Art print and sleeves I did for Whalerabbit's Dualle - Dravokki

Comic I did to promote Mitoy's Frank!

Concept art I did for NEO Impossible Bosses, coming out early year (click to view full image).

The Last Jedi sketches

A concept artwork of an ancient Chinese military outpost done for an art test. From sketch to the final polished illustration. I had some difficulty emphasizing on the evilness of this image. I found that adding tons of red, especially on the windows (suggesting an ominous red light source emitting from within) worked wonders in bringing that idea across.

Mekazoo has gone live.
Mekazoo has gone live.
Mekazoo has gone live.

It feels good to say it.

I have worked on this game, part-time for 4 years and full-time for 3 and a half. Working on this game has brought me from Singapore to Seattle and back. I have attended PAX twice as an exhibitor and have seen firsthand how people were having fun with the demo. I have evolved, as an artist and as a person throughout these 4 years. I have also become engaged to the love of my life. After all this time, Mekazaoo has finally come into fruition. 

So what is Mekazoo?

It is a 2.5D platformer where you switch between the 5 mechanical animals - Armadillo, Frog, Wallaby, Panda and Pelican. Each of the animals possess unique abilities that aid the player in navigating the game's vibrant levels. If you love side scrolling platformers from the late 80's and early 90's, you should definitely check out Mekazoo! It is available on PC, PS4 and XboxOne. I will recommend playing it on the PC with a controller for the best experience.

Steam link - http://store.steampowered.com/app/390330/

The above images are early concept artwork I created for the foresty world of the Arboretum. We wanted to differentiate ourselves from other platforming titles that had cheery and bright forest settings. The vision we had in our minds were that of a neon and luminous forest that featured highly saturated, almost psychedelic colors. The paintings were very much inspired by the music of MJ Quigley, the Audio Director of the team. I remember bouncing to the beat of an early Mekazoo track as I painted this.

I will be posting more images throughout the week and elaborating on my involvement as the Art Director of the project, so do look forward to seeing more artwork!

This will be the last post of 2015 from me. 2015 hasn't been a very good year. I got into an accident, my grandfather passed away and the game I've been working on for some time now has been delayed till next year. I'll be taking a break from Wednesday till 2016.. so I hope the year ends well for me.

I recently participated in a art challenge organized by my Bali workshop friends. The challenge is to design a fighting game character in the King of Fighters rendering style. Here's my entry:

No process for this one since it was quite a straight-forward piece of artwork. Here are some of the rough thumbnails I came up with the challenge:

And since this is the final post of 2015, here's a random sketch of the day. A friend gave me this idea and I thought it was pretty cool.

Last month, I took part in 2 deviantART contests, FFXIII - Lightning Returns and D3 - Reaper of Souls. While I did not win, it was an enjoyable experience doing these paintings. The Lightning turnaround in particular reminded me of the good ol' DigiPen PRJ251 days.

Today's the last day of the Chinese Year of the Dragon! Let's do some fiery art!

It's been some time since I did a painted character turntable, so I decided to make it the last artwork for this year. This character concept was modified from a rejected sketch for a class in school. I felt that it had some potential so I decided to bring it to final.

Wishing everyone a prosperous and healthy year ahead. HUAT AH!

On the final days of 2012, I was preparing my portfolio for job applications. One of the studios that I am trying for is Tecmo-Koei, developers of Dynasty Warriors. Their submission requirements include an illustration that is created using traditional medium. It was an opportunity for me do another watercolor piece and I took it.

I was pretty sure I wanted to paint a snow scene. This was triggered by the 'missed opportunity' late last year as I was not able to experience snow in America before flying back to Singapore. I also knew that it was going to be a character piece, and specifically a female character. I felt that I had been doing a ton of male characters recently and wanted to go for something different. I chose the Mongolian theme as I recalled eating Mongolian BBQ Noodles in Beverly Hills Center in LA. The food was unremarkable, but the cashier was quite pretty and friendly ;)

I started off doing quick thumbnails on paper, determining the rough composition. I then selected one that I'm happy with and proceeded to do a digital sketch (as seen above). During this stage, I prefer to work in Photoshop as it allows me to make quick adjustments to character proportions and shift things around without having to erase and redraw. This step definitely helped build confidence when I draw the actual lineart on paper.

I also did a more traditional 'un-posed' character concept sheet to support the painting. I wanted to be sure of the design of the character in a neutral posture so that I can better illustrate her in the final painting.

Another step I took before transferring the lineart was to produce a color thumbnail. Once, again I favored Photoshop over using watercolors. While using the final medium helps to inform you on how to mix the right colors, I feel the process is too slow and too inflexible for my liking. Having the experience of working on color scripts for my team's upcoming short animation, I was able to quickly block out the colors I had in mind for the illustration using Photoshop.

With all the preparatory work done, I moved on to replicate the lineart onto the watercolor paper. I intentionally left out the line work for the environment as I wanted to see what kind of results I can get if I painted them straight onto the paper without guides. The above is the final artwork done in watercolor. I'm pretty happy with the results though I feel I could definitely improve on some parts of it (right wolf looks too chubby, girl's face could be more appealing etc).


Hopefully this is will kick start a string of watercolor paintings for 2013!