Paper recycling

I went to Whole Foods almost every week for groceries, and they had stop giving out plastic bags. So we ended up with a whole lot of paper bags, and a danger of running out plastic bags for everyday garbage. We don't know what we should do when the doom day comes, we try not to think about it. Btw, Whole Foods is really expensive, but they have better selection of fruits and produce than Safeway. But sometimes I just can't bring myself to buy one $3.00 avocado! It's too much!

Back to fruit

Watercolor is hard 'cause the color is quite transparent, and wet color looks different when dried. So many times I have to stroke again and again to make the color stay, and that's not good. But watercolor is so much more easier to bring around than oil! I just really have to work on water control so I can get just the right thickness of paint, so I don't have to rework it.

Some old stuff

These are some old work stuff that I'm only allow to publish recently. Some 3D work and photoshop paintings.

Yosemite Trip

I went to Yosemite for four days, I hiked the Naveda falls and got two very very sore legs. I also attended their free art classes and painted the falls with other artists. It's a good feeling to paint with other people, I just wish I can find paint buddies that also need to sleep in on the weekends. (I didn't like the little painting on the left corner but it'll be weird to leave it blank, so pretend you didn't see it.)

Lemons are hard

More like, painting translucence is hard. I will have to paint more lemons to practice that. I spend 2 hours fumbling with that lemon, I wish there was a translucence dial I can turn up for that material like I do at work. Oh hey but peppers are not easy either! Hi pepper!

Bunny looking far far away. Perhaps waiting for the train.

Oh man, I'm painting some weird stuff....

I wanted to say that I'm completely out of my comfort zone for doing these, but I don't really have a comfort zone to begin with... hmm. I guess everything in this real paint world is still very new to me, and that I haven't been practicing long enough. I'll be getting a new white lamp, so when I paint at night my whites can hopefully appear as white.

In other news, my boss lend me his advanced-level origami book on prehistoric dinosaurs, I was so excited about it that I ran my left arm into something hard. The bruise is turning yellow and slowly subsiding after a week.

Color exercise is tough

Oh man these color exercises are brutal. When I showed my watercolor book to Nathan, one of his comment was that I need to pay attention to color temperature, otherwise my warms and colds mix together and I get mud. And these exercises really exposed that. I need to think carefully and be aware of color temperature and don't mix them at random. Keep practicing!

Nathan's Color Workshop

This past weekend I went to Nathan's color workshop in LA. There was so much information, I need another few months to practice and digest. The two smaller ones are color exercises we did, just splashing colors and try to make them work. Nathan himself showed us a ton of these little ones he did, and none of them are bad! They are all great ones, lots of them. I'll be starting to do these too. The bigger one on the right is our lovely pirate again. It's so difficult to do these well, in class, with pressure.

In other news: I tried In and Out Burger for the first time. The burger tasted good, but surprisingly small. It's not enough to fill me up, but it feels wrong to buy two burgers, so I don't know if I'll go back.

I love balloons

I wanted to try out new ways of using my flat brushes. By "new" ways I mean violently jabbing my brush on the paper with one eyes closed and hope something decent comes out of it. That's how I did the tree leaves on the top right. I rather like it, maybe I should develop my new jabbing technique further.


Bunny loves balloons!!

Hey look at my cuckoo clock!

I was being a rebel and didn't paint this week. I'm putting my 3D work up just in case people haven't visit my website yet.

SketchCrawl #18

I went to the 18th SketchCrawl here in SF yesterday, we gathered by the fountain of Ghirardelli at 11am. The pictures turned out different than how I want them to look, but this is the first time I painted outside after practicing painting photos at home, and I almost didn't panic! There were a lot of tourists gossiping and peeking, but it wasn't as bad as I imagined. It was very cold and windy, and I have to blow my nose a lot.
These are painted from photos of my Hawaii trip, in the comfort at my own home, without nose-blowing.

Bunny found a place to set up his slide, weeee!

Keep practicing

Why does plein air painting has to be done so early in the morning? Of all the plein air groups I've heard of, none of them starts in the afternoon. I'm sure lots of plein air painters has regular day jobs, so how come they don't want to sleep in on the weekends?? Is the lighting in the morning really that much better? Surely painting outside anytime of day would be just as good.... Zzzzz....

