“Cuppioctopoda” ~ A3 size. Pencil / Marker / Acrylic / Coffee

{ UPDATED SKETCH from the initial post } A running joke with a friend of mine although not as original as we thought it was after checking it on search engines. However, I still feel a full fledged portrait painting comin’ on.. perhaps a future album cover?

Lantern Dance, 40x60cm, Oil

Sangmo Tigers, 60x40cm, Oil

Unmasked, 30x40cm, Oil

Warren

Warren’s Girlfriend

Harold

SaHee, the nurse, from Nigeria

The theme of the conference was “contentment” so I couldn’t get the maze idea out of my head. To be content, you have to somehow try to enjoy your life no matter where you may be stuck. That feels like a maze or labyrinth to me. It wasn’t what the pastor had in mind at first but the other members of the church expressed their interest in it.

Last May a friend shared info with me on the Art House Co-Op’s “Sketchbook Project”. I thought it was pretty rad idea so I signed myself up. It’s basically a ‘sketchbook concert tour…but with sketchbooks’ as they advertise it. It’s definitely a unique way to share your artwork along with other artists around the globe besides the common conventions of the internet, café galleries, and what have you..
My apologies for the terrible quality of the images. My nikon recently went for a swim in Seoul a couple weeks ago. It still has a bad case of ‘jughead’ so to speak. Thus I resorted to my iphone.

The cover. That was a fun one.

A couple Japanese ladies I met in..well..Japan 2010 – They were kind enough to sign their names below the sketch. Anyone read Japanese? / A model for the CUD Fashion Show 2009.

Sketch I did on the Shinkansen (Japan’s bullet train).

Catholic University of Daegu Fashion Show, April 2009

Another model.

Woman lighting incense and tending to the shrines at Ankor Wat (temple) in Siem Reap, Cambodia 2010

Ornate temple roofing, Taipei, Taiwan 2009

You can now see the whole book, even the terrible bleed-throughs, in much better quality at the arthouse site here.

~ Brandon

Recently sent out 3 illustrations for the Davinci Coffee illustration contest here in SKorea. They are horrible iPhone shots but here are the images of my process the past few weeks.

The Ring

Of course, I’ll begin with a rough pencil sketch to decide the rhythm and mood I’m looking for. For Ring I thought it’d be fun to try out gold prismacolor pencil to start the board drawing and I actually used it when I finished as well. Once the final pencil drawing was down I basically tried to destroy it by throwing paint at it and stamping my own coffee mug all over the place. Add color, highlights, tweak this and that, and finished up by adding the red stripe frame. I think it’s a nice touch to tie it all in. If you remember, I painted in a red stripe frame along the border of King as well.

Splash

Pretty much the same process as Ring except instead of a final pencil drawing, I used pen & ink which I’ve been wanting to use for a long time. I’m sure you’ll see more pen/ink uses by me in the near future. It gives a decent amount of control if you want but you can let the pen do what it wants as well if you don’t mind using those little surprising mistakes to elevate your work a bit toward getting a bit messy. I enjoy that kind of versatility. I actually finished Splash in a few days, just a couple hours each day. I’m proud that I got a decent result but there are quite a few areas that I would’ve liked to elaborate on as far as tightening the details.

Ring is much more traditional compositionally and topically, but I had a little more fun emotionally with this one given the imaginative and whimsical imagery. I don’t provide myself with much of this kind of controlled chaos type artwork. It was also a visit back to some past work for Returning the Knife 4 years ago where the animals were maliciously fighting and biting each other in a sea of whatever that began with a single drop. The single drop is also shown here in Splash falling from the coffee mug above the couple and the clam.

Timeless
The drawing on the poster of the contest was the winner from last year so I thought I should also submit a drawing that seemed to take me 2 minutes. However, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. This next one took under an hour.