MUGIC - the Wonderful Adventures of Officer Mu

LAST ONE THANK GOD

I'm so funny it's not even funny

We each made a comic for our final project. The minimum page count was 4, but because I'm an idiot I decided that 8 would be more appropriate. It didn't help that I spent 3 hours one day sketching the storyboard for another idea instead of this one. #efficientplanning

So yeah, by the end of this I was getting thumps in my brain, the kind you get when someone's banging on your door trying to rob you of all things happy. 

But I have to say, it was worth it in the end. I'm really happy with how my comic ultimately turned out - it's about Officer Mu, a magical creature that world of such colored-pencil cuteness that you wonder why he's the police chief in a worlds of black-white inked monsters - until you find out why :P. I really like the fact that I used so many media to do this (colored pencil, pen, pencil, colored charcoal, marker), and I'm overjoyed that I actually enjoyed using pen this time - THANK HEAVENS FOR THE ALL-MIGHTY FABER-CASTELL PENS they're so smooth and wonderful

Really relieved that the monsters turned out all right, since I've never drawn monsters before and I wasn't sure I could come up with enough designs - but I guess you can just take some organs, vegetation, and reptiles and just slap them together and there you have it.

 I'm also proud that despite the fact that I did so many extra pages, I managed to fit in a bonus page and a back cover logo (which I didn't take a picture of). So it comes to a total of 12 pages, and it's printed out and stapled all nice and shiny. :))) The only thing is that it is apparently hard to read (source: parents) in terms of Mu's hand-drawn text and some of the panels' orders. :( Nonetheless, still feels like the first semi-professional thing I've done, even though the process was all scrambly and not professional at all :P 

Kind of inspired to make another few comics now though, this was so fun even though my body was so miserable

Greeting Card for Un-Holiday

We all made one greeting card each for a holiday we invented. I originally had a lot of lovely ideas, such as happy colonoscopy day, and I also wanted to draw innards and rib bones, but well dreams don't always come true DO THEY. I went with happy emotional breakdown day in the end, 'cause we all need a positive spin on our darkest moments right? :D It may not be visible in the picture, but for the inside black background I used scraps of velvet, which I think helps make the card heavier in atmosphere. I also like that I made the brain a frown to contrast with the bottom laugh. However, I kind of failed on the speech bubble part, since I just could not glue it properly onto all the velvet, so now when you open the card, the little tail sticks out all weird and unwanted. Also, since the background's so dark, the face itself needs more darkness in its shading.

In-class Watercolor Model Study

A watercolor study of a model who was sporting some tats that I unfortunately did not have the time to paint in. I'm pretty satisfied with the result, although his legs look short and funky and he's a little too yellow. Gotta work on subtle colors more. I like that I made the background textured and the little chunks of red I put in his body though. The figure pops, which is nice since usually my colors are too mid tone(?).

In-class Studies

I don't even know what order this came in anymore

In-class studies (I didn't put all of them up, just a few). We had some pretty fabulous models. Times ranged from 30 seconds to 20 minutes.

WHY ARE MY SHORTER ONES BETTER THAN THE LONGER ONES

But yeah, pretty happy with my short ones, gotta work on maintaining the energy, or rather, channelling it into shading, in the longer ones.

TRICKED YA!!

WAIT NO THIS WAS THE ACTUAL THIRD ASSIGNMENT

Oops.

So yeah, in-class charcoal study. Really not much to say. I'm pretty happy with the shading and highlights, but it needs more contrast (a running problem with my work), and the composition is kinda boring (another running problem). MERRR

Editorial Illustration

Fourth(?) assignment: Choose an article and make an illustration for it.

I chose a New Yorker short piece about trigger warnings on university books. I think the piece itself is pretty explanatory.

Thoughts: Honestly, I think this was my weakest piece. Although I think I was pretty successful with getting the idea of the article across, and I like the harsh black/white bottom of the book and the poses of some of the students, I'm unsatisfied with the hanging blonde girl and black guy, as well as the cloud background. All in all, I don't think what's outside of the black-white bottom of the book matches its intensity and dynamism. Verdict: MEH

Watercolor Study

I think this was the third assignment. Not sure. Our palette was artificially limited to only include blue and orange, if I remember correctly.

Not so much to say about this one - it was fun to use watercolors, and I think I painted the objects pretty well, especially in terms of the highlights. I wish I had tried to push blending orange and blue a little more to produce neutrals, since the only non-orange/blue object in the piece is a chopped cupthing. In terms of composition, I also think the piece might be a little too heavy on the left side, so that needs to be watched out for next time. Composition and I are not very good friends. Yet? Lastly, I should probably have painted the background some color. Yellow, maybe? Or a lighter shade of the cup? Right now the background and table are too similar in color.

The Urban Monk

Second assignment: Make a black-white pen illustration that ties together four randomly generated terms. Mine were: ecru (the color of unbleached silk), ahimsa (the vow not to kill living things), chaffer (to haggle), and aglet (the plastic protective casing around the end of your shoelace).

In the end I decided to tie these together by making the piece about an urban monk finding peace within the destructive, materialistic city. BONUS GAME: GUESS WHERE EACH TERM IS

Spoiler, if you were too lazy or I didn't make them obvious enough: The monk is wearing an unbleached silk robe :D, there are aglets on the ends of the strands(?) of his silk robe hoodie ('cause he's an urban monk…. GET IT??? Just look at his head tat, can't get more urban than that), the mouths behind him are chaffering but he is oblivious to it, and he refuses to even harm the bugs (which are also silkworms btw) invading his personal space. Also flowers.

BTW THIS ASSIGNMENT GAVE ME A REALLY FUDGEBUGGING HARD TIME. I had only used pen once before, at which I terribly failed, and during the process of inking this (I did a pencil draft first because I wasn't confident, so I basically had to draw the piece twice), I ran out of at least 8 pens. They were all those really old decrepit pens too, the ones that your parents leave uncovered  in the back of drawers so by the time you take them out the ink is all dry, if there's any left at all. My hand muscles were spasming by the end of this.

Hand twitching aside, I was pretty happy with the final result. I'm kind of proud that I managed not only to tie the terms together, but to also actually have an idea behind the piece so that it could technically stand alone as an actual thing rather than just an assignment to put random words together. Obviously some technical things would be the fact that the outlines of the plants in front are way thicker than the ones behind them ('cause I used marker for those and then crappy incompetent half-dead pens for the rest), that can be easily fixed if I go back and thicken some of the background vegetation with my newly bought wonderful faber-castell pens.

My name is...

LET THE ART DUMP BEGIN

Our first assignment: making a black-white illustration out of either or entire name or our first initial. I chose to do my entire english name after my inquiry about using my chinese names was rejected. I basically just took a picture of me when I was in Battery Park with some friends, used it as the outline of the illustration, and then filled it in with my name's letters and scenes from the different places I've lived in, mainly Beijing and New York.

Overall, I'm pretty satisfied with this piece, although I feel it still needs to pop a little more (i.e. more contrast), the blank top of my kind of bugs me, and there's too much white space outside of the figure. Eh.

(just realize this would have been a good piece to start this blog with - OH WELL)

Comic Prep

Just read chapters 3 and 4 of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics in preparation for our class's comic project, and I have to say I really enjoyed it! Kind of spazzed out a little when he mentioned Osamu Tezuka. IT MADE ME REALLY HAPPY OK.
Anyways, I found some techniques/ideas that he explained particularly interesting and would like to somehow squeeze them into my comic:
1) Aspect-to-aspect transitions (the idea of expressing a mood rather than action really appeals to me)
2) Non-sequiturs (this as well, since it verges on the absurd/surreal/fantastical)
3) The gutter (love the idea of manipulating negative space - because with the idea I currently have for my comic, the most intense emotional drama happens invisibly)
4) Panel shapes and borders (just to heighten any mood or idea I'm trying to convey)

I'm going to try to post some photos of some of the stuff I did earlier during this program. We'll see how successful I am with that.

Communication Mural

Ok this is kind of overdue - we actually finished the mural last friday, but I was too busy working on the pre-posted animation to make an update about it. I designed and painted the mural with Audrey, Krissie, Diana, and Jahiakil. Our theme was communication, and we each sketched some of the specific objects we planned on including in our design beforehand.

First though, the following is my sketch of what our project was generally planned to look like after we all combined our initial ideas (I'm not including the actual photoshopped conglomeration because I don't have it):

In preparation, I sketched a bunch of useless metal panels, a bionic heart, and some ribs:

And so it began.

Have some progress pics.

THE END

In order to keep the mural cohesive and not psychedelically out of control, we decided on a largely gray palette with specks of yellow, red, and green, but towards the end we threw in some purple as well. I'm quite happy with how it turned out in the end - I think everyone got some of their ideas into the piece, so it was an even distribution of planning, and all the ideas managed to fit together really well. The grays give the mural a really techno-futuristic look that I like, but the little bits of color prevent it from seeming cold. I love the symmetry and vertical energy as well. 

Although some parts still need some work, like the anatomy and background coloring, I think correcting them wouldn't have been very difficult if we just had more time. We were rather rushed towards the end: our group took the longest time to complete the mural, partly due to stupid mistakes like forgetting to put pins under the gessoed parachute canvas which resulted in rips and subsequent recalibrations of the original sketch, and partly just due to the amount of detail in the painting itself. So I guess we may need to work on our efficiency more. 

In terms of teamwork, I think we cooperated pretty well. Although at the beginning there was a little awkward friction in terms of whose ideas would be incorporated more (can't say I didn't contribute to that >_>), Ken came around and helped us find a way to get all our ideas in, and once we began actually painting, everyone became better team players, so that towards the end, I'd say we were working pretty well together.

ON TO THE GREETING CARDS!!!!

ARYZ

http://www.unurth.com/Aryz-Civitavecchia-Italy

A mural painted by Aryz in Civitavechhia, Italy. It was part of WAVES, a project centering on urban requalification and promoting education and the general public's participation in communal sites. I'm not sure what the theme of this piece was - I think it may have been mainly intended to just fascinate the eye and provide a feeling of whimsy and fantasy to what looks like a nondescript neighborhood.

The mural itself is gorgeous and complex in its details - the dinosaur is made up of god knows how many flowers, each one distinct, with thin veinlike stems running through the body. The blossoms squeeze out of the skeleton, floating outwards. Yet the color scheme and overall structure/composition of the piece seem surprisingly simple - the dinosaur stands in a straightforward erect position, while the palette consists mainly of greens, pinks, blues, purples, and some orange, along with the orange-beige background the building itself provides.
I really like this piece, in case that wasn't inferable. I'm a sucker for overwhelming detail; skeletons are cool, not to mention dinosaur skeletons; and pink and purple are almost my favorite colors. The little cap, the bunny ears, and the bow tie add a dimension of play to the mural that complements and augments the fantasy of the blooming dinosaur skeleton. I feel like the colors were also well chosen - though it may at first seem like a cool-palette piece because of the greens and blue-purples, the interspersion of the pinks work with the color of the building itself to balance the illustration. Perhaps the only thing I find fault with this piece would be its composition - I think it was a good idea to lift the leg of the dinosaur in order to sidestep the issue of the building's overhang, but overall I feel the placement/movement/posture of the dinosaur pales in vibrancy and dynamism to the detail and color.