First Post: Old Works!

Welcome to my revamped blog! For my first post, I'll be posting some of the old works I've done which I have some affinity left for. I was looking through my portfolio the other day and dug up some nostalgic goodies. So let's get started!

 
This work is unfortunately undated, but I still remember having a lot of fun creating it at my old art teacher's house, probably around 2003. I think I was creating it after the style of another abstract artist whose name I have unfortunately forgotten... I do like making abstract art because I feel much more loose and free doing it as opposed to when I'm trying to make things look realistic. But I hope to be able to draw realistically as freely as I do abstractly someday! This was made with acrylic I think.

Haha I do love this piece, another abstract work created around 2005 (I think)! Basically humans have become ants and ants are humans. This was actually created rather subconsciously and looking back it's actually pretty disturbing lols... Really fun to make though ^_^ Watercolor and ink pen.

Eh, looking at it now I don't know why I took a picture of this one actually, but since I made it all nice and pretty I might as well put it up. Created around 2005 or earlier, copied from a picture from a book. I think I added the fish in myself. I like how it looks like the shark is gonna eat that fish. XD At this very moment I just named this piece "Sharks and Minnows"! Watercolor

 

I could've sworn this was a Van Gogh but I looked through all his works and couldn't find this; it's only a portion of a larger work but if anyone knows whose work this is please let me know! Anyways, this is a copy of someone's work I did, what I remember most is when my teacher painted that sliver of highlight on the right side of the woman's cheek it totally changed the picture and made me go "woah" lols. I vaguely remember having fun painting the orange onto the glove of her right hand and enjoying as it slowly became 3-d, but I don't think I really liked painting the background or the chair lols. Oil-Paint

Haha this was done in 2006 I think, when I first got into DBSK and was super- crazy about Jaejoong. I think this was one of the first paintings I was really "inspired" to do too, and the process of creation was highly enjoyable but tormenting at the same time. I also started to realize the limits of my skill.... Used a picture of some city at night, a picture of Yun-ho from DBSK, and another of Jaejoong from DBSK. Nevertheless, this was fun, and I was quite proud of it back then. I vaguely remember when I was thinking about how to make this picture I did it purely for composition's sake; I stuck Yun-ho in there because I believed it would make the overall picture more complete. Thus, no message in this piece at all; I just wanted to draw Jaejoong's beautiful face =___=
Looking back, it's funny how one could potentially infer some homoerotic subtext from this picture.... I wasn't even aware of that stuff back then. My subconscious at work? XD Watercolor and some charcoal/graphite

That's the last of my works with my first and most beloved art teacher I will share. She taught me from when I was in kindergarten all the way to the beginning of tenth grade, and although she didn't really teach anything technical, it was because of her way of teaching that I grew to love art so much. She taught me to try to see things as they really were, and also that things were not always as they seemed, and to be accepting and unafraid of experimentation. I miss her, I really need to pay her a visit, it's been several years. :(

Once tenth grade started, I took up many other activities (too many other activities imo, but it was all my fault....), so I ended up quitting from my outside art classes because I started taking art at my high school. I learned a lot at my high school art class, a whole bunch of technical stuff I only vaguely knew of such as contour drawing, perspective, etc. However, the first piece I shall be sharing is from my second year (intermediate) in my high school art class.

This is supposed to be Sasha Cohen; I can't really tell though haha. It looks like a mid-life Sasha Cohen... Anyways, this was made in 2008. I was super obsessed about Sasha Cohen (I love her Romeo and Juliet program and wish she could've done it perfectly at least once. And her Olympic dress for that program is just exquisite!) We colored our entire paper black with charcoal and then erased in the picture.

Next we did a project in which we colored in the paper with graphite and then erased in the picture again. This was a wrist-killer because it's soooo hard to erase in graphite =___= Anyways, I chose Danny Noriega from American Idol; I was totally crushing on that guy it was like love at first sight =__=''' Yes I tend to become obsessed with people at times... I only watched American Idol because of him haha. But once he got kicked off I still watched because I wanted to see who won =__=''

This was done around mid 2008, near the end of the school year. Yes, I was obsessed with Johnny Weir as well... Anyways, we had to make a fragmented picture so this is what I did. In the picture reference I used he looked playful but he looks really fierce in this picture lols... The fragments are in oil pastel and the picture underneath is water pastel.

  

Bleh, senior year art was off to a slow start and I pooped a lot of mediocre uninspired pieces out in the beginning... this being one of them. It was partially due to the stress and existential crisis I associate with college apps but also because I was really tired of working from reference all the time (despite that, I did nothing to improve myself despite so many opportunities available (although unbeknownst) to me! Shame on me! If only the woes of teenage angst and insecurity had not inflicted themselves upon me...) So yeah, this is one of those bland pieces I found more acceptable and perhaps marked my "comeback" of sorts... We had to make a drawing in which something transforms into something else; as you can see, here it's a snake transforming into a scarf. Toy snake for reference, scarf for reference, girl from my imagination. I don't know how to use prismacolor pencils lols. The frame base is cardboard and made out of real leaves and tissue paper.

