What's the thinking.

character designs

2011-07-30T10:31:00.000-07:00

I was never a character designer in the first place. When I got out of school, I aim to be a environment viz dev artist because I thought doing environment is less difficult. Funny thing is, a lot of my current projects throw a bunch of characters at me. As I'm picking it up i found, hey, it's really fun and cool! Since then I started to check out other character artists and expanding my toolbox!

character head shape doodles

2011-07-01T05:12:00.000-07:00

The Kong's

2011-06-16T11:02:00.000-07:00

Haven't been updating this blog for such long time...

Here's a piece from a series of art work I'm working now called

"The Kong's: A group of Exceptional Individual".

It was inspired by people here in Hong Kong, not limit to girls btw. I will try to capture as much interesting individual and make a series of these extraordinary people around us.

Project Patchwork Designs

2011-05-04T09:28:00.000-07:00

City of Hero (the iphone app)

2011-04-06T22:27:00.001-07:00

Have been really lazy updating this blog. Here's some sneak and peek on my latest works. These concepts are created for the iphone game project i'm currently on. They are really fun to work with.

portrait

2011-02-24T17:50:00.000-08:00

some background paintings

2011-01-21T01:55:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas from Team Patchwork

2010-12-19T20:42:00.001-08:00

Her portrait

2010-10-07T01:13:00.001-07:00

happy mid-autumn festival

2010-09-22T09:19:00.001-07:00

color comp for "Dreaming"

2010-08-17T21:46:00.000-07:00

2010-07-29T09:16:00.000-07:00

2010-07-12T21:33:00.000-07:00

2010-07-12T09:47:00.001-07:00

2010-07-08T08:24:00.001-07:00

more work stuff

2010-06-26T08:29:00.000-07:00

These are some colorkeys I did for both Gatchaman and Cat Tale, which never made its way out.

more environment

2010-02-23T22:38:00.001-08:00

environment quicky

2010-02-23T10:30:00.000-08:00

sealed entrance

2010-02-22T11:10:00.000-08:00

more courtyard

2010-02-22T03:57:00.000-08:00

Courtyard sketch

2010-02-20T06:37:00.000-08:00

some more development piece, more to come!

higher, higher

2010-02-15T06:56:00.000-08:00

2010-02-09T05:08:00.000-08:00

I also did development paintings for other projects, here are a few of them .

Astro Boy

2010-02-09T04:15:00.000-08:00

After 2 years working at IMAGI, finally need to say goodbye. This place has a significant meaning to me as it was my first job landed as a visual development artist. Amazing people, fun work place and a team full of enthusiasm and energy! It's really sad the studio has to close down like this. It could have much more to offer to the Hong Kong animation industry...

Big part of my time was on Astro Boy, which I think it was amazing. I designed many props and did color keys on the film. so here they are. I hope you all enjoy them as much as I do.

Self protrait

2010-01-26T07:24:00.000-08:00

I realized I do not have any drawings/paintings of myself, so here are some self-portraits. It's actually really fun to paint yourself with expression.

these are speedies and accuracy is the key.

more new stuff

2010-01-18T07:19:00.000-08:00

New post, finally

2010-01-14T04:31:00.001-08:00

It's just a head

2009-08-02T09:58:00.000-07:00

City on the water

2009-07-28T09:13:00.000-07:00

Discovery

2009-07-13T09:27:00.001-07:00

The original

Nautilus in repair

2009-07-03T05:07:00.001-07:00

Nautilus in repair 2rd pass

2009-06-26T11:33:00.000-07:00

ok, I adjusted the angle a bit on this one to show a more dynamic scale on the ship. it'll stay this way for now. more to come.

Nautilus in repair

2009-06-25T10:35:00.000-07:00

Here is rough layout render to get the basic perpective nailed down. It will have a lot of painting later on.

Nautilus WIP

2009-06-15T09:29:00.000-07:00

Nautilus has been my favorite spaceship since I watched The Secret of Blue Water. So here I built a model of the ship for the purpose of putting into a full-scale painting later on. Even this model is pretty low-res, i'm pretty satisfy with it.

2009-06-13T09:22:00.000-07:00

I figure it'll be nice to post some step-by-step for this piece as I've never thought people would be interested in how I work. well, basically I suppost almost every digital artist would start their work in a similar fashion, mine is no different.

I started off doing a thumbnail sketch. The purpose is to see how's the composition and color working and as well as the overall design. This piece is about a battle between two spaceships. I want people to see the blue ship firing missils at the red ship and the smoke trail would serves as a lead. The main challenge of this piece is there are so many things going on, the red ship in the middle ground is competing attention with the blue ship in the foreground. So I have to pay extra attention to their proportion and contrast.
Having all these things layout, I pretty much know what I want. Of course, I left some space for whatever comes to mind later. After finishing the sketch, I asked my co-workers for opinion and the problem here is everything is 50/50, things are too evely spread out. so I have to re-work the design and make sure all subjects have more dynamic placement and well connected.

After examined the problem and made adjustment, it's time to drill into some detail. Painting any man-made objects in perspective aren't easy; so in order to get the right perspective, I used Google SketchUp to built two low-resolution spaceships. What I like about SketchUp is it's basically a "Maya portable", very easy to handle and it has everything I need to get the job done. I placed the city image as a back drop and spaceships in the scene, moving them around, tweaking the camera angle so I could get my composition nailed.

Once I'm happy with the rough layout, it's time to put in some color! Painting environment is always fun to do because instead of painting one object, where you only have to worry about the design, environment demands picture balance, value, color saturation, DOF, contrast and edges. So there is a lot of things to beware of. Many people often got caught up with small details and forgot about the grand design of the picture. After 4 hours of painting, I'm happy with the result; the story is told, two ships are better connected, value looks right, composition is there, foreground, middle ground and background are well defined. I add smokes in the surrounding to give some story and mood.

2009-06-10T10:30:00.000-07:00

2009-06-09T09:05:00.000-07:00

2009-06-08T10:04:00.000-07:00

Work isn't much these days; Astroboy is wrapping up and the team starting on our next feature film - Gatchaman! thanks for the little down time we have, i managed to post another piece of the story i'm working on.

2009-06-03T10:49:00.000-07:00

For those of you who don't know about The Secret Blue Water, it's my favorite anime since I was a kid. This is my rendition of the main characters, Nadia and John. I'm working on the other ones as well.

2009-05-30T09:29:00.001-07:00

2009-05-28T04:23:00.000-07:00

ok...haven't post for a long time. So here's a piece I did for a short story I going to put together.

2008-12-01T08:05:00.000-08:00

2008-08-24T09:15:00.000-07:00

2008-01-22T19:33:00.000-08:00

2008-01-22T19:32:00.000-08:00

2008-01-22T19:31:00.000-08:00

2007-11-05T16:46:00.000-08:00

2007-11-02T17:35:00.000-07:00

2007-08-29T19:51:00.000-07:00

2007-08-25T15:50:00.000-07:00