Geishia's Back

Using watercolors with "low fume" paint thinner and water to achieve this soft drippy effect. I'm trying to tie my images in with more of an ethereal background to them.

Totoro in Pastels with watercolor background

I just had to draw this out <;0) I just love Hayao Miyazaki's work. His illustrations and movie "My Neighbor Totoro" となりのトトロ is just too cute. So the background is actually an experiment using watercolors with water and ozone safe paint thinner. I'm trying to combine several elements that I like, plant botanical illustrations with morphing and merging of colors. I think with Totoro and his friends this subject matter would be a perfect fit <;0). I'm actually happy how this came out.

Next Piece-Geisha sketch

This is something I've been toying around with on my sketch book. Trying to test out watercolors as part of my mixed media with pastel. I'll be using the Art Spectrum paper for this as well. However, I'm using a real light hue instead of my usual dark blues or blues. I'm also checking out "Richard McKinley's - A Studio Session" to see how he combines watercolors and the use of under paintings in his pastel work. It's cool to see how this artist uses other medias for his pastels (weird, the link for his website is broken <;0( ) Thanks Joan for letting me borrow this DVD.

Ocean Sunfish- Mola Mola

My son loves this fish, he had seen it before during a school field trip at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. and when we went as a family he immediately insisted that we should see this first. Without going into the facts about this fish, I thought it would be an unusual subject matter to pastel paint this. Granted it's not the world's "prettiest" fish, but it is quite awesome to see this live. Click here for the Wikipedia info on this species. I wanted to incorporate some elements of ocean sunfish in Katakana, and used the Kanji for "ocean" in this piece. I have used the Art Spectrum paper, which is acrylic based, and took to my acrylic paints and matt medium quite well. So the finished piece has these layered of acrylics, papers and pastel, and I'm really enjoying the texture from the layering process.

Greeting Cards... okay

now, I'm testing out of to make "merch" or "swag" out of my work, should the opportunity arrive <;0). These are greeting cards, blank inside, printed at Kodak Gallery.com. It's printed pretty nicely on heavy white stock and your choice of color envelopes. The down side is that, it is pretty pricey and shipping will always add to your cost. So with that, now why do I still use this site? It's because I have for many years, liked the size and quality of their cards. I have tried other sites and the quality of the ink was really low and the sizes of the cards were too small for me (4x6 or smaller). These cards are 5x7, which is a good standard card size, I think, to show off your work.

FYI- I'm not a True Blogger...unfort <;0(

I'm just using this as a way to post up my work, share and partially as a portfolio too. That being said, I won't have advertisement or a way to monetize this site. Although through google blogger there's an option to do so, but I won't be taking that route (at least for now <;0). Reason is why: I don't know if I have the time or make the commitment to do "how to" pages or explicit tutorials like most bloggers do. Especially when I'm in the middle of learning and figuring out how I can apply pastels myself <;0). There are a great many YouTube pastel tutorials that are good to great. Also if you have time, you can check out the publication (a physical magazine!) called "The Pastel Journal". I don't think there's a direct link to this, but I was able to find this at the "Artist Network". Anyways, thanks for visiting! <;0) Domo arigato gozai masu. どうもありがとうございました

"Geishia's Dream"

Finally, was able to finish this piece (April is always the busiest for us, many birthdays including my son's) The challenge was that I was trying to make the appearance of the Geishia to look visually flat, because traditionally (dating hundreds of years back) geishia figures had a flat treatment to them, due to the fact that many were depicted using wood block prints. The challenge for me personally was to make pastel seem and applied in a flat look, which is hard since the beauty of pastel mediums is that it's pretty organic and so it is meant to be built with layers. Also, I wanted to mention that this is a "mixed media" piece. I used acrylic paint in some of the areas. So I had to consider drying time before I could proceed with the pastels. I may have created the composition a bit too much, I think I got too excited and carried away with my theme that I went a bit overboard. And I think this will end my theme using the koi fishes. Note* You might be able to tell that I am heavily influenced by Hung Liu's piece "Chinese Profile II" which is a permanent piece in the San Jose Museum of Art.