Lisa

Lisa & Leroy

Random portrait of director Mike Figgis

profile of a man

happy birthday to us

Birryshop

 A few concept drawings I did for a local Shanghainese client.

birthday portraits

I've learned to draw over the years through a handful of drawing classes, experimenting, lot of trial and error, and the internet, of course. Too much of the last one perhaps. I fall in love with a new illustrator maybe once a month and my latest crush among the many is sarah maycock. I really admire the loose but controlled quality of her work. Being mostly self-taught there's a lot of back and forth and uncertainty that arises, but I hope that I have been positively influenced by these people whose work I admire and that I am able to incorporate things that I've learned from studying their work in a fair and meaningful way.

Sarah's style of doing representational portraits (reminiscent of Francesco Clemente and Elizabeth Peyton, whose work I also love) is something I'm trying to do more of in my own work. One of her more recent posts on live sketching inspired me to do a quick drawing for my friend Ai-Vy's birthday. This wasn't live but rather just done from memory, but I tried my best to keep it loose and quick-ish (approx 10 mins)...this is also great practice for me to just go straight to paint instead of sketching it out in pencil first...I think it turned out alright :)

Hello

After a couple of years of jealously poring over other people's illustration blogs and filling my pinterest with other people's amazing sketches, drawings and paintings, I figure I'd better get to it and start my own blog.

So here we go. I thought it would be appropriate to start off with a sketch of yours truly and something that is indicative of my style - which has been forever in the making - and is still, and probably always will be, a work in progress. I've read so often that you shouldn't stress about finding your style. That it will just come. That's been somewhat true for me. I think I've gone in circles and have finally come back to my one true love - drawing. Mostly with pencil. But, I have adopted watercolor along the way. You'll also see some digital touches here and there. I was very resistant to it at first, but I think the two can live harmoniously as long as you have other bits of you to tie it all together....