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.

A character I designed and animated for an art test last year. Disclaimer: I did not create the background.

Step-by-step character creation guide for my students with videos. I also made an environment concept to accompany the character.

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.

Before I left my previous job, I refreshed parts of the syllabus and updated some of the tutorials. In doing so, I created some new artwork to supplement the content.

I also designed some characters to introduce my students to alternative methods of rendering their character designs.

Here are some notes and drawings I made to supplement my drawing lessons during my previous job. Due to home-based learning because of COVID-19, I relied on digital tools to teach traditional drawing.

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:

This started as an Ipad sketch which evolved into an in-class demo on how to color character designs. The following is a step-by-step breakdown of the process:

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.

Rexxar rings in the festive cheer.