Reflections 2023

I felt the need to write another reflection post because I experienced some interesting developments recently.

By coincidence, I wrote "Reflections 2022" almost exactly a year ago. My plan was to create a series of images that capture bitter-sweet feelings from my childhood.

I am pleased with the images I painted in this one year period, so much so that I replaced the portfolio on my website with some of these images: "Little Star Dreaming", "Mid Autumn Festival", "Warm Ramen in a Cold Winter's Day", "Year of the Rabbit", "Little Witch with Frizzy Hair", "Broom Ride!", "Spell Cast!", "Mermaid", and "Hi, Mr Whale!".

Along the way, I found myself liking "witch" as a theme and adopted "witch series" as a theme. The theme in my mind morphed into "draw witches with things associated with childhood".

In terms of painting, I developed the following standard practices:

• Colorize inked lines.
• Overlay a low-opacity layer of blurred inked lines.
• Invert some part of inked lines as glow lines.
• Be conscious of applying cool and warm colors.

In terms of monetization, I started a print shop at INPRNT.

I followed this plan until end of May 2023 with "Hi, Mr Whale!".

In June 2023, I wanted to start accepting commissions and had to adapt the plan. I did not get a strong positive reaction from the childhood-themed images. I need to explore adjacent ideas:

• Keep the witch theme and experiment with graphic elements in character illustrations. Outcome: "Punk Witch" and "Flame Witch".
• Draw images that make audience recall their childhood. Outcome: Cammy fanart. My logic is admittedly roundabout. Street Fighter is a nostalgia for me. Recently "Street Fighter 6" was released. so why not draw a SF6 fanart? Looking at the new roster, I liked Cammy's new design and so Cammy fanart it was.
• Draw images of special dates with children's point of view. Outcome: "National Day". In the coming months, I plan to draw one for Mid Autumn Festival and one for Halloween.

While preparing for sample images to accept commissions, I found out that I had only one sample bust image, so I painted another one, "Everything Goes According to Vegeta's Plan".

Mid August I started accepting commissions. I learned quickly why commission artist do not use Instagram for commissions. I received at least 3 direct message requests that turned out to be scams. Their characteristics are:

• The requested image is not related to my art. The requests are pet pictures, even though I do not draw pets.
• The requesters are eager to pay more than my price. A common tactic is to ask for multiple images.

The first time I received such a DM, I followed through with accepting the order and requesting a down payment. The scammer (a she) insisted on using PayPal. After I sent my PayPal link, she claimed to have sent $200. To add to the urgency, she attempted to audio call me via Instagram. She then sent this line: "The money has been deducted from my account kindly check your paypal email address inbox and spam too,the last mail I got from PayPal got hold on my spam". I did receive an email in my spam. It was a phishing email sent from a Gmail account pretending to be PayPal. I don't remember the content of the email, but I remember it saying that the payment of USD200 exceeded my PayPal daily limit and that I should click links to remedy this.

It was interesting and infuriating to learn about art scams firsthand. I know now why commission artists do not use Instagram to accept orders. Too much time wasted on scams. I still do not have a good solution to this issue.

Sadly, I have not gotten a legitimate commission order yet.

Finally, let me share another story. By luck, "Hi, Mr Whale!" got a Daily Deviation feature on DeviantArt. The effect was gratifying: I received a lot of love and comments, some of which seem legit. Of course a lot more are most certainly bots. In addition, I received a number of chat requests that are most likely scams. Some are even exact copy-paste. All of them ask to purchase one of my artworks. I do not know the aim of these requests; I simply ignore them.

I share this story because I start to see the scams as a balancer to the gratification of getting a Daily Deviation. I realize that (1) getting attention was luck and (2) many people use social media to get attention.

As for my future plan, I am still hoping to accept commissions. I am figuring out how to strike the balance between convenient ordering and filtering out scams.

Opening Commission!

I am opening a commission service. While preparing the commission sheet, I was surprised that I found only one artwork for "Bust" example. So why not draw a bust sample? It should be fun and easy.

Final painting

I wanted an image of Vegeta from Dragon Ball Z. It should give you an idea how I draw well-known character using my style. Sketching the thumbnails was more difficult than I expected. The pieces I had fun with (#1 & #4) were the ones in which I exaggerated Vegeta being cunning/evil rather than making him sympathetic.

Thumbnails

As the make-believe client, I picked thumbnail #4. I like the exaggerated cruel grin.

I then proceeded to draw the image in actual size: the square is 17 x 17 cm (around 6.7 x 6.7 inches).

