a night out ...

The last finished illustration I'm going to make for this year. I like the simplicity of it and I remembered to crop it in the end. I always leave that last especially when a piece isn't planned out, but at least I get around to it. It's so important to crop 'cause anyone can put it all in; a smart person knows what to leave out. It's going to be a new year and a new decade soon enough and that should be fun and exciting.

Coffee and Snow

This might be the last illustration I work on for the year. It's a simple winter piece 'cause I really wanted to do a winter piece with fun snow in it. I shall have it done by tomorrow before I leave for a fun trip.

Robot, Tree and a Mage

The top drawing is drawing in my sketchbook, which I've yet to finish filling out (6 pages left). It was suppose to be this fun quirky idea 'cause it seemed really funny and witty for a robot to use his hand as an angel/star for a Christmas tree. I got myself an Al Hirschfeld book recently, which is amazing. He's had probably the longest career is illustration of anybody, for 80 years, which is pretty crazy. So I've been trying to learn from his line work, which I've loved the first moment I saw it. There is honestly something really beautiful in his lines and as one of my teacher use to say, "You've got only two things: line and tone" and no one does line better than Hirschfeld. I can never be him, but I like trying to experiment with line with heirarchy of lines that vary in stroke and importance.

Girl (sketch XV)

Just a quick sketch. I didn't realize how much I missed using hatching in my work until I did this again. It gives it this nice textural quality to the overall piece. On a website note, I should probably update it sometime in the new year with new pieces.

Fundraiser

I haven't had much time to draw lately due to the new part-time job so here's a quick sketch for now.

Origami in Flight

This is actually an old idea I had a year or two ago. I'm not sure if I posted the original drawing or not, but this is like a version 2 of the idea, I guess. I've had this idea to turn it into a story for awhile now and maybe I'll finally get around to writing it.

Christmas Cards 2009

It's probably a bit early, but here are the two designs I have for Christmas cards for this year. They're three dollars a card; each card is roughly 4 1/4" x 5 1/2" in size. The back of the dragon cards has my contact info. The snowman card has the kid running on the front and the snowman on the back so it opens up to show the whole scene, which a few people have told me is pretty cool. Anyone interested can e-mail me: bhongillustration at (@) gmail dot (.) com.

Sidenote: The photos are exactly amazing 'cause I'm really bad taking photos and my camera is over 5 years old.

very dragon Christmas

Dragon Christmas

Just having some fun for Christmas.

Winter Wonderland

I think I should have waited until December 1st to post this, but oh well. The first winter illustration of the seasonal cycle 'cause I did create some witner illustrations all the way back in Jan and Feb. I thought the idea was funny when I drew the first thumbnail.

HEAL!

A quick sketch in honour of my computer being fixed.

Skating Sheep

Job hunting has been preventing me from drawing more as well as computer health problems, which should be fixed now, well the computer health. I should hopefully get some more winter/Christmas stuff sooner or later before year's end.

Thoughts and Gold

This is a fun little illustration I wish I had gotten around to finishing the rest in the series. It was meant to be a birthday present for a friend that I run out of time to make. I had a lot of fun making some of the illustrations in it including this and this . It was a lot of fun to work with ink and use a lot of hatching again; in some ways, it was a learning experience to figure out the pen some more. There's always more to learn.

Lamb and Fish

The top illustration I designed for a friend's Christmas card and had to end up modifying the finished illustration, which this one is the original illustration, 'cause they never got back to me on time. Luckily I had some old patterns I ended up using for the background so it wasn't a lot of extra work, but it sure annoyed the hell out of me when people don't reply back on time and then ask for relatively big changes. Oh well ... The second illustration was for an idea of fairy tale characters after the little red riding one I did earlier this a month or two ago, but it didn't pan out too well. I decided to modify it to more of a scene, which ended up as the sleeping beauty illustration.

Skating

And the winter illustrations are starting now even though it's still really nice outside, (finally some nice fall weather) and winter isn't only until 4 days before Christmas, the archaic form of X-Mas.

Sleeping Beauty - Finished

I've been finished for awhile, but haven't found the time to upload this yet. I want to do a few more illustrations like this on fairy tales and will hopefully get around to it before year's end.

Sleeping Beauty

...

EDIT:

Walk in the Snow

I draw when I can't sleep, which sort of means I'm an artist according to one of my profs from when I was still in school. To paraphrase him, J.C. Knaff, "You know [when you're an artist] when you'd rather draw than go to sleep." But I think all artist, of any kind (visual, written, musical, dramatic, etc.) have always said roughly the same thing, that what makes an artist is that drive to not quit and keep on going. I should get some sleep, I can badly philosophical when I don't have enough.

Fall

I should start on some winter illustrations soon and get back to my usual palette of blues though it's been fun working with the oranges, yellows, browns and reds.

Running in the Rain - Close up

Here's a close up of one of the figures in the illustration. She's about 80% finished with some touch up and extra parts that need to be drawn in as well as shading to do. It's turning out really well and hopefully I won't take too long to finish up the piece.

