... to now halfway into 2020. (Thoughts on current world concerns)

So much has happened within the half year. 2020 has been very eventful for many reasons. CoVid -19, BLM movement, resurgence of "Me Too" within the entertainment industry, and more.


Fear, concerns, unsureness. Those were a majority of the thoughts swirling thru my mind back in late November, early December. They still are.

The start of this pandemic (before it was officially called a pandemic), was concerning for me. I have relatives in Taiwan, including my Grandpa, and Taiwan's proximity to China, the epicenter of the virus, was scary. Taiwan already was getting the smog from China's air pollution, and with unknowns of how CoVid-19 spread, the concerns grew. Then anger set in, towards the Chinese government due to lack of global news and public knowledge, and the gross management of quarantine in the initial weeks of the outbreak.

Then the virus spread around the world. And the US was not immune. Lack of face masks, panic buying, increasing cases, community spread. Who wasn't immune from the fears? (I won't get into those who believed the virus was a lie. That's just a whole other rant.) 

However, there were two bright sides of this virus: a lot of time to ourselves, and better air quality in heavily air polluted countries.

But public outrage over the police brutality and racism towards African Americans, and people of color flared up and gained a large movement both in the form of protests and information across social media and various networks. This movement has been long overdue. Followed by a lot of women (and some men) sharing their horrific stories of sexual abuse through social media by those in power within the entertainment industry. It horrified and angered me, that this wasn't 'old' news, this was current.


So much of the world needs to change still.
- Public Health in many countries, now that the effects of CoVid have shown all the cracks in the wall, so to speak.
- While things have improved since MLK Jr's days, racial discrimination is still prevalent. It's no longer acceptable to turn a blind eye, because people of color can't afford to turn a blind eye.
- Sexual abuse, both physical and verbal needs to be pointed out as well. Too many victims have had to 'just deal with it' for far too long and for the worst of the worst sort of actions too.


But with all this negative, what are some positives? Awareness is definitely one of them. By the public being more aware of these issues, it's a good step in the right direction, even if it's small!

The rest of 2020 is still unknown, as CoVid is still around, protests are still happening. But here's to a sincere hope that all of us can move into the right mindset and improve on all these concerns.

A little bit of late housekeeping

I found out recently my Wordpress blog was still active and the way I found out was a person commented on my page on my -at-the-time-portfolio work from 2013.

No offense to the person but I specifically wrote on home page that my Wordpress was going inactive so I was slightly confused why that person didn't go to my other links on the side to view my other social media.  In the end, I had to log into my Wordpress (after searching for my login ha!) and then redirect the person to my more up to date social media.

Anyways, the housekeeping part came in when I deleted that Wordpress blog and decided to make a post here to keep this blog a bit more current, since I failed to post anything since very early on this year.


So, what's been happening since my last post? A lot of course!

I graduated, job searched for artist related jobs, worked for about a month. Then I went to Taiwan for half a year for helping my mom take care of her dad (my grandpa), came back home, then  went to California for house viewing since my parents decided about 2 years into my studies at AAU, that, they wanted to move to California to be closer to my relatives there (and not have to deal with shoveling the snow here on the East Coast.)

And currently, we've been packing things around the house for the past month since we got back from California. My mom regrets so very much that we never did spring cleaning before the decision to move. At least 27 years worth of things, including, for some reason, my brother's elementary and 7th grade homework, a few notebooks of my 7th grade homework... Lesson learned: ALWAYS clean the house after a few years of things you don't need. Otherwise, it bites you back, hard.

Art wise, I've been drawing in between all the craziness of real life, between travels and family matters.
I made myself draw/paint 100 portraits/characters a few weeks back and been jumping between environment and vehicle designs after that personal challenge.
Additionally, I've been reworking on my comic from way back in 8th grade or so (some time in middle school) and just started redrawing page one earlier this week.

Ohh, it's been too long since I posted!

First of all, Happy New Year!

And apologies for the lack of blog posts since apparently June?! (Oops.)

For those of you following me on my Instagram and Twitter, you probably saw my uploads of personal projects I've been working on. (Hint hint, follow either, or both, of them~)

I think part of the reason I haven't posted as much here is due to low audience on Blogger, as well as most of them time I'm just posting WIPs of current projects. In the long run, it'll probably be a good idea for me to maintain the blog for many reasons, such as keeping a log of my work (though I suppose ArtStation is like that) as well as showing I can maintain multiple social media (should I be though?)

While I haven't been posting on my ArtStation either, though, that's because I hadn't liked enough of my work to post them on there, I've definitely been trying to keep my Facebook page up to speed as well.

But that's enough of housekeeping of social media!

Things I've been working on lately have been redesigning and recreating environments and characters of my comic, Teens of Valor  ( sketches and ideas ,  comic - redrawn several times over ).
I've also been considering redrawing the comic , *again*. Mostly because the art will differ so much; I had started the comic (most recent startover) before I went to art school and studied art, learned tips, etc. Another reason I'm considering redrawing the comic is because of the environment and character redesigning I'm doing.