But it seems after my slow start (and after app season was over) I pooped some of the strongest pieces I've ever done! (If I do say so myself...So arrogant!) I definitely think the teacher's creative assignments which pushed the limits of my imagination definitely had something to do with this. For if I wasn't going to improve my skills conventionally, what else to do but explore other mediums of art yes?

 

One of the first pieces I could say I was proud at that time is this experiment in pointillism referencing a Joshua Bell picture. From the moment I saw that photograph I knew I wanted to draw it someday, and this seemed like the perfect time to do it, a time I could experiment with the color scheme as well. Although I didn't really capture the painful longing/angst/ecstasy/passion/etc that the photograph captures.... He looks more peaceful/serene in my picture imo (Look at the photo here!). Watercolor background and markers for the dots. It was really fun to make this piece because it was a whole different way of making art. Blue and orange is also my favorite complementary scheme :D This was the beginning of 2009 I think.

 

Another creative assignment where we had to make prints of something we cut in a block of rubbery stuff (I forgot what it's called I'm such a noob >.<). I supposedly gave my best one to the teacher but I guess the ones I had left were the second best ones I had. This was inspired by some lines from Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. (I don't quite remember the lines now, but they're pasted behind the brown print. It had something to do with John looking at a lighthouse I presume, for that's the picture... and yes, that is actually Leonardo DiCaprio as John, for I read somewhere that he would be playing John in a movie version of the book...)

This was done at the end of 2008. Just a fun flower collage. I think the paper collage really helped me get the shadows of the flower down more clearly; value is something I have quite a problem with.... Must practice!

 

This is called "Cut" and partly inspired by the manga "Cut" by Kawai Toko, also inspired by some, er,  curiosity in the macabre I had before I drew this (interestingly enough, after I finished this piece I totally lost interest in the morbid). Our project was to incorporate words into the painting. This was the beginning of when I began to feel really frustrated with the limits of my skill (it didn't help that I didn't get into the figure drawing class at the community college ;_;). But yeah, I constantly had to reference my hands and exacto knife to draw this, and even then I didn't know how to shade correctly or put the blood on convincingly... Oh well, maybe if I'm interested I'll draw this again when I feel I can make it better. :D This is acrylic on canvas. And in case anyone is wondering, no I am not emo nor do I want to kill myself =__='''

 

We had to paint a landscape and I wanted to paint it with Okami-style art. Fail perspective haha, I was trying to mix a couple pictures together but I totally forgot (or was too lazy :x) to use perspective to match them together.... Fail light source and rendering too... I am too much a slave to reference ;__; Done in 2009, oil painting.

 

We had to make a self-portrait based on a 20th century artist's style, and I chose Franz Marc. I rather like his style ^^. Abstract is fun! I still had to use reference extensively though =__=. Early 2009, Oil painting.

 

This is the final piece done in high school and one of my favorites too. We had to make a collage piece inspired by music. I actually came up with the inspiration for this piece a while back when listening to a Jay Chou song called "Romantic Handphone". When I first saw the English translation of the name I mistook the name to be "Romantic Headphone" and I immediately remembered a chapter cover from the manga Seven Days by Takarai Rihito, in which Seiryuu, one of the main characters, was wearing a headphones decorated with flowers. Then I got an image of him sitting on a bench in a park, cherry blossom trees blooming warm pink flowers behind him. Anyways, I hadn't planned on drawing this piece until much later, when someday I hoped my painting skills would be much better, but since I couldn't think of any other song to use and this kept coming up in my mind I finally just decided to do it. Although it really didn't come out as I expected or imagined, it was fun to try and figure out how to make things work. Collaging was fun too and made me able to be more abstract and free in a sense. I used my brother for reference. Watercolor and tissue paper collage. Also some ink rolled on the ground and as cherry blossoms.

And so ended my high school career and the three years of high school art class I did as well. Although I didn't realize all my missed opportunities to improve my art on my own until the end, I did enjoy the creative process the class put me through. I probably wouldn't have tried out so many creative things on my own, and I like how the teacher's assignments continued to stretch and push my imagination to the very end. 

During the summer of 2009 I was finally able to take the figure drawing class I had wanted to take for so long. It was really fun, but I did miss many opportunities to learn from my fellow classmates and teacher. This was the final project for that class, called "The (not so) Old Man and the Sea". The model posed for us for 2 days and he was really skinny. Once the teacher asked him to hold a pole-looking thing in his hands, an image of Meiko Tsunami from Yu-gi-oh with the waves splashing behind him came to mind, which led me to think about the cover of a copy of The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway I had, where the Old Man was chasing after a swordfish. So yeah, that's where the inspiration is from... I think I could've been thinking about fisherman a lot at that time too because I was watching some old Ninja Warrior replays on TV in which I took a liking for Makoto Nagano, who was a fisherman XD I definitely want to paint this again/ paint over(?) this again someday, the one thing the teacher commented on was that this piece needs more value, and he's right! Lots of other fix ups could be used too~~

After this class I practiced what I learned for a while using posemaniacs for reference, until a couple weeks after college started and I kinda just cracked under pressure, existential crisis after existential crisis, etc.... I wasn't ready to study art on the side while doing things my parents "forced" me into back then, but now I've decided to take control of my own life and will do all I can to improve!!