Recent Work / Three Beautiful Foodies for Bakker's Bites

Food and fashion makes the perfect pair, except maybe really high fashion types who would never be caught dead doing something so base as eating but that's not the case here in Hong Kong, a city that loves food. Last week I got to collaborate with model, writer and food blogger Li Meng on an illustration for her blog Bakker's Bites' 3rd birthday.

The three illustrated girl is modelled after Li Meng herself, and each represents a different area she covers on her food blog: Western dining, Chinese cuisine and of course the best tipples in town. Click through for a sneak peek of the drafts after the jump.

Tutorial / How to Fake that Chalkboard Look on Photoshop + Champagne Blending Illustration for Tatler HK

How to get a realistic chalk effect on Photoshop.
This trick looks more like chalk than CaCO₃, I learned it from a Jessica Hische talk. Speaking of which, talks and podcasts by creative people are the only way I survive while working since I spend 8+ hours drawing by myself, my sanity is just hanging on by threads. My absolute favourite lately is Your Dreams My Nightmares by artist / educator Sam Weber, he interviews illustrators and art directors and it fulfils all my podcast listening fantasies: weird music, cool people, talking about minute things only illustrators care about, NYC!

Anyways back to this tutorial, it really is super easy.

- Using a 2B or darker pencil draw the words or pictures you want on a piece of paper (bond paper is fine).
- Smudge it all around with your hands, that's why you need a 2B pencil, any harder and it ain't messy enough.
- Touch all your belongings and make everything dirty. 
- Scan the paper and open it up on Photoshop.
- Invert the image so the white part becomes black and voila! Finally play around with the levels until you're happy with the black to white ratio.

Here's one of my latest illustrations for HongKongTatler.com for their article on champagne blending where I used this chalkboard technique. Uh huh huh, I had a tres bien time drawing that French man.

Thanks to the editor Charmaine and the writer Esther.

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.

And as always if you dig this post, share it on Facebook, tweet it or +1 us on Google, I'm always so grateful when readers take the time to share my posts so more people can see them. Thanks! xx

L'Dezen x Kitty N. Wong | Diamonds are an Illustrated Girl's Best Friend

Hi guys! My illustration collaboration with L'Dezen Jewellery is finally done! You've probably seen snippets of these beauties on my Instagram and maybe you wondered what they were for. Well I finally get to share them with you now in all their bejeweled glory along with the process of how I created the illustrations.

Read on for more.

Red Carded! A Pretty Illustrated Business Card Commision

HEY GUYS! Remember me? I'm been lying low lately as I've been busy drawing and trying out new vegan recipes which you may have noticed if you follow me on Instagram. This portrait of Remedy Rouge blogger Jin Wong is one of the things I've been busying illustrating. A couple of weeks ago Jin approached me to help her create some custom business cards and I was super excited and flattered. 

Jin was looking to have cards done that were both elegant and fun (which is perfectly her style). So, we started out with a watercolour illustration from a few photos Jin had sent me and we went from there. And after some window shopping on ASOS for a dress to illustrate, a few tweaks, font hunting and a trip to the printers we were done!

Below are Jin's pretty new cards all ready to be handed out, let the networking begin! And if you too are interested in having your own custom illustrated business cards that make a lasting personal impression, please don't hesitate to drop me a line!

A little bit about Jin: she's a media strategist by day and runs the fashion blog Remedy Rogue by night, she also created the lifestyle blog HK Girl Talk which is all about Hong Kong's unique culture. If you want to have a candid look on life as a twenty something young professional woman here in the city make sure you head on over to HK Girl Talk and have a read. Thanks so much for the commission Jin, it was a pleasure working with you!

New/Old Illustrations - And a Commentary

 You know how when you get something from the thrift store and you show you friend and you're like "hai this is the new skirt that I just got, I mean it's old but it's new, it's an old skirt but it's new to me but it's like actually old." Well these drawings are like that, I made them last month for the Terracotta Warriors Inspired Fashion Design Competition (phew, long name). So they are old to me and new to you.

These didn't get picked but I thought they were cute enough to share. But looking back at them, they do seem kind of flat and lackluster. I can see how they wouldn't be too appealing to the judges. I actually quite like the green outfit in the middle, the little bomber jacket with patent leather sleeves and the stiffly pleated olive skirt. That's another thing, I think these illustrations could really benefit from some arrows and written commentary. The boards which I actually sent in did include fabric swatches but I think it needs more than that from a presentation standpoint. At my old job at Li & Fung as the assistant designer, I was mainly in charge of visual communications and I spent a lot of time making presentation boards for buyers and we never would have sent these out: first of all the image needs a background (a muted complementary tone with some texture preferably), the figures would have had a shadow and the clothes need texture. Even if the clothes were boring we would have wowed them with the general presentation, and that's what I'm lacking here. I think I got a little lazy and fancied my drawings could speak for themselves. But you learn.

This week I've been snail-making that DETOUR 2012 piece (but really mostly drinking Baileys and watching Bones). Here's what I've been working on? Frankly I'm a little majorly embarrassed to show you. It's so hideous you're going to hate me and think I'm a total hack, but it's just the armature and it's all going to be covered, but still. Well, let's just hope Dan Savage was right when he said "It Gets Better".

I've created a monster/
So hideous I didn't even Instagram it/
Imagine my horror.

How to get your work into Detour 2012

What's in this moderately heavy box?

 I've been entering contests and competitions like a madwoman this year, living on my desert island slipping messages into bottles and right now it's starting to feel like a few of them have been washing back each filled with a little bit of love and I'm so so grateful. Last week I got a call from Ambassadors of Design letting me know that my proposal had been nominated!

My installation along with the other nine winning pieces will be displayed at DETOUR 2012 this November. In case you didn't know DETOUR is Hong Kong Ambassadors of Design's 17 days flagship event and it's pretty totally sweet, held at the Former Police Married Quarters last year, it was one of first things my friend Wing Sum and I did together, the art was cool but really at that time I was more excited about finally having found someone in HK to go to designy things with.

Yesterday, I went to the Ambassadors' office and lugged a huge cardboard box home from Wanchai wearing totally inappropriate clothing - namely a Pierre Cardin top that I got at HK's creme de la sleaze thrift store Mee & Gee (secret: my favourite one is the one on Fa Yuen St, Mong Kok. But, please don't go there and buy all the cheap nice fringey things because that is not nice and I need them for my body).

Below is my proposal, the theme of the competition was Growing Up with Hong Kong:

My nominated design! You go Glen Coco!

"A Celebration" is inspired by imagery associated with growing up in Hong Kong, created in the style of traditional Lunar New Year posters, the child is riding triumphantly atop of the crocodile, clad in her school uniform and clenching test papers. The airplane badge on her dress symbolizes the pre-1997 immigration rush, which affected most children whether directly or by seeing their friends and family move away. The child is surrounded by treats from her childhood: birthday cake from the local bakeries, egg waffles and tea eggs from street vendors."

A photo from my elementary school days that I used for inspiration.
I love how the 'treats' were hard-boiled eggs and apples.
Also, is it irony if you put an Instagram filter on an old picture.

DETOUR 2011. Photo: Ambassadors of Design

This little guy was inside the box "Decorate me. Rawr."

The installation will be made mostly of paper and paper mâché along with some embroidery and found objects. I was thinking of doing the figure like those Chinese funeral paper dolls, but I'm not so sure about the connotations with that since it's supposed to be about celebration. Anyways, stay tuned this month, I'm going to be blogging about the process.