A new year, another step forward

    After my previous post, things got busy with finals and final projects. Most of those projects, I believe, if not all, have been posted to my Behance  but not quite yet on my deviantArt. I have several pieces still in queue in my dA stash but I'm slowly getting there.

   On the other hand, a few classmates/friends and I are doing a drawing/painting challenge on Instagram. Our plan is to draw/paint a character/prop/environment each day and post it on Instagram. Anyone on Instagram should check out #aauinstaeveryday. I personally missed the past 2 days trying to get something in, but I definitely plan on getting myself back on track!

Part of the reason why I missed the past two days was...

5 and 7 mins studies - Lace and Grace, and news regarding my comic

7:31 pm Pacific

I'm definitely making this my weekly routine to go to these drawing workshops. Or at least one of them each week. I tried to go to both last week but ended up not going to the one during Friday afternoon.
This week will depend on how much work I need to do , both school and comics wise.
Yes plural!
I've teamed up with a friend of mine, originally an online game friend turned pretty close not-just-an-online-friend sorta relation, to work as a secondary artist on her webcomic.
As a possible result, my comic may end up being biweekly. I'm thinking I should be fine but at the same time, I'm wondering if I should change it to biweekly for the sake of building up a buffer. My current buffer is sitting at zero but usually I'd have 1 page, or more if I'm on break.
A side note, but related to my comic:
I've reuploaded them on my deviantART to include the right page size so text was legible.

Update

I've updated all the blogs posts in terms of labels, literally cutting the number of labels down to half or more than half. It was a bit lengthy in terms of the number of hours I had to use up. Now I just need to fix my portfolio posts and I'll be set to get some drawing or painting in today!

Portfolio blog is up and mostly done!

I finally found a good template for portfolio use, now I just need to separate the images into their own posts so the tiles are actually tiles rather than large columns!
I'll leave that for when I wake up later today though... 
Along with going through all my older posts and fixing the labels. That'll be a few hours of tediousness. 

Finally! Moved all blog posts into one blog!

I've finally moved everything , from first art blog on Blogger, from Wordpress (the .com one ) and from Weebly, onto this blog!
It took a while but thank goodness for having archive navigations on these blogs otherwise I would still be clicking to earlier Weebly blog posts! 

On a similar but not so similar note, it looks like the Blogger app can't save or post any blog posts so that's pretty lame. It looks like, until /if they fix the app, I'll have to resort to my Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook page. 

Fight in the Distance - different coloring; plans for when I wake up. Also Instagram?

1:00 AM EST

This would be the second time this week I completely lost track of what time it was and ended up finding out that it was 1 AM. Coincidental? Maybe.
Anyways, I digress. After spending two days (not 24 hours straight) on matching the previous 6 pages of my comic with page 7's style, and finally catching up earlier today, I was able to finally work on coloring 'Fight in the Distance' concept. It took a while for me to get the right blending mode since "Normal" didn't look right even with opacity adjustments. The final decisions were a color wash layer (low saturation color under a multiply layer I believe) and a soft light layer with continuous buildup with a 6-15% opacity brush. 
Tomorrow's plans, as in when I wake up later today, will consist of coloring page 8, which I've already paneled and lined earlier this week, sketching up a new cover page for chapter 1. Hopefully I don't sleep in too late tomorrow and can finish those two tasks before the evening rolls in so I can switch to working on the 'Fight in the Distance' concept.
I may or may not start up recording my progress again. I think for the most part I can't record brainstorming since that'd be boring for viewers, maybe. I need to try creating a character without line art/sketching with lines. Once I know I'm comfortable with a certain method, I'll record stuff then. I know I can do that for environment paintings, at the very least in gray scale (values).
In other news, I finally decided to get Instagram and plan on using it to take reference photo shots. It might be a while before I get any photos taken though. 

Site Organization - notes (Weebly)

12:21 AM  EST

Notes on what I actually organized:

• combined "works in Corel Painter" and "works in Paint Tool SAI" together into 1 gallery. 
• Labeled each piece from Painter and SAI with corresponding program.
• "Works in Painter" page deleted.
• All galleries have thumbnails on the left. Double Thumbnails for galleries that have many image.
• All galleries have slide transition during slideshow play-through. 
• Added missing sketches and works into Photoshop's gallery. 
• Adjusted spacing and aspect ratio of all galleries to: no spacing above, small spacing below and 16:9 ratio. 
• Renamed "Fan Art Works" page to "Fan Art".
• Fixed "Traditional Art" page's text. 
• Fixed "Artwork" page's text. 
• Fixed "Social Media & Previous Blogs" page's text. 
• Fixed "Portfolio & Bio" page's text. Updated date as a result. 

Update

5:24 pm est

Sadly I have an exam and a paper I need to work on over the next few days so I might not have any work posted during that time.

