Where do we float

Bunny Floats

I dreamed of this situation years ago, where I was trapped on a floating desk after a storm, in a bottomless room with a sky light, with emerald green sea water gleaming all around me. I hope one day my painting ability would be good enough to translate these colors out of my head.

Fish out of window

I saw WALL-E twice, once with my company and once with husband. I LOVE the movie, but I gotta say I do not enjoy theater at all. The floors were littered, the sound went off for five minutes during the climax, the people beside me kept glancing at their glowing phone, the kids behind me kept kicking my seat, etc. I want to watch movie at home without disturbance! I want to pay for downloading blue-ray versions for the newest release at home, and say bye-bye to the theaters.

Awesomest rafting trip!

I just got back from my company's sumer white water rafting trip and it was AWESOME!!! We camped two days and had so much fun seeing each other flip in their boats and we helped each other out, man we had love for each other like we never knew! I love Double Fine!!! WOOT!

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.