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.

I decided to move on from Hearthstone after so many years. It wasn't because I hated any new mechanic or set that came out. I guess I grew tired of the same gameplay after so many years. The new Battlegrounds mode did injected some new excitement but I felt that I hit my own personal skill-cap brickwall after hitting ~7K MMR.

I started playing Slay the Spire last year during my trip to Taiwan. Since then I have been playing the game on and off. I love the rogue-like gameplay and the card-based combat system. It felt like a natural progression coming from another digital card game. I also created a number of fanart for the game last year which I did not posted here.

This year, I returned to the game briefly after the Watcher character was released. I updated the fanart series with on that featured her, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to share it right now over here:

Illidan Hearthstone Battlegrounds fanart. In these dark times, I can only say that we are definitely not prepared. Stay home, stay safe!

Fanart of my favourite gymleader in Pokemon Sword and Shield.

It's been a reeeaaally long time since I did a Hearthstone fanart. Truthfully, I have been meaning to quit Hearthstone for a while now. Having a kid meant that I had less time to play games. Because of that, I felt that I have to properly utilize that and clear some other games that are starting to pile up on my PS4 and Switch. Besides, I think that it is important for me to play a wider selection of games as an educator in this field. All these, coupled with the fact that the meta went really stale leading up to the recent expansion led me to drift away from Hearthstone.. ... Until the release of Battlegrounds.

I have tried League's auto battler but I prefect the simplicity and familiarity that came with Battlegrounds. It is just more fun for me to interact with characters and minions that I have come to love. 

I conceived the idea for this artwork one day while playing Battlegrounds. I had the vision of the other minions joining forces to buff a giant Amalgam, much like how the Power Rangers combine their zoids to form the Megazord.

Little did I know that the Nightmare Amalgam will be removed from the game the day I am done painting this. Good bye and thank you for letting me win games I wouldn't have otherwise won.

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.

In this exercise, I tried to use the Transpose tool for the first time. It was surprisingly intuitive and easy to pick up!

Did this LOL fanart as part of a in-class demo.

Rexxar rings in the festive cheer.

It's been awhile but I have been working on the Schoolism assignment. As it turns out, I kinda misinterpreted the previous assignment and went off course. Regardless, I will be taking whatever I learned from the lesson and using that knowledge to apply to whatever I intend to do moving forward. Here's my second "assignment" where I include Substance Painter into the workflow.