hope all of you who read this have an amazing New Year!!
Happy 2013!!!

Catching Up With More Free Time and Portraits

2012-12-22T06:09:00.001-08:00

Now that I've got some more of that delicious free time on my hands, you wonderful people better believe me when I tell you I'm finally going to catch up with showing all of you the work that I've done since I've been gone.
There's so much, in such completely different mediums... that it's almost impossible to tell where I've hidden them all on my vast and shockingly extensive network of computer folders and categorizations. But while I was looking for them again, I came over an image I made close to almost 4 or 5 years ago that I can't believe I still haven't shared with you.

She was one of the many many people that made that summer of almost every single day making art on the beach so memorable and spirited. We were taught to draw with near perfect anatomical rendering there, almost mathematically using our eyes to translate real life onto the paper. And looking back, I still think that this is one of the best random sketches that came out of the whole ordeal. To this day, I still also think that she's one of the most beautiful people I've ever met.

I think it might be safe to say that I seriously miss that summer!
And speaking of old beyond words portraits, here's another one when I simply wasn't at my best.
Can you tell who it is? Haha, my mother couldn't!

Now, onto a more recent portrait, one which took me dead on forever to complete (strictly in my spare time) but was still a great deal of fun. Another beauty by the name of Natalie. She has wonderfully powerful waves of pitch black hair that frames her face in the best possible way. For this piece, I decided to focus on that aspect of her being, diluting every other color that showed up in the image.

Catching up with the old doodles

2012-08-05T06:28:00.000-07:00

Finally! An update!
Due to a combination of failing internet connections, schoolwork, actual work and friendship work, I've not been posting as frequently as I would have liked. So I've decided to take some time right now. And still I feel like I should put up the rest of my old in-transit doodles in order to see how my work has changed (since that's one of the main functions of this blog here... to see progress and to make progress).
So my newer works will only show up once you've seen everything that has led up to them.

So I'm going to start off with the drawing that holds the most interesting story. I was sitting on the coach bus that was to take me up from the city to the mountains (where I live) and a wonderful elderly woman sat next to me. She was all gentle smiles and conversation and said that she chose to sit next to me because I gave off an air of happiness and peace (even though I was sitting completely expressionless, crammed into the very last seat in the corner).

I don't know if I'm allowed to say her name on here, but she started to talk to me. About her children and her love life, and about how she's fought her cancer. It was awesome hearing her speak and it made me understand that you can grow to respect a complete stranger out of nowhere. And that all strangers deserve your respect, no matter how important or unimportant they seem to be. (There may be a few sad exceptions.)

But I dedicated this image to her right away because she said it was almost fate that she sat next to me while I was drawing it. One of her dear friends was always into collecting Geisha pictures. She saw it and it reminded her of them.

I was very happy to have offered such a memory and she left me a pen to remember her by.

I draw with that pen now.

There two images have the second most interesting story. I was at my mother's place and looking through old photographs in her albums. My brother had given me an old appointment book he had found and I decided to draw in it. I made a watercolor wash and then practice drawing the photographs that I saw there.
The first photo is my favorite photo in the whole wide world. It's of me sitting on a training potty for little kids and right next to me was supposed to be my cousin eating a sausage with some bread. We jokingly call it "What goes in must come out" in my family. I drew only my side of the photo.
The second drawing's of my aunt.

These last ones have no story at all. Just that the bottom doodle was from observation.

Foundations Art Show

2012-05-05T18:29:00.001-07:00

I was recently able to get my hands on a much better camera and I must say that there's a significant improvement in quality in this image from -the previous photograph- that I uploaded in -this previous blog entry-. In that entry, I also had another pastel piece that was in progress. Well, I'm very happy to say that both of my pieces were accepted into the Foundations Exhibit at my college.

Pictured below are the two pieces in their respected settings.

All in all, it was a very successful exhibition, with a lot of truly wonderful pieces by many extremely talented beginning artists.

Below I've compiled a few photos that I took while there just to give you all a general taste of the event. The show itself was spread throughout many different rooms and hallways in two buildings, so the settings of each of the photos are naturally different.

None of the actual works of art belong to me or have been made by me.

Design Form class above...

Drawing 1 and 2 classes above and Design Form classes below...

Here's a larger look at the gallery space...

Below are pieces from the Design Color class (the class I just graduated from)...

More Subway Doodles

2012-04-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

These are a bit old and shot with my old camera. But these are more of the subway doodles that I did when I was on winter break in Manhattan.
I said before that I have a lot of work to upload... well, here I am, starting in chronological order.

All of the colors have been washed out into blue, except for this red one. I need a new camera.

New York inspires me in a very fashion oriented way, where my works become almost entirely "for show", like the ads you see displaying random products in a magazine or on a billboard. I'm not entirely sure if that's a good thing, but looking back now, I see all of the strange twists in my art whenever I visit the city for an extended period of time.

Lots of Work to Upload...

2012-04-19T17:32:00.002-07:00

... don't have the time or camera power. It seems I've dunked my camera into water one too many times and now the quality's gone down beyond repair. They turn out near gray, and even after image editing on the computer, they are still of too low a quality. Time for a new one!

Anyway, I've been busy and have many many new works to upload, but for the above reasons, I almost don't want to put anything online because the photos don't do justice to the actual artworks.

