Drawing & Painting

I have been doodling since I was a kid. Most of my spare time during middle school was devoted to an unfinished fantasy manga. Neither the artwork nor the story were good in my own judgement today, and I never shared it with anybody during the several years of creation or afterwards. But I think it was the purest joy and desire for drawing and dreaming.

During my PhD years, I started developing interest in other styles (non-cartoon), and learning to draw and paint more seriously by taking (online and in-person) classes, and practicing a lot. Now I draw regularly and post my artwork on Instagram.

Digital Painting

I primarily paint digitally, using both iPad Pro with Apple Pencil, and Wacom Intuos drawing tablet (connected to a computer). I'm interested in a wide range of topics, including still life, landscape, movie scenes, and mostly human figures and portraits. I prefer styles that balance between realistic perspectives / colors / lights and abstract shape designs / brushwork.

Traditional Media

I do occasionally paint with traditional media, using oil, Acrylic, watercolor.

Drawing and Inking

While I prefer painting digitally, I mostly do drawing and inking traditionally on my sketchbooks. I mostly draw human figures or scene with people. In particular, I do travel sketches while on the go. A milestone in my learning process is starting to use ink pen (or any non-undoable media) directly and practice timed figure drawing (e.g. 60-second pose drawing with SketchDaily). If you like drawing, do check out inktober.

Manga / Cartoon

I can't really tell if I like reading mangas (and watching animes) because I like drawing them or the other way around. Here are some of my earlier cartoon studies.

Frame-by-frame animation

I'm always interested in making animations. However, I have only managed to make a handful of them over the years, and they are all very short. Frame-by-frame animation is very difficult, requires a lot of patience and efforts (e.g. 20 frames per second), and much deeper understanding in some areas (e.g. how do common actions and gestures unfold, how to move camera, etc.) than single-frame illustration. I hope to learn more and make more animations in the future. :)