Garden HQ

My goal for this project was to emulate background paintings in animes I see from time to time. 

I started out with sketching out the basic idea and building on top of it, and trying to fill in as many open spaces as I could. 

At this point in the painting stage, I felt like I needed to design more, to make this garden more my own. (Prop designing!)

After designing more of the garden, I saw I had to bump up the contrast. (Yay for eyes catching onto values in color now!)

While it wasn't quite the style I was going for, I do appreciate how it looked in the end and the bits I got to design while painting. 

100 Portraits/ Character Designs - personal challenge

Starting out, this was originally going to be a portraits study but over time, I wanted to add more expression, story, personality to the portraits and thus, it became a character challenge as well, haha.
Full 100 paintings are on my Instagram (instagram.com/lillianlilychen) and Artstation (artstation.com/lchenart) as well.
( Direct link to the 5 albums )

I'm glad I did this personal challenge for many reasons, such as trying out various styles and brushes on Painter. It really let me go out and be creative in each of them, either through the character design itself or in the style I drew and painted in.

"Teens of Valor" HQ Hall layout

In redesigning my comic, "Teens of Valor", I needed to plan out the rooms, such as the main hall of the tower (which also needed a redesign). 

I wanted to focus on the lighting over the colors for the layout. 

Looking back, I wish I added more details to break up the floor more, such as pathways to lead the eyes. 

"Playing with Fire"

One of my original characters from my comic world, "Teens of Valor", I've been redesigning often. I never quite got her look down, but here I got her a bit closer to a likeable design. 

I put the struggles I had with the 100 Material Cubes challenge, as well as the oil still life paintings I painted while at AAU, and applied them to this painting.
I also played a lot with bounce light and went super strong with the colors. Stylistically, I loved how I painted the hair, eyes and headphones to really catch the eye. Background wise though, I wish I added something more than the gray shadow wash.

Year of Rooster - character painting

As an annual challenge, I wanted to paint something full instead of a background less character design.

The idea started out in my sketchbook, which I cleaned up in SAI before going forward in the painting. 

The original sketch felt scaled wrong and I wanted to try something more creative with the rooster itself. 

I eventually got the idea of making the rooster part of the floor, literally and adjusted my painting from there. 

Looking back, I enjoyed the amount of colors I got to paint with the stained glass. There was so much bounce lighting I got to play with, and could have played with more. 

100 Material Cubes - personal challenge

All 100 cubes in one

When I did this challenge, I wanted to have each set of cubes follow a theme, such as fruits, fish, building materials, etc. 

Over time, I found myself able to pick out important details a bit better. During the 100 cubes, I struggled a bit with turning a material into cube form. Looking back, many many months later, I realize what sort of materials I struggled with and tried to design around them.  Additionally, I realize that these cubes don't show lighting and shadow too well, if at all haha.