So I've been spending nights and days with barely any rest working on the above color project. I've gotten used to leaving the studio at 3 a.m. (along with almost the rest of the class). The teacher for that class is amazing and very knowledgeable... not to mention that she also seems to have the eyes of a computer, noting even the slightest deviations from a desired color or color scheme.
Her drilling literally turned me into a workaholic-type person craving more and more art making experiences. I feel that as a result, I've actually been more productive this semester than ever before in my life, instead of feeling overworked like everyone else I know.
All of the color swatches above were hand painted. To get it to be perfect, all of the ones below had to be discarded and redone. You fill in the blanks.

This is the next color project we have. I'm not too pleased with the first one I finished so I'm doing another one. If it turns out to be better than the first, I'll hand it in. If not, I'll go with the original. If I still have time before the due date and don't like either of the two, I'll make a third.

This is what the finished one sort of looks like. Sadly, my camera didn't catch most of the colors that appear in the piece.

Oh! And look at who's peeking out from below the other piece! Maybe I'll finish this one too.

I have also another image I'm working on that's a major work (not on a large scale though). But it's a super late birthday gift for someone and I'm set on surprising them so I won't even upload the progress photos of it yet.
Hope to go online more... and with a better camera too.
Till next time!

My Tiger Phase

2012-02-02T05:21:00.000-08:00

After I made the drawings I put up in my previous journal entry, I went through a little tiger phase, so to speak. I went to the library with my brother and took out a children's book about tigers for him. But since he found all of the firetrucks more appealing, I was the one who spent most of my time reading that book and looking at all of the pretty pictures of tigers. There were many photographs, and I thought it would be interesting to draw all of these tigers in different scenarios. This is what I got.

As you can see, all of these were drawn on simple note paper that I stapled into a bunch at one end and turned into a makeshift sketchbook for the holiday.

At one point, I felt like drawing simply a portrait of a tiger from one of the larger photos.

Then I went back to drawing tigers in different scenarios. If you couldn't already tell, I got a little bit bored with the third picture and went on to draw the tiger's "prey" that I put up in the picture below. And that marked the end of my mini obsession.

My new doodles

2012-01-24T15:30:00.000-08:00

So I haven't updated in a while, but now that my technical difficulties have been settled, I can share my newest pieces with you!

So during my vacation, I really got my hands on some time to draw and decided to make a daily thing out of it. And honestly I thought I'd make a 365 day thing out of it and call it something clever, but I realized that going back to school would not leave me enough time. Still, I did do a lot during my vacation and am now going to be putting them all up chronologically while explaining my thought process also. So I wish you all a beyond great belated Happy New Year, and sit tight and enjoy my first entry of 2012~!

My initial idea was to draw very quickly and from observation (observing pieces of reference photos at times haha) and get myself back into the incredible habit that I slowly somehow got myself out of. The more I drew the easier it came to me. The first two images here grew off of each other and I did both at home. The third one below I did on the subway on an hour long trip and it was simply the aftermath of my thoughts about the two drawings I did above. See, I really liked the idea and thought that I could someday blow it up and make a nice large painting out of it or something and these images could serve as studies.

This is the last image of the three and where I will end this entry because this is where this particular thought process ends. This bottom image however is the first in a makeshift stapled sketchbook I made especially for images I made while bored on hour long trips on the subway.

My main goal here is to draw pretty much every day enough to see some real progress in my work and so that my character and style could really start to shine through.

Having said that, everybody farewell and enjoy!

The Essence of it All

2011-10-23T19:02:00.000-07:00

So this surprisingly didn't take me too long because I truly sat down and cranked this one out. Which seriously makes me some strange type of invincible. As if to say "If I can do this, I can do anything!"

The works in progress snapshots from this image can be found in this journal entry. And the original idea for this entire image came from an image from the Art Nouveau period found in a stock art book from my college library. The background came completely from my imagination.

It was actually strangely difficult to draw and get all of the colors down exactly as I wanted them because I was drawing on a slightly glossy paper (I have no clue where I have it from) and the only colored pencils that would actually hold their pigment on the paper were crayolas. Either way, everything ended up wit a grainy look because of that.

I sincerely hope that this picture can do me a lot of good and take me far because I plan to submit it to a contest... so wish me luck everyone!
That is, if this picture even makes it. Because I plan to make a lot of different images that can all potentially be submitted and I'll pick the best of them all.
I'll catch up with all of you about what's going to end up happening.
Bye for now!

Most Recent things from the New Educational Year

2011-10-11T08:30:00.000-07:00

I realized how little I've been posting and how much I've actually been getting done. So to catch everybody up with everything, here is a total recap of all of the artistic things I've been up to since I started the new school year.

This is an image of my addition to our "First Year Foundation Courses Art Exhibition". I'm not sure if that's actually the name but it's along those lines. Basically all of us were given an empty poster with nothing but a rock printed on it and we were to make anything out hearts desired out of it. In the end, all of the students different creations were displayed side by side to show the range of creativity. Some students got rid of the rock altogether. Here's mine.

Other than that, I've been doing small drawings such as these in my sketchbook of things I see around me to keep myself sharp and to fulfill various homework assignments...

And also more fantastical pieces to keep my imagination going...

And of course the awesome act of drawing real people that actually exist. (Though halfway around the world at times) Haha. This guy here is from Germany and quite fun to talk to.

Till next time everybody!