Well, here's the start of my annual end-of-year art updates on my socials. It has been a largely unproductive year to be honest. Managing two young kids and moving to a new apartment has consumed most of my free time.

This first batch of artwork contains a caricature of Jordan for Chinese New Year (it's the year of the bull and I just watched The Last Dance prior to painting this at the start of 2021), some grayscale studies and some perspective drawing studies.

Recently, my dad and nephews started watching wrestling clips on YouTube. My 2-year old son, being ever so curious, joined in the fun. A few days after that, we kept hearing him chant this wrestler's name.

Some caricatures I did for my YouTube channel.

Excavated this old drawing I did a few years ago from my hard disk and decided to colour it.

Here's wishing everyone a prosperous year of the rat!

Some caricatures I did at the latter half of this year.

This is a custom Hearthstone card I made for a colleague who was leaving the organization. He was the only other person I knew IRL that was a Hearthstone fanatic so I decided to create a special artwork for him.

Keanu was everywhere this summer: John Wick 3, Netflix's Always Be My Maybe, Microsoft's E3 press conference and Cyberpunk 2077.

My wife and I love Stranger Things. In fact, we built the Lego Stranger Things set together for her birthday. The latest season saw the group of kids hitting their teenage years. And just like Harry Potter and his gang during book 4-7, I must say that the teenage hormones have made the main characters in Stranger Things really annoying. The only character that I have actually grown more fond of is Steve.

This post is long overdued.

I first posted this series of artwork created to coincide with the Lunar New Year (which took place early February this year) on my Instagram page but I didn't find the time to do a proper post here on the blog. So here it is, in its full glory:

Like many artists, I was super inspired after watching Spiderverse late last year. I really love the art direction of the movie and the way each shot is composed and set. While not a huge fan of chromatic aberration in general (the effect was used awfully in Netflix's Sabrina in my opinion), I appreciated the application in Spiderverse. The effect seemed appropriate for the frame-by-frame visual eye-candy overdose that the filmmakers were going for.

In creating the above fanart, I set to emulate the film's art style. Coincidentally, it aligned with the style I am currently exploring in my art as well (using blocks of solid hues with little to no blending). In preparation for the above piece, I also did simple sketches and paintings. I have never painted black people before and I took this opportunity to learn more about achieving that particular skin tone.

I have been meaning to improve my ZBrush skills in preparation of possibly teaching the subject next year. If you follow my art, you will know that I dabble my feet into 3D once in a while. During my days in DigiPen, we were taught 3DS Max and ZBrush. I really want to improve my digital sculpting skills and eventually move on to high level texturing via Substance Painter.

Last month, I enrolled myself into the Justin Goby Fields' Schoolism Introduction to ZBrush course. However, due to the ongoing Inktober event, I didn't really have time to invest all my time into the assignments. In this post I will share with you what I've done for the first assignment.

The assignment is to sculpt 5 busts. I tried to be a little ambitious and added colors and lighting to better present the final image. I also purposefully selected subjects that were different from one another. Some of them turned out pretty bad while others were fine. Stay tuned for more diary entries of my assignment progress. 

First time trying out grayscale to gradient map workflow. Seems like a pretty time efficient method!

How is Taylor Swift related to these puppies? Absolutely nothing.

The Taylor Swift sketch was sitting in the depths of my harddisk so I decided to use it in a random illustration. Here's wishing everyone a great year of the dog!

Caricature of Jay Chou as a ninja.

​Music that inspired this piece: