Tea-bending

I love being silly in the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender. My Avatar persona wouldn’t be someone who is badass and can fight. Instead, it’s a girl from the Northern Water Tribe who, through a little teamwork with her friend from the Fire Nation, has perfected the art of making good tea using bending. Avatar (c) the wonderful Mike and Bryan.

Fanart Tuesday!

I could seriously write essays on why Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of the greatest shows of all time. Of all time. Doing so would simultaneously make me revere the creators and hate M Night Shymalamafailsauce for bombing the movie so spectacularly. But this is an art blog, so… I made art. I’ve been experimenting with semi-realism a lot, but drawing real people bore me. Drawing fictional people are more fun.

I am one of those girls who ship Zuko and Katara. As to Toph and Sokka, no, not really, but they were fun to color. Aang, Mai, Azula and Ty Lee remain sketches until I figure out something new to do with them. Maybe I will paint them in Photoshop.

sketchy sketches:

Expect more Avatar art along with my usual mumbo-jumbo!

let summer begin!

my brain was already in full summer mode a few days ago (which is bad because I only finished my last paper at, oh, 5:30 this morning) but nevertheless! Here is some new artwork; a short comic and some sketches. I’ve been really obsessed with detail lately, having read Will Eisner’s A Contract With God and Craig Thompson’s Blankets– both artists are less about the screentones, which I have used a lot in previous work, and more about details in the lineart. It’s fun to sit and see how many perfectly straight lines you can draw.

…wait, is that not fun for anyone else?

Onward! here’s a short comic, featuring one of my old characters:

I went to Books of Wonder with Mike the other day and picked up A Practical Guide to Wizardry, and this is what happened:

Lolita-fashion inspired:

another old character gets a makeover:

Also here’s an obligatory Paula Deen drawing in honor of Mother’s Day:

Until next time! I’m freeeeeeeee, finally!

Mini-comic finished + summer illustration project

So, I did choose to continue the comic I started last time, after all (hence the really subtle title). As to an official title for the comic… um… yeah I don’t know. I’m terrible with titles. It can’t be as blunt as THE BREAKUP HOMG or as stupidly shoujo and melodramatic as HEALING THE HEART.

the working title right now is “Paper Trail”.

I’ve posted the first few pages last time, but I’ll post the entirety of it here. Hope y’all enjoy reading it! I’m going to make more mini-comics.

Last summer, I did the 30 day drawing challenge, which, while I did not finish, I got through a majority of. This summer my project will be to illustrate His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. I don’t know whether I’m going to go chapter by chapter, or two illustrations per chapter, or a conglomeration of it. I love those books beyond anything else; they’ve helped me more than any other books I’ve ever read, and this summer is a great time to make an homage to them.

Here’s the comic:

In other news:

• today is beautiful
• I am not stressing about finals… yet
• I am excited for the summer like WHOA
• I am working on a new crochet project
• A good chocolate croissant can bring a world of joy
• Kyoto cherry rose tea is heavenly
• SUMMER SUMMER SUMMER SUMMER
• Neyrelle and I entered the Paula Deen website giveaway sweepstakes.
• The NYC buses flash their destinations in all-caps, so I read them in Billy Mays’ voice. I realized this morning crossing the street that I kind of miss Billy Mays.

Oh, also, this lovely new tea shop just opened up on St. Mark’s Place, between 1st Av and Av A. It’s called Graffitea, and if you’re in the area, it is so worth checking out. Alice and Ilana are wonderful and their tea selection is amazing and delicious. SO YOU SHOULD ALL GO. THEY ARE NEW. GIVE THEM BUSINESS.

See you next week!

self-deprecating comics and a few Lolitas

Glad I got back into the swing of scanning and uploading my drawings again, and glad I’ve taken time to do some more drawings/comics! I went to MoCCA Fest this weekend, and apart from meeting the lovely Betty Felon of Fashion Tips From Comic Strips, I also chatted with quite a few artists and got some inspiration. If you guys are up to reading about it, I blogged it here (ps: follow me on Tumblr for the frequent Paula Deen/Hayao Miyazaki/random writing/comics reviews spam)!