Oh no! Not that super nice guy!!

I read the news about Justin Wright passed away yesterday. I was staring at his picture and I thought "Nooo!"

I met Justin once, during last summer's SketchCrawl. We were at a cafe exchanging sketch books and listening to Ronnie del Carmen talking about art. Justin saw my 2 headed baby sticker on my sketch book and he's like "You work at Double Fine? You work for Tim Schafer??!!" I was a new hire at the time and I was grinning with pride that someone from Pixar was jealous of me! (I think he's hard core gamer).

Bye Justin, you would've liked our new game. :-(

Landscape Practices

Bunny got himself stuck in a garbage bin and was trying to get out.

My dad said I should practice painting landscape from photo first before I panic when going out to paint real things. Good thing I always took photos of lots of landscape before.

Bunny and practice

There was this phoneless phone station by the train platform, and I thought it would be fun to imagine how a bunny would be disappointed if there's no phone available for him.
There was going to be a series of pears, but I ate them all before it was done. :-D

Plein Air Bay Area?

Does anyone know if the Bay area have any Plein Air group? I saw them PA Austin and PA Sonoma even has their own website, and was wondering if we have something like that around the Bay area.

These two studies took me more than one hour each, yikes. I guess painting more will help me go faster? One can only hope.

Practices

Still practicing almost everyday. I'm also looking at lots of artworks online. The strange thing is, the more paintings I look at, the more often I saw paintings in the real world. I now see lots of possible painting places all around me. Don't know if it's good or bad for me 'cause I already daydream a lot to begin with.

BTW, that glass soap bottle I bought from IKEA sucks. It's the prettiest one I found, but the soap that comes out the spout are dark green and yellow, and has a metallic smell. Eww. I decided to stop using it after a year. Good glass to paint from though.

Grandma Eyeball Rupture

My 94 years old Grandma in Taiwan fell down at home again last week and hurt her left eye. Everyone at home was helping her, taking turns staying overnight in the hospital. I couldn't do much being this far away, so I think I'll send her my flower painting, as a get well card. :-P Mom says Grandma's doing fine, she's excited about all the attention and was being very chatty, and interested in why her hospital roommates all have a left eye patch, same as her. My cousin typed 'Grandma eyeball rupture' on Skype. I found the Chinese-English message both scary and funny.
Man, I don't know how to paint flowers. I need more practice, and I blame my hubby not getting me real flowers so I have to paint from photo. :-) Hopefully my 'loose interpretations' of flowers will be okay for Grandma, 'cause she can't see that well right now anyway....

Monkey see, monkey do.

Last week my buddy Simon mentioned this awesome lady Carol and her blog. It was simply too awesome. I love paintings with big bold strokes and I'd love to learn how to paint with such a care-free attitude. For some reason I imagine people who paint with big strokes are like 'Oh sure. Call me sometime or whatever, I won't wait by the phone though.' And people who fuss over little painting details are like 'Why didn't you call me?? I was waiting for you all night!!' Strange association I know, but to me painting style says lot about the painters' personality. I prefer the first one.

And I'm still doing my small painting everyday, some days better than others. I like the upper right corner one. That one makes me look like the 'I won't wait by the phone' type. :-)

Practices

Since Nathan's workshop last Saturday, I've been doing these little paintings one a day. That's what Nathan was doing for many years, and that's what I'll try to do if I want my painting skill to be remotely close to his. He said he did one of these little paintings everyday, to solve a compositional problem or a color problem. Well, after week of doing this, I felt like I CREATED a compositional or a color problem everyday, sometimes both. I guess I'll just have to keep doing it. Also, I've been looking at some nice photos on line for painting subject, if my paintings looks like your photo, don't get angry at me not mentioning your name, it'll be too much for me to keep up.... I know that painting from real life is much better than painting from photos, but unless I live on a cross-country train, most of the time my view in the evening is pretty limited. Plus we can learn composition from good photos.

I did the sketch of Fred while mine plus three other computers that were on a some circuit had a power outage. The problem with partial outage is that no one else will play with you while you're bored, waiting for power to come back.