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WOW it has been a while since I last updated this blog! I actually did quite a bit of drawings last month but because they are still not ready for the public so I can't put them up just yet. Hopefully I can start sharing about them within the next two weeks. :)

Meanwhile, here is a banner that I recently designed for my church's sunday school! It actually took me three whole months to do the second revision--NOT because it was hard to design but simply because my life was too busy so I kept postponing it... =_= I hope both the adults and the kids found this banner appealing and useful... If not, oh well, it's done anyway! LOLs

Ants & Anteater Silhouettes

Some character silhouettes.  

Happy Ant Family

A little concept drawing for an upcoming project :)

Breakfast & Drawing

Work is extremely busy these days that I have been slaving away in the office till 7pm almost everyday. The worst part is that even when I am off, I still have to think or plan about my work, leaving me with no time to draw for myself... :(

So this morning I decided to take a break from everything, and let myself to sketch away while I was having breakfast at a quiet cafe. Although these drawings were rather small, their power of rejuvenating my spirit was immense.

Thank God for this morning!
 

Howl and Sophie

I've recently re-watched Miyazaki's "Howl's Moving Castle" for the third time and yes, the walking-in-the-sky scene STILL gave me butterflies every time I watched it (and the Waltz music just makes everything all the more beautiful)!

___________________

Love truly is magical.  Once you've found Love, you will suddenly have the courage to do things that you had never dreamed of doing before.  Obstacle becomes nothing; fear disappears to nowhere; failure is no big deal.  You were transformed by Love, and your love will in turn transform everything into something better for the sake of Love.  After all, we were made to love Love, find Love, adore Love and be loved by Love.


(P.S.) I absolutely adore Miyazaki's Calcifer! He is so cute!

Scatches

Did a quick sketch of my senior at work today, but he was too shy to show his face when I tried to compare him with my drawing.. D:

Nothing Is Impossible

Even a cat could fly!
 

Catwoman

I finally watched "Batman: The Dark Knight Rises" last week and I didn't really like the Catwoman costume this time; I think it was too "ordinary-superheroy."  But I do like how she is slightly obsessed with Wayne's pearl necklace. :)

So I decided to do a drawing of her wearing the pearl necklace in my ideal Catwoman costume.  Which version of the drawing do you like better?

Ver.1


Ver.2 


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Process stuff:

Less is More

Yes, it's true!

Hot Air Balloon

"I'll be out of my mind 
And you'll be out of ideas 
Pretty soon 
So let's spend 
The afternoon in a cold hot air balloon"
--"Hot Air Balloon" by Owlcity

 

Doodles

Some mindless doodles on a lazy Sunday afternoon...

"Le Ballon Rouge" (1956)

Randomly saw this almost-slient French short film today. You can check out the delightful adventure between a boy and his red balloon on Vimeo.

Disney Cuties Pluto Pez

Something that I drew last year has now been made into actual product, woohoo! :)

Behind A Drawing

Learning to appreciate my drawing from a different perspective.

Scatches

A strong typhoon hit Hong Kong yesterday and the strongest typhoon warning signal (T10) was in force most of the night.  This was my first experience with T10 and unfortunately I had to spend the night by myself!  Sitting in an empty apartment listening to the sound of rain and wind hitting madly on the windows IS SCARY!  I kept thinking what if one of the windows in front of me suddenly broke, then all the broken glasses would be flying straight to my face!  Thankfully that didn't happen, but I sure scared the crap out of myself. :P  So in order to calm myself down, I decided to pick up a pen and started drawing people's happy faces.  Yes, it worked. :)

**(P.S.) I sincerely hope all the homeless people in HK are still doing OK right now...**

Wedding Guest Poster

I had the honor to design a few things for my brother's wedding and one of them being the wedding guest poster.  Though I was assigned to this task more than a month ago, the busyness of life (and some level of procrastination LOL) kept holding me back from starting it sooner... In the end, I had only three days to finish this 100cm x 70cm poster and oh boy, IT WAS INSANELY STRESSFUL!!  And because I had to get it printed in HK before I fly back to Vancouver, I must meet the Friday deadline or else I would be DEAD!!  Thankfully it's done now.  I just need to bring it back to Canada and then my mission will be accomplished!

I wanted the wedding couple to look like a pair of love birds
so I made this sketch for my own reference.

Finished drawing.

Final product!  I am very pleased with the way it turned out!

Close-up.

Scatches

*Photo reference from The Satorialist

Happy Daddy's Day!

Here is a late drawing for Father's Day...  I actually started on this drawing two weeks prior, but I still couldn't finish it on time... *sigh*  My life will only get busier for the rest of month until I fly home on the 29th!  Oh boy, I CAN'T WAIT TO BE HOME SWEET HOME!
























Back to this drawing.

Before I started sketching for this drawing, I was looking at different Father's Day cards on the internet and there, I found some cards that have the quote "Dad/ Father, you're [the] king" on them. This quote really captured my heart because it was different from the usual greetings--like "Happy Father's Day," "You are the No.1 dad" or "Thanks Dad."  The word "king" also reminded me of the fearsome-yet-so-loveable King of kings. :)  I wish one day I could love my earthly father like I love my Heavenly Father, and vice versa.

Happy belated Father's Day, dad!

Happy Birthday to Mama!

