K-ON! keychains

Posted on March 22, 2012 by karlen

I made these keychains based on the characters from the anime called K-ON! They’re made with Grafix brand inkjet printable shrink plastic and coated with embossing powder to make them waterproof (otherwise the ink will smear off if the piece gets wet). The package instructions said the graphics should be printed lighter because baking process would make the colors more intense so I set them at 80% opacity and printed at 600×600 ppi. I was really nervous that the colors wouldn’t show much on the clear plastic, but when they were baked, they had the opacity of frosted glass, which looked kind of cool because the back part which wasn’t printed out had a colorfully blurryish silhouette.

It was a little bit disappointing that the details got lost in the shrinkage, but I suppose it ought to be expected. So here is an image of all the characters put together. I also made another set of character keychains which I will post a little later.

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Dragons Like Fish

Posted on March 10, 2012 by karlen

There is all this fish in the water, why is he just sitting there with that funny pole? I want fish, there is a lot of fish in there, there is — FISH!! 

How To Train Your Dragon is one of my favorite movies. For this illustration I was trying and capture the dragon-trainer relationship between Hiccup and Toothless (besides just one requiring the other in order to fly)…and also between dragons and fish I guess. I got stuck for a while on the colors but I think it turned out okay. On the right is the original pencil sketch that I colored over.

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Year of the Dragon

Posted on February 10, 2012 by karlen

2012 marks the Year of the Dragon on the Lunar Calendar! Here is a pencil drawing I made to start off my year. When I was younger, I used to secretly feel bad for people who had lame zodiac animals such as the rat or pig. Seriously though, what animal on that zodiac can beat a dragon?

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Arcanine

Posted on January 8, 2012 by karlen

A painting I made as a surprise gift for my friend, done with watercolor and gouache on cold press watercolor paper. I used masking fluid to make the little dots…wish this paper had a little more texture on it.

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Warm Wishes

Posted on December 25, 2011 by karlen

Polar bear likes to make sure his friend doesn’t miss the holidays just because he hibernates. I hope every has great holidays with their family and friends, and also will have a Happy New Year.

I make a drawing for Christmas cards every year and have been doing so for the last 6 years maybe. I drew out the idea in my sketchbook and transferred it using tracing paper that is shaded with soft graphite in the back. This is a great alternative if you don’t have transfer paper. The size of my sketchbook was exactly the right size to transfer it directly to the watercolor paper!

 

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ACEO: Fuu

Posted on December 10, 2011 by karlen

 

Here is an ACEO of Fuu from Samurai Champloo. I took some photos of it while waiting for some of the washes to dry. Sometime I will also make one of Mugen and Jin to have a complete set!

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Mermaid Explorer Club

Posted on November 17, 2011 by karlen

Mermaid Explorer Club currently has three members and is always open to new members. All creatures are welcome – an ability to swim is the only requirement. Human applicants should shout their name into an empty conch shell they find on the beach and throw it back into the ocean.

Here is an image I had from a year ago but finally finished up for Artist Alley. It was for one of the Chiustreams with the topic of mermaid. Here is what the image looked like previously:

I changed the colors and also used this tutorial for the water reflections http://zummerfish.deviantart.com/#/d3b9sqx

 

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Anago boy Ko

Posted on November 11, 2011 by karlen

This anago (eel) maker thing is pretty popular right now: http://anago.crap.jp/

And making eel gijinka or moe anthropomorphism is all the rage on tumblr…I haven’t got a tumblr account but people started uploading them to deviantART and I thought they were pretty cute.

It was also a good exercise to experiment with a different coloring technique.

His name is Ko, and he likes sandwiches. I think he’s eating a particularly tasty one right now.

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Baba Yaga

Posted on October 30, 2011 by karlen

Happy Halloween! I saved this picture for the occasion.

 A witch-like character in Slavic folkore, Baba Yaga lives in a house with chicken legs, flies around on a giant pestle, kidnaps children and eats them. This was the second piece I did for the Midnight Phantasmagory a while back. Once again, here is the process I went through for this picture.

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Howling Stone

Posted on October 22, 2011 by karlen

The howling stone scenes are the most beautiful scenes in Zelda Twilight Princess, so I really wanted to try and illustrate it. Also because I thought it was extremely necessary to have at least one Zelda artwork to bring to the NYCC/NYAF Artist Alley. (I’m happy to say that this one sold pretty well too.)

I had a really hard time with this picture: the composition, values and colors were very difficult to do. The main thing was to keep the feel and colors of the game, without it being too dark. It also had to be a vertical format picture, so I had to figure out how and where to stack the elements. The scene in the game is very dark and green, but I wanted to have more variety in colors but keeping the atmosphere.

Hyrule Castle must have been the most time-consuming part of this picture. I drew it at least three times before finally giving up and modeling it in blender. But even after that, the details still had to be painted to make it fit with the rest of the picture. Here is what it looked like after the initial values and colors were laid down, with the 3D model:

There was a point where I was so into the details of the picture that I wasn’t able to draw a straight line anymore because my hand hurt so much (had to Ctrl Z like 6 times before I got the line I wanted). I also used a really helpful tutorial for painting trees made by jezebel on DeviantART. Her art is very beautiful, her gallery is definitely a must-see.

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