On to the drawings! I don’t think my mom ever wanted me to become a comics artist, but oh well! Here’s what the rest of the kids in my college have been up to:

I am also prone to fits of raeg. For previous raeg, see here; same reason, same problem:

In contrast to the RAEG, have some lolitas:

I thought about how much high school sucked in my psych lecture (we were going over SPSS… I probably will have no idea how to do the statistical analysis when it comes time. But my data suck anyway. I can never become a researcher, alas) :

Last, but not least, have a comic of the Boy:

While it’s hailing out, have some doodles

Good lord. I promised I’d be updating this blog more frequently once the school year started, didn’t I? Well, that failed spectacularly. -_-

This semester I’ve been juggling three different jobs (freelancing, tutoring and store-clerk-ing) along with all my classes (Chinese is killing me. KILLING ME) and a semi-social life that mostly consists of watching Paula Deen on Friday nights while devouring hamburgers, tea and cookies. Let me tell you, she’s inspired some bizarro illustrations that I am in the process of drawing. Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.

So in between Paula Deen and class and dancing to Taylor Swift when the store is empty on Fridays and watching all the lights in Manhattan from somewhere in Brooklyn with a boy who loves the Rangers (romantic, right?) I… kind of failed to update. And draw for myself.

But I have a minute now, and I am in the process of getting through a couple more freelance projects… so hopefully I’ll be updating a bit more often. Fingers crossed. By next Wednesday I will probably be tearing my hair out over Chinese and psych lab and updating will be the last thing on my mind, but a girl can dream. The power to stop time would be really handy right about now.

Anyways! Drawings: some fanart (I’ve loved Sakura ever since Cardcaptor Sakura; imagine how excited I was in high school to see her again in Tsubasa); a diagram of how much I am a disappointment to my mother; and lastly a steampunk revamp of an old, old character. In that order:

Adventure Time! And other bored class doodles

I have been alternating between hating everyone in physics and hating everyone in world cultures; class has really been a sorry affair so far, but things are getting better. I made a friend in physics and we make jabs at freshman philosophy majors (not aimed at all at the freshman philosophy major who sits behind us and makes allusions to obscure forms of psychoanalysis that he says don’t work, namedrop, namedrop namedrop, Freud Camus Aristotle Sophocles Socrates Aristophanes Sun Tzu Laozi etc.)

World Cultures recitation, however, was lovely on Wednesday. Our TA, Ayako, said she had a treat for us– that we could spend fifteen minutes in class quietly reading from Kenko’s Essays in Idleness and then we would, GASP, get to go outside, enjoy the beautiful weather, and write little diary entries for half an hour, inspired by Kenko’s observational style! I was so happy. Except my happiness was nearly spoiled by the kids in my class who “did not understand the assignment”; “is this going to be on the exam”, etc. DIE. Anyway. Here are some more doodles from class and from late night ideas fueled by chocolate cupcakes and fried sesame seed dough things.

I love the cute stringy |: face style of Adventuretime.

I also still have a fondness for blazers and loose socks, the byproduct of too much anime in high school:

And clothes. I think I saw this somewhere on Yesstyle.com

And a random super-fine pen comic I doodled in writing class.

I hope class is less stab-inducing for everyone else!

in-class idleness

this semester I am taking a physics and astronomy class (astrophysics… big important term!) that’s really an excuse to mash ninth grade earth science with eighth grade physics equations. I am not a science person… but COME ON.

My other classes are also doodle-friendly.

Here is the majority of my three weeks’ productiveness since school started.

I’ve really been wanting to draw Lyra and Pantalaimon on the banks of the world of the dead for awhile now and got around to it in fiction class.