Author: Robin

I'm Robin (he/they), a third year enrolled as a User Experience Design student. I'm especially interested in eventually professionally creating artwork for entertainment such as animated films, books, and video games. I want to share my artwork with a wider audience using this blog, and I also want to open up a conversation about what goes into making illustrations and artwork both on the creative and business sides..

Industrious Illustrating #15 – Flamechaser

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Hello again! It’s almost November already, and yet I still haven’t finished posting about what I made over the summer.

Starting from earlier this year, I’ve been working alongside a team of other UMich students to make an anime-style visual novel called “Flamechaser” about lesbians piloting giant robots in space and uncovering a deeper conspiracy lurking in the shadows. We released a demo of our minimum viable product earlier this month on itch.io, and we’re planning on releasing the full game on both itch.io and Steam in the spring of 2023!

I hand-drew all of the mech and character sprites, as well as designing the logo and painting all of the background art. There’s another artist on the project helping with cleanup/flat colors/graphic design/some of the character designs, but otherwise the majority of the art can be credited to me. I feel extremely lucky that I’m getting the opportunity to work on this project alongside some really talented people, and I’m going to put in my best effort to make this visual novel a brief yet enjoyable experience for its readers!

Here is the current main title page featuring all of the main characters:

Here is a promotional poster design I drew to celebrate the release of the Minimum Viable Product earlier this month:

Here’s a few select screenshots from the game’s most recent build:

If you’re interested in following along with the game’s development, be sure to check out our newest builds and updates on our itch page and our Twitter:
https://jarojakd.itch.io/flamechaser

Now it’s time for me to get back to working on making new prints and managing my inventory before Youmacon happens in two weeks… See you guys next week for the next post!

Industrious Illustrating #14 – Oil Painting

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Mini Con Ja Nai last Saturday was really great! I enjoyed talking to the people who came by and selling art prints. That just leaves Youmacon on November 4-6 next month before I will likely take a break for a few months from selling my art at conventions.

I haven’t had a lot of time for making observational work or studying new techniques recently between being a full-time student, being the lead artist on an indie game project, and working on expanding my illustration portfolio to sell at conventions, but I have been trying to proactively learn from school assignments to hone my craft and develop my artistic techniques. For one thing, I’m currently taking Intro to Painting (ARTDES 250) at Stamps, which teaches oil painting techniques that I could also apply to digital painting one day.

A recent assignment was to paint whatever we see on the ceiling and use warm/cool colors to make objects seem closer or further away, respectively. I ended up painting a ceiling vent in front of some windows and exaggerated the colors a little while also letting some of the orange underpainting show through for a warm, almost sunset-like look.

My next assignment is to paint a fruit still life using scumbling, which is applying a layer of dry opaque paint over a previous layer of paint so that both colors are visible on the canvas. I only have the yellow underpainting laid down at the moment, but the still life should start to look more distinct once I start to apply further layers of color.

While the specific application and look of digital paint is usually pretty different from analog/real-life oil paint, I could still try to replicate these techniques using oil paint-esque brushes in a digital painting for a similar effect. Stay tuned to see if you can identify exposed underpainting or scumbling in any of my future paintings!

Industrious Illustrating #13 – Mini Con Ja Nai

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It’s now the first week of October, and that means that Animania (UMich’s anime club) is hosting Mini Con Ja Nai in the MLB on October 8th between 12 to 7 PM, and that also means that I’m nearly fully prepared now to table at the Artist Alley there! I’ve been working on ordering, preparing, and categorizing my inventory over the past few weeks in addition to creating new print-worthy artwork.

While I’m not a graphic designer by any means, I had to make these graphics for myself so that I could have helpful product “menus” for customers to look at. Unfortunately, being a sole proprietorship means that I have to do all of my business-related stuff myself, which means that I can’t just focus on making more art. But as long as that means that I get to enjoy conventions and selling my work, I’m willing to put up with having to learn a wider variety of skills to do my job.

  If you’re able to make it to Mini Con Ja Nai this Saturday (which is tomorrow as of this posting), I hope to see you there! If not, see you next week when I make my next Industrious Illustrating post!