Pencil round 1 

The client side of me thought I could push the drawing further, so I did. I enlarged the fist to add more depth to the image. The electric arcs hopefully added some interest.

Pencil round 2

And here is the inked drawing.

Inked drawing

The next stage is coloring. I started with rough color thumbnails. I used different dominant colors to try out different atmospheres:

• #1 is Super Saiyan Blue look.
• #2 is classic Super Saiyan look.
• #3 is Super Saiyan God look. The hair color in this form is reddish black, so I went for complementary green background.
• #4 is combination of #2 and #3.

Color thumbnails

I had difficulty choosing. Of course my numbering above hints at my choice; but it was not clear during the process. I personally prefer yellow hair; but it is too close to the skin color. In the end I had to choose what in my opinion was the better color scheme.

I am still in the process of painting this image as I write this post. I will update with my progress below.

Update on 10 Sep 2023

Having chosen the color scheme, next step was tidying up the colors. It has the side effect of defining area selections to help with painting. I do not always take this step; sometimes I want to paint loosely.

Flat colors

Add shadows

Adjust lit area; add rim lighting; shift lighting color to green

Paint background; add gradient between face (area of focus) & fist (foreground);
paint eyes; paint light pass on hair & fist; darken fist

At this point, I thought the painting was close to done because I have worked on all areas of the image. However, I felt something was missing. This scenario is difficult to tell on hindsight because on real time back then, I felt uncertainty I no longer feel now that I am writing this.

Remove rim light on lip edge, replace with shadows;
add darker shadow area; darken fist

Change lighting on hair; paint fist; brighten image

As final touches, I decided to darken the frame, background sky, and the foreground fist to emphasize the face. Further, I educed opacity of the lightning to reduce its prominence.

Final painting

And so, we have the final painting. I hope this post gives you a better idea what it is like to order a commission from me. You can do so by going to Commission page on my website.

S Curves, Witches, and Varsity Jacket

Final painting

It started with S curves. I have been studying images that caught my attention while browsing Reddit and Twitter, figuring out what attracted my attention. One element was S curves that span the width or height of an image. So I drew such an image.

As usual, I started with thumbnails.

Thumbnails

From the top, the S curve starts with the hair, continues through the face and neck, and ends midway through the torso. I extend it to the leg to our right so that curve spans the whole figure. These sketches show the proportions I am most accustomed to (i.e. action manga proportions) as well as the kind of poses I naturally think of (i.e. action manga poses). Hence the clenched fists and "don't mess with me" expression.

I stubbornly added a magic wand because I wanted to stick with witches as a theme. The second sketch (on the right) gave me the idea of varsity jacket.

For background, I went for more curves, making it the theme. However, what concrete shapes would these curves take? I took inspiration from Ayane's drawings (see her works on Twitter). The long, curvy, blobby shapes suggest water; so I drew shapes with water in mind.

At this point I must confess that I forgot to scan the pencil. I did take picture of this work in progress image, in which the background elements were still in pencil.

Inking in progress

Compared to the thumbnails, I softened the girl's expression. She had multiple earrings because she was rebellious punk; while the bracelet was a talisman, probably magical.

I do not have much to say about inking process, so here is the inked piece.

The inked drawing

Next step was painting. I started with painting color thumbnails.

Color thumbnails

Unlike with previous paintings, this time I liked both color schemes. I could only paint one, though. So I went with the one on the right. I do not recall a specific reason; maybe because it felt more like summer than the left one? 

I tried to by conscious about warm and cool colors this time around. Usually varsity jackets have white sleeves, which may grab too much attention. I did not want this, so I gave the sleeves dark shades of orange. To differentiate the jacket from the hair, I made it red.

Adjusting jacket

I experimented with what Marco Bucci called "color vibration". (You can watch his video on YouTube: How to Make Colors Vibrate.) I applied it to the background water. I liked it; my mistake was adding it too soon for this painting. I ended up painting over it later on.

Next, I inverted some part of the inked lines and made them glow lines. I found it great in adding interest to the image. (I feel I should be careful not to rely on this trick to much.)

Glow lines and vignette

I painted cyan rim light to the hair to get cool-warm contrast even though physically it does not really make sense.

At this point, I arrived at the never-ending state in which I kept seeing things to improve or fix. Still, here are the major aspects I worked on to get to the final painting:

• Painted details on lower part of background water.
• Painted over the middle and upper part of background water. Bye bye color vibration.
• Painted blush on the face.
• Painted glow particles.

So here is the final painting. Do you like it? Let me know in the comments!

Final painting