WARNING: Movie spoilers (Reservoir Dogs (1992)) and Blood
Author: dai
hey! i'm dai, a CS sophomore looking to (hopefully) double minor in APIA studies and Art and Design. i'm a mainly digital artist who loves color and wants to improve and expand on my coloring abilities. in my current series “Chroma”, i'll generate a new color palette each week using a randomized color palette generator, and then create an illustration based off it. along the way, i hope to capture the creative process of my art, as well as the different gradients of life. enjoy!
Chroma: ARE YOU SURE?
Hey everyone, welcome back to Chroma. This week, I painted someone looking into a mirror in a bathroom, having a crisis about their reality. I feel like bathrooms, whether in your home, a club or bar, or even just random public bathrooms, are almost liminal spaces. Somewhat unconsciously, I’ve gravitated towards drawing them for my backgrounds in a lot of my illustrations. Looking at your reflection, specifically your eyes, can sometimes be freaky in different contexts, which somewhat inspired the text written in the mirror. Additionally, this character I drew here has accidentally become someone that I’ve been including in a lot of illustrations, so prepare to probably see them again soon.
Chroma: Cyber
Hey everyone, welcome to the Winter semester! I hope everyone had a nice winter break and if you’re a student, are transitioning to your classes well. As a short reminder, in my series Chroma, I generate a color palette every week, which I then try to make an illustration from. This week, my palette was a little duller than I usually paint in, but I tried to add some pops of color. I painted a somewhat cyber looking woman, pulling a large hole in her chest.
Chroma #6
It’s almost time for our 5 day break, before we get right into finals! I hope everyone will take some time to relax. In the mean time, I was able finish the WIP I posted last week, with this palette:
As mentioned in my last post, this illustration was based off of chīwěn (蚩吻), one of the nine sons of the Dragon King in traditional Chinese mythology. I wanted to add a very colorful background to match with the woman in the foreground, and I’m pretty satisfied with the results! This method of shading is something I’m less familiar with, but I always like trying different drawing styles.
Chroma #5: WIP
Welcome back again! For this week’s edition of Chroma, I generated this palette:
When I saw the colors of this palette, I was somewhat reminded of chīwěn (蚩吻), one of the nine sons of the Dragon King in traditional Chinese mythology. I had wanted to get a tattoo of it a while ago, and although I never got around to it, I had searched many images and drawn out designs of it. Specifically, it reminded me of an image of a chīwěn on the roof of the Longyin Temple in Chukou, Taiwan (shown below), though looking back, the colors don’t actually match very much.
Either way, I decided to draw a personification of this dragon in the form of a goddess/woman. I also wanted to practice the solid black color shading I had used briefly after playing the game Hades. I didn’t end up finishing coloring the background, but I hopefully will be done with it next week!
Chroma #4
Welcome back! For this week’s edition of Chroma, I generated this palette:
This illustration is a lot messier/more fluid than I typically draw, but I was inspired by some different drawings I’d seen online and thought I could expand on my typically structured pieces. I definitely had some fun just drawing some random stuff! Specifically, I based this piece on the end scene of the 2001 film “Mulholland Drive”, which I couldn’t get out of my head after a bad trip. It’s a pretty depressing movie, but I would still recommend watching if you have the time and emotional stability. 🙂