Running in the Rain

See this illustration follows my regular process quite well 'cause I'm at the stage where it looks like a complete and total mess and I'm starting to question it all.

Red Riding Hood

EDIT:



I'm slowly working my way on this illustration. It's turning out pretty nice so far, which is a first. I normally go from cool sketch to "what the hell is this?!" colouring to "oh, that's what I wanted to do" colouring to "good, it turned out right" final.

Age 6?

So I was doodling the other night and drew this little kid that sort of looks like me when I was about almost 20 years younger. I can't remember if I did smile more or did frown a lot as a kid or scowl naturally like I do now.

Rain and a Lamb

The rain illustration is coming along well and I found my own way to create rain in Adobe Illustrator though it's something I thought of awhile ago, but never tried out. It's simple and nice and I'm thankful for the easyness of larging things in Illustrator without problems. I knew something was wrong as soon as I saw it and scale of objects in relations with each other was the key thing wrong in my mind. It's a bit of laziness, but I don't have to go back and redraw it again. The second drawing is a rough for a Halloween card for a friend. I don't think she'd mind me showing the rejected idea and I'll ask before I show the final version of the final piece though there's a bit of animation I want to try with it first.

Leaf Monster - Finished

I realized that I should post more finished stuff though I am a bit lazy once I'm finished and then I also like to save up finished pieces for website update. So here's something finished ... well almost so I guess that's a bit of a lie. I like how the leaf monster turned out with the hints of colour here and there. I still might take this into Photoshop to throw some textures onto things. I don't like how the colours of the guy turned out if only 'cause I wanted to limit the palette of him and it turned out really dull with two colours of green and grey. I think I just need one more colour to go with it.

Rainy Fishes

It's fun to come up with ideas like this one. There's this odd sense of fun with it though I think the technical parts of this is going to annoy me with the refraction, reflection and figuring out how to create rain in Illustrator.

Leaf & Muse

I've been a bit slow with this piece since I've been working on a new pet project recently. For this piece, I spent the longest time just wondering if I should have kept the inked line art or redo the whole thing again in illustrator, which I ended up doing. The ink wasn't close enough for me, at least the straight line ground was all crocked. I should honestly use a ruler more for stuff like that and think before I ink. On an interesting note, I submitted an art piece and it got accepted for an art auction: Muse 2009. It's nice to do some good.

Leaf Monster

Just something quick and fun I developped from a doodle.

Football not Soccer

I should really do a piece about soccer but I think I don't want to bother with rendering a soccer ball. I've been scaling down the size of the heads in my work lately and I don't know why I don't catch this in the initial drawing stages, but I really notice it more when I start to render the head in the final piece. There's even a note in piece for making the head smaller.

Fall Princess

This is turning out into a really simple and pretty piece. I was looking over my illustrations earlier and realized that I seldom if ever create a fall or spring inspired piece so here is one.

Smoking in the City - Finished

No more fushia, unfortunately.

Smoking in the City

I really want to find a way to use that bright glowing fushia, but I doubt it'll happen when I'm finished.

Religion and Map

I got shown a really cool back of old illustrated map recently and I wanted to do another map inspired by one of them. It was an interesting circular map though I think that one was more depicting just a city instead of a city and surrounding area. I enjoy creating these maps since they require a more old school approach in illustration over something really heavily conceptual. I've also been trying to create an illustration based on Guan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy in Asian Buddhism/Taoism. There are variations on the face and just a few ideas on how to pose one of the arms.

Finished Slices

So here some slices of the last few illustrations I've worked on. Looking at the three together, I know I lost something in the 3rd illustration 'cause the figure is just less graphic than the figures in the first two. It's probably why it felt a lot harder to work on since it didn't feel "right". Regardless it was fun to work on them and to do a more art nouveau style illustration though I'm sure I didn't use the right colours for the feel of it. Now onward to the next illustrations.

Stuck

I've been stuck on this for about a week now. I think I really don't want to finish it, but I don't want to abandon it eiter. It's looking a lot better now though there feels like stuff I'd want to redraw. I probably wont finish the 4th illustration I had planned in this series. Mostly I want to do something new or try to figure out something new I want to work on. It's hard to draw when drawing isn't fun and I miss that.

Demon

Just a quick sketch and colouring since I haven't done much this week.

Swimming to nowhere ...

I really don't know how to finish it. It feels like it really need something and I don't know what. I've got a feeling I'm probably going to end up abandoning this piece.

EDITED:



So I think I finally got this to where I'm at least satisfied with it.

Blue

I'm having more fun playing with graphic shape as well as negative and positive space. It's something I don't do as much since I'm more focused with linework. The sketch I did in my sketchbook looks pretty nice with the way the line is worked especially in the fishes. Hopefully this will be done by the tend of the day or tomorrow morning.

Green

I was bored and wanted to try something out .... not sure where it's going if going anywhere at all.

Alchemy

So here's the second illustration in this coffee series. The first involved witches and magic so this one involves a bit of magical science in the alchemy. It was an unexpected series, but somehow the sketches were going in this direction. I have two more in the planning stages, but I wonder if I'll get around to finish them soon or leave them for another day or maybe year.