I got a Character Design request!; character designs on wife

I was asked by a friend to design two characters he had in mind for his short: a short fat husband and tall skinny wife.

I'm writing this down on the blog mostly for my own memory's sake as I doubt I'll remember all of this when I wake up.

So far there's the short's details he told me ( I wont say in case he doesn't want to reveal yet, and I probably can't do it justice if I tried to explain it),

From listening to the short story details and doing a quick couple of sketches, I've decided upon:

Wife;

- tall,skinny

- " oh, what is my husband doing now?" Sort of reaction

- shoulder length hair, light brown? Blonde? Sharp on ends , goes with face ; maybe a slight bob style

- sharp face shape ,

- long enough neck ( nothing too crazy!)

- necklace,pearl

- short scarf , yellow?green?

- turtle neck shirt , elbow length

- short heels ( she's already tall. I believe these types of shoes would be called "pumps"? Even though I'm a girl, I'm behind with fashion terminology )

- lengthy skirt, "pinstripe" (Again, I don't know the right fashion term, but the outside if the shirt looks like it has lines on it but not striped pattern or plaid)



Husband:

- fat , short - knees should show a bit of this

- " the idiotic husband"? ; comical w/o trying to be comical

- short hair, parted in middle; brown

- mustache

- rounded face , almost oval?

- slight chin

- barely any visible neck

- leather flat shoes , black

- vest, green?red?

- tie, black ........ Actually, No tie. ( too troublesome for the husband to wear given his size)

- white dress shirt, no cuffs,loose collars

- dress pants (since they're usually look loose enough I think? I wouldn't know.), black

Notes as well as variations of initial ideas

I felt that having my blog as the first thing people see wasn't quite what I wanted so to combat this, I moved my artwork page to the first to be seen rather than my blog page. Hopefully it looks better?

 /edit 
As I mentioned in my previous blog posts, I was asked by a friend to draw/create the two characters for his short. Here's the wife, version 1.

The coloring is a lot rougher from my usual methods. I also tried setting the tablet pen's sensitivity lower than usual, to force myself to "paint" lightly. Hopefully this prevents my hand from getting too tense and cramping. 

Here's version 2 of the wife, for my friend's short. As with the first one, I didn't focus on the coloring as much as I would typically with my other work since I was more focused with getting the idea through rather than the coloring. 

Updated blog/site's appearance

After seeing Weebly get updates, I decided to clean up my site a little more, especially in structuring the pages. For example, if you check out the  "Social Media & Previous Blogs" or the "Portfolio & Bio" page, it's not a large amount of text that requires a lot of scrolling! 

I plan to do the same for my portfolio site.

Update

The summer courses I'm taking now run only through Mon - Thurs (with an exception of one class, that has 2 Fridays....). In theory, I would have weekends free but unfortunately this weekend is preoccupied with studying for the midterm for one of my classes. 
We'll have to see about next weekend; at the moment I don't think I have something due after Memorial Day Weekend but I could be forgetting an large assignment.
Here's hoping!!

Updated portfolio

Added a group projects section on my portfolio site. 
In other news ~ my finals are done for this semester. Now I need to finish packing and move out of the dorms.

Onward to the weekend and a moment's relaxation before moving back to dorms for summer courses and graduation!

Gotta study, study, study ):

Sadly, I've got to study for my finals so as a result, this means no time to sketch or draw.

...Though I might have time after my final Wednesday night. We'll see. No promises at all!

Balance in Haven - coloring #2; Captioning work in Slideshows

I played around with a couple of coloring styles (mostly with layer arrangement and flow+ opacity of the brush).

Sadly, because I was playing around with a couple of coloring styles, I only got two images colored. However, I do like the speed for completion this style goes through! 

I was planning on captioning everything within the slideshows on this site but apparently I got way ahead of myself and most of them were already captioned. 

Now I have nothing to do to be productive during my moment of no motivation, ahaha.
I could always sleep early.... though it's only 10:51 PM at the moment.

New name for Facebook page

I've changed my name for my Facebook page. The url is still the same but now it says Lillian Chen - Flames of Fire Lily.

Organized gallery on deviantART

12:53 pm EST
I realized my featured gallery really shouldn't be holding everything I've ever posted on dA, but rather my more better works. So I ended up spending the past few minutes just copying/moving deviations into their respective folders or to the scrapbook.
Feel free to check my dA gallery!

Update/ Final post on WordPress blog

This is most likely my final post on this blog (WordPress) as I will be sticking to the Weebly blog instead. I rather not spread myself over too many blogs.

My weebly site (which has a blog tab): lillianchenartworks.weebly.com

It's the same url except instead of "wordpress.com" it's now weebly haha.

/Edit
I apologize ! I incorrectly linked the url! It's corrected now.

/Edit again.
I realized I spelled WordPress as WorkPress in the post title...

/edit 4/6/13 The link seems to have failed. lillianchenartworks.weebly.com