Industrious Illustrating #12: A New Semester

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A new season means a new semester, and a new semester means a new Industrious Illustrating banner! It’s been a while since I last posted to this blog, and I hope that the summer was a restful or productive time for all of you, whichever one was your goal. While I have some exciting new projects I want to share with you guys over the next few weeks, I want to focus first on a brief recap of a few pieces I made over the summer.

For most of the summer, I was spending time living with my parents in Hong Kong. We lived pretty close to the beach, so sometimes I’d go down to the beach and look for interesting-looking animals in the sand and rocks. Attached are a few watercolor and ink sketches I made of a Fiddler crab, as well as some clams, sea urchins, and sea snails I found when the tide was low.

Aside from sketching the wildlife, I also made more refined illustrations based off of the scenery and sights I saw in Hong Kong, albeit with a few changes for artistic effect. For example, one of the new pieces on my year 2 banner features a tiger girl dressed in summery clothing while leaning over the railing of a staircase next to overgrown terraces. This is actually based off of a real staircase near my summer home that led down to some tropical fruit trees and a tiny beach (though it wasn’t the one I frequented).

               

If you look at the other side of the new banner, one of the pieces I added features a girl floating in a brightly lit vestibule as if she’s in a spaceship. This is actually inspired by the Moncler clothing store display in Hong Kong’s International Commerce Center, which always caught my eye when I was walking from the Kowloon MTR stop through the ELEMENTS shopping mall and the ICC lobby. I made a few tweaks to the lighting to make it look more dramatic, but otherwise I kept it close to the reference in an attempt to capture what I liked about the design.

For a side by side comparison:

       

Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten around to making more studies of the sights I saw in Hong Kong, or even more pieces inspired by what I saw in Hong Kong, but I’ll be sure to work on some and post them when I have time!

What did you guys do over the summer? I would love to hear about it in the comments.

Industrious Illustrating #11 – Until Next Fall!

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So I promised last week that the final update would be on May 4th. I was wrong. I ended up having an internet connection outage yesterday and couldn’t post anything from anywhere except my phone, but then I couldn’t log into my account from mobile…  Anyway, that’s enough excuses.

Over the summer, I’m planning on taking lots of reference pictures while staying abroad in Hong Kong for artistic inspiration. In this vein, I’m trying to better organize the photographs I’ve taken on various vacations and trips as references for future paintings/drawings. You can see a sneak preview of one of my photo folders here. Maybe you’ll recognize one of these in a future drawing I post to this blog!

Ever since I started posting on Arts Ink several months ago, I’ve enjoyed making posts about various topics to post every Friday. Can you believe that there are already ten of them?

As a reminder, I’ll be tabling at Anime Park this Saturday (May 7th) at Canton High School. If you want to see me in the fall, I’ve heard there’ll be another Con Ja Nai at UMich in the fall, and I was also recently accepted with a Stamps classmate to table at YoumaCon in November. More details to come! No matter if you come see my illustrations in person or just read my columns online, I’m glad to share my artwork and artistic journey with everyone! See you soon!

Industrious Illustrating #10: In Progress

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Can you believe that the semester is basically over? I’ve been pretty busy with moving out of the dorms and preparing for the next con I’ll sell artwork at, which is Anime Park 2022 held at Canton High School on May 7th. If any of you guys are still in the Ann Arbor area around that time, I’d love to see you there!

Anyway, I only have some lighting studies from James Gurney’s excellent book “Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter” (still planning on expanding the canvas and adding more studies, hence the empty space) and a very messy preparatory sketch for a painting to share this week. I feel like two weaknesses in my art are bland lighting/values and not rendering my paintings enough, so those are the issues I’m actively working on. Honestly, I’m not satisfied with the limited artistic progress I’ve made this semester, but I’ll also try not to be too hard on myself when I’m ultimately still human.

The final post of this semester will be next week on May 4th as a final send-off for the winter semester. But that’s not the end! I will be returning to Arts Ink in the fall, and I plan on posting lots of the artwork I created over the summer. Stay tuned for that!