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 #3

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Halloween’s tomorrow! Hope everyone’s having some fun this weekend and dressing up. This week, I ended up generating this palette:

I decided to incorporate the colors from the palette mostly in the background with the trees, sky, and moon/sun(?), with the woman in the foreground being based loosely on a picture of a woman I saw online, but can’t remember the name of. I also recently played Hades, a great dungeon-style game that I’d really recommend! It has beautiful art that utilizes some color-blocked, black shadows, which I decided to experiment with a little with the woman and the trees/branches in the background.

Chroma #2

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Hey, everyone! It’s almost Halloween weekend, so I hope everyone’s excited and has their costumes ready. I’m here with another post for my series, Chroma, where I generate a random color palette each week and create an illustration based off of it. This week, the palette for my illustration was very bright and colorful, which are some of my favorite works to do. I especially love combining bright colors with black or darker/more neutral colors, which I tried to do with the woman and her dress.

I’m happy with how this one turned out, which you may be able to tell by the way I set it as my weekly header! I think the colorfulness of the background captures the vibrancy I’m using in this series. Again, I’ve been trying to do more backgrounds recently, and although it was repetitive to draw so many different bottles/jars, I liked to see it all come together.

Chroma: #1

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Hey! I’m Dai, and this is the first post for my new series, Chroma. In this series, I’ll generate a random color palette each week and create an illustration based off of it. I’ve always loved adding color to my works, but I often find myself struggling to choose which colors to use. Through this series, I hope I’ll be able to improve my coloring skills, as well as create new art for the readers of arts, ink. to enjoy.

This week, I generated this palette on Coolors.co. I loved the contrast between the bright red/pink and the cool blues and purples, and I knew I wanted to create a night scene with this palette.

Recently, I’ve been wanting to draw more animals in my illustrations. For the longest time, I only drew people, barely drawing objects, animals, or backgrounds, so I went slightly out of my comfort zone with this piece, though I’m very happy with how it turned out! I ended up using the blue, purple, and black mainly for the background/sky, while using the red/yellows for the lighting and the tiger. I wanted to capture the atmosphere surrounding railroads at night, and I hope I captured it well.

Yesterday: Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes

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This week, I painted Silme Domingo(left) and Gene Viernes(right), two Filipino American labor activists who fiercely lobbied against racial discrimination in Alaskan canneries in the 60s and 70s.

They were specifically part of a union called Local 37, and sought to improve working conditions and prevent racial discrimination for Filipino and Native Alaskan workers in Alaskan fish canneries. It was shown that the employers treated the Filipino workers awfully, being kept segregated in decrepit bunkhouses and served fish-head soup for a meal during their 12-hour shifts, while white workers were getting the best jobs as well as company-provided food and housing. Domingo and a partner posed as students from the University of Washington’s School of Fisheries and requested to document the canneries for a project. Instead, they gathered evidence of discrimination. In 1973, the Alaska Cannery Workers’ Association (which Domingo and Viernes helped found) filed a class action lawsuit against several Alaskan fish companies, winning millions of dollars for migrant workers. Unfortunately, Domingo and Viernes were assassinated in 1981, an order put out by the-then Philippines dictator, Ferdinand Marcos. 

Despite their tragic deaths, I wanted to celebrate these little-known activists who fought their entire lives against injustice, and dedicated decades to helping marginalized communities across America.

Yesterday: Snail Diner

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For this week’s edition of Yesterday, I painted an old-fashioned diner with an elderly snail enjoying some bacon and eggs, inspired by @slimetownusa on TikTok. As shown through the window, the newspaper, and the TV, there’s some trouble in the Snail Diner. While I wanted to make a cute painting, I also wanted to connect the 50s-style diner with the Cold War era going on at the time, in which there was a large nuclear war scare. The significance of the diner patron being a snail is up for interpretation!

Yesterday: Batman – The Long Halloween (1996)

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As a long time Batman fan, I was super excited when The Batman finally came out a few weeks ago. So for this week’s post, I wanted to combine one of my favorite Batman comics, The Long Halloween (1996), with the new Batman movie, drawing Robert Pattinson and Zoe Kravitz in place of the comic book versions. I hope you like this rendition, and if you have the time, check out the comic or the movie!

The Original Comic Strip