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.

Changing my blog

After receiving some tips on my blog, I decided to go ahead and make this blog into a project based blog.

Currently, I'll make the new posts into a project based style, but I do plan on editing my older posts to fit the style to keep things consistent.  This should help with organizing and trimming down those labels, haha. However, it will take some time, as I'll have to go through hundreds of posts!
As such, this would be the last 'housekeeping' post!

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.

"Hotel Hallway" - WIPs

 

rough line drawing

 Addition of color and textures

 

Painting over, edits, getting rid of the line.