Recent Work / Chow Sang Sang - Part I

A few months ago I got to work on a super exciting project for Chow Sang Sang, a huge jewelry company here in Hong Kong. They asked me to illustrate the invitation for their 80th Anniversary Event.

The marketing manager for the company had seen my work through a mutual contact's social media and reached out to me. Yay, finally my hours of aimless internetting are paying off - MOMMMMMM!

The idea was to showcase their new line by using an illustrated model and photos of the real jewelry. This would also give the client more flexibility if they wanted to change up the pieces to be featured. 

Here are the initial pencil roughs for the project, I really liked the last sketch with the gemstone background, but the client ended up going with Sketch A with a more mature vibe that's more in line with their market and with a more versatile single colour background.

And good thing as the event ended up having to be reorganized - as the original event was centered around a yellow diamond that was being flown in especially for the event but due to traffic restrictions from Occupy Central (solidarity!) the date and theme had to be changed. So pretty white pearls it was instead.

Close up of the hand-drawn logo I did for the event illustration. I love hand drawing logos and lettering for illustrations that I make, it's a small detail that really unifies the image - plus picking fonts is literally the bane of my existence.

This was such an amazing project to work on, thanks so much to Chow Sang Sang and their amazing team for their support! And I hope their guest really enjoyed opening up this lovely piece of mail with my illustrated girl in it.

Stay tuned for Part II of my collaboration with Chow Sang Sang! That blog post is coming up next week.

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Quotes / Dressing Up

One of my favourite quotes about feminism and beautification, but I think it also applies to a lot of other privileges in life as well.

Go Places / Make Things

Fall schedule: go places, make things. Rinse and repeat. I've been reading Jessica Walsh and Tim Goodman's super interesting social experiment/blog 40 Days of Dating so I felt like doing some hand-lettering myself.

Print of Go Places / Make Things is available on my Etsy shop, go have a look!

Recent Work / RSVP

My newest illustration for Hong Kong Tatler: "Is the RSVP a Dying Art?". Drawn in ballpoint pen and coloured digitally. I just have a total soft spot for the colour pink right now, especially a cool and crisp shade like this one.

Read the article here. As always thanks to the editor Charmaine!

Illustration / Birthday Yarn Hand Lettered Birthay Card

Birthday Yarn, 2013.

I made this little birthday card for my mom's friend who loves to knit.

Making birthday cards is one of my favourite things to do for friends, it's fun making things for people you love and it's great practice. I love designing them to match their personalities.

A great intro to hand-lettering and script resource is Kait Bos's blogpost.

If you have a crafty friend who has a birthday coming up this card is for sale on my Society6 shop.
 

Illustrations / Chanel and Lacroix for Schiaparelli Haute Couture Fall 2013

Chanel Haute Couture, 2013. Pencil and Gouache.

It's fashion week again! And it's my favourite time to experiment with new illustrations due to all the new inspiration, I love scrolling through all the shows for my "homework".

I've been fixing up my portfolio these last few weeks and have been spending countless hours looking at other illustrators' portfolios. I especially love Bernadette Pascua's, there's so much beautiful stuff there, I could spend hours there (and I do). And seeing her work has inspired to include more of my handwriting into my drawings.

Party Hat, 2013. Pencil, gouache and collage. 

This pink and black striped drawing is inspired by the Christian Lacroix for Schiaparelli collection. I'm a huge Schiaparelli fan (basically all of my university projects had Surrealism listed in the theme somewhere). I had a really fun time doing this one, it's fairly big almost A3. Painted it with a huge messy brush, exaggerated the features and experimented with some 3D collage elements for her brooch and headpiece.

Both of these prints and iPhone cases are available for sale on my Society6 store. The Lacroix one, and the Chanel one.

 

Recent Work / Anya Hindmarch portrait process for Bagaholicboy

Last week I was really excited when Alvin aka BagaholicBoy, a super popular luxury handbag blog based in Singapore emailed me after seeing my Art | Basel streetstyle sketches on TheWanderlister+ asking to work together. He had done an interview with UK handbag designer extraordinaire Anya Hindmarch and wanted to commission a portrait to give the post an unique edge. I really admire  people like Alvin who puts such attention to detail to what they do, a blog post with a custom illustration, that's dedication, you can see why his site is so well read.

After researching reference images of Anya, I started by doing a round of sketches, I've been doing all my roughs lately with this water brush. It's so handy for quick sketches, since it's always filled with water I don't even have to go into the kitchen to get a water cup, I just grab it from my pen holder and go.

For this particular illustration I used gouache thinned down with water to a watercolour consistency. I find using gouache this way scans better than watercolour but has a similar look, so I've been using it more for works that will be seen digitally only.

Some other variations we tried with Anya, without a background and different styles of colouring in the shirts. I like to call this one 2 Anyas, like you know, Andy Warhol.

For the wording on the final image I used a Conte lever-action dip pen from a set that I picked up on a whim at an art supply store in Mong Kok. I've been obsessed with hand lettering lately, as you might have noticed from the ZigWisdom drawings I've been doing.

Hope you like it! And thank you so much to Alvin for contacting me for this fun job! We'll hopefully be doing a series of these so keep your fingers crossed for us. You can read the interview here on BagaholicBoy.com.

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