It was my mom's birthday on Wednesday and since I know she adores Ellie with a passion, I decided to let Ellie to drop her a personal birthday wish.  I hope my mom wouldn't mind this came a bit late.. :P

Ellie at FCUK

Caught Ellie working as a part-time model for French Connection!

Happy Mama's Day!

I was going to draw something nicer than a sketch for Mother's Day, but I have been so occupied by work lately that I had absolutely no time for leisure drawing... Hope my mom will go easy on me this time... :(

Happy Mother's Day to my cute mama! :D

Vince and His Ukulele

Musical instruments are so hard to draw...

Hello Ellie

I miss her pretty face...

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Work has been so busy that I hardly have any energy left to draw for fun when I returned home at night... This makes me sad but there's nothing I could do about it at the moment... But if only I could have Saturdays off, if only...

Drawing Animals

Some zoo animals.

*Previous watercolour painting on this kind of penguin...

Fantastic Creatures

I went to the "Fantastic Creatures" exhibition at the HK Museum of Art on Saturday, and I spent about an hour sketching different exhibiting items. I personally think the Greek and Japanese ones were the most aesthetic and well-crafted (which explains why my sketches were either of the Greek/ Japanese...lol). And at the end of the show there was a little game in which you could create your own fantastic creature (or play it online).





After thought:
It had been a long while since I last visited an art exhibition and I must say this visit was a very refreshing one for me. Although I was mostly copying what was in front of me, the mere act of drawing still brought joy to me. And then there was an elementary school boy who walked by and saw my drawings, and he said to his dad: "Wow, she draws so well!" This, for me, was a huge & precious compliment because HK people (or all traditional Chinese) are generally very conservative with verbal praises--even if they complimented you, it'd be questionably genuine... But the fact that this compliment came from a kid and not an adult, I knew it must be a real one. :)

Looking forward to the next art exhibition visit!

Church Banners

Our church needed some new banners for both inside and outside of the building, but this time I was so privileged to have two other amazing graphic designers--Melanie Islip and Sophie Li--to be part of the brainstorming session. It was a very cool collaboration. You girls rock! ;)

Before:


After:

Good Friday Service

Come join us on Good Friday to meditate on His great love for you and me.

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This scene from "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe" made me want to cry... God just loves us too much!

Happy Words

Created this with an iPad app - "Happy Words"

I could spend forever playing with this app! lol

Carpet Design

About two months ago, I was assigned to come up with a carpet design for our office's waiting area and this is what I did.

Before:


After:


It was an interesting side project for me because I got to try a few new things : interior design, communicating with a [carpet] manufacturing factory and bargaining. Out of those three, I think bargaining is the hardest because I am so easily persuaded...! LOL But in the end, I still gave it a go anyway and of course failed completely in my first trial talking to their Marketing/Sales guy. (Lesson learned: NEVER bargain with a Marketing/Sales staff because they are all scarily persuasive!) But then by the grace of GOD, I was arranged to meet with their Exporting staff and he was much more negotiable than the other guy. After a bit of back-and-forth, he ended up giving me a $1,200 discount and that's not the end of it: he also offered to install the carpet for us for free (which normally would cost a few hundreds if they had their legit worker to do it)! Sure, this Exporting guy is not a pro and his installation was slightly less than perfect (because it was his first time installing a carpet), still, it was a HUGE favour that he did for us!

Lesson for the day:
If things always turned out just fine in the first trial, then there wouldn't be "pleasant surprises."

The Sweetest Hand Warmer

I miss walking around in cold Vancouver with a cup of hot dark chocolate in my hands. :)

*Photo reference from The Sartorialist

Shatin Church Logo and Website Redesign

I have been helping Shatin Anglican Church to redesign their logo and website layout for the past four months and now that everything is done, I will share a little bit about the design process behind it.

Phase 1: Brainstorming/ Sketching


Phase 2: I picked one of the sketches and polished it in Illustrator. I presented them at our first meeting but they were banned because we don't want our logo to look like a church building when we don't actually have one...


Phase 3(a): More brainstorming/ sketching


Phase 3(b) : More brainstorming/ sketching in Illustrator




Phase 3.1: Meanwhile, I picked three of the logo designs that I liked best and created a matching website layout for each one of them.



Phase 4: The church community decided on the very last logo design--the one with a leaf; I then did some tweaking based on their comments/wishes. They also decided to go for the second web layout design.


Phase 5/ Final Phase: As I was tweaking the logo, I suddenly had an idea of making the symbol to resemble more closely the second Chinese character for "Shatin" (沙田).


In summary...
Before:

After:


Special thanks:
I want to thank David Chou, Karl Udy and Heewoo Han for inviting me to be part of this project. Instead of pressuring me to take up this "nearly-impossible" task (well, that's what it seemed in the eyes of a 6-month old graphic designer!), they were continuously encouraging and praying for me to try my best. I also want to thank GOD for walking side-by-side with me throughout this project. No doubt that the whole thing was a leap of faith for me. I knew clearly that there was nothing inside me that I could trust to get this project done. So from the moment I took on the project, I almost never stopped reminding GOD that "This is Your logo and Your website for Your church, You better take care of this!" And our GOD is faithful, like always, plus I know He cares deeply about Shatin Church. So in trust I took a leap and only found myself landing right in the middle of His infinite love and grace.

May all the glory and praise that came from this project be given directly to our LORD. Amen.