Couple of fashion type sketches I did some time ago. They are tests for moving the ink style towards fashion. Not quite right yet, if anyone wants to comment on them be my guest.

This post is also to test cross posting to my new Tumblr account, which I still don’t really understand but am told that I should use, apparently.

Original Sin clothing - Click to visit site

'Santa Muerte' printed on ladies tee

I’m so happy I can finally post this! This was probably my favorite project from last year. I was contacted by illustrator Godmachine to create a piece for his new clothing line called Original Sin. As the name implies, the brand is stylistically dark, macabre, goth and well, wicked awesome. They gave me more or less free reign to come up with something, and I proposed a design based on the Mexican ‘narco saint’ Santa Muerte or Saint Death.

They liked the idea, but the original sketch I did was too tame, so they asked me to make it darker, more bloody. Best changes I have ever been asked to do ever!

So, while it’s not really a match with anything else in my portfolio, I’m really happy with this since it’s been a good long time since I had reason to play around with themes and imagery I really like, like mythology, folklore, and good old’ skulls and goat horns. True, it’s not really high brow art. But I think it’s darn cool.

Here’s the art with the colors I proposed. The colors are different for the t-shirt version:

Santa Muerte for Original Sin clothing, Charlene Chua illustration

Did some tests a few weeks ago. Trying to develop some more fashion type illustration pieces in the ink style. Still working on it.

Did this as a sketch a while back. Started by drawing the girl and didn’t know what else to do so I kept drawing and added the hands and chicken. It reminded me of Baba Yaga’s chicken house so that’s why it’s titled as such. But honestly I have no idea what’s really go on…

Did this last night, just for fun. I thought it would be fun to pretend to do fashion illustration, and I actually quite enjoyed drawing these. I was sort of thinking about what clothes I would like to have if I actually could sew (or had oodles of money sitting around).

I’ve never thought of myself as much of a fashion person, and I don’t think I will ever really get fashion. But it was a fun exercise to do these up, and I liked having something different to concentrate on (usually I focus on the figure first).

Click on the image if you want to see the sketches in larger detail.

Did this a while back. My agent requested a piece that had more guys in it, so I cooked this up. Hopefully they do, indeed, look like guys!

Did this a while back as a quick overnight fix for a magazine. Usually I’m not one for using Photoshop filters but for once it actually worked out pretty well. The article was about a indie punk band called Trigger Effect, and was mainly talking about how they tended to do a lot of their business independently, although they disliked the being associated with the term DIY. For visual sake though, I thought the 80′s DIY punk aesthetic made sense for the article.

I basically ran a stamp filter over a photo of the band and cobbled their heads together to make the record cover. Was trying to get it to look like a grainy black and white photocopy – actually tried drawing it but it looked too clean. All in all  I thought the experiment worked out pretty nicely.

This was done for the June cover of Lucid Media magazine. The focus of the issue is the North by North East (NXNE) music festival, which is a big free music bash in Toronto that features a huge array of up and coming bands, as well as a few big names.

The festival’s mascot is the bunny that you see on the yellow wristband. I was hoping to create something that was eye catching and keeping with the spirit of the festival without being too overtly like a music poster. The editor wanted to try to tie in the multi faceted aspects of the festival (apart from the music, it also has a film and interactive/ conference portion). I worked the other elements into the tattoo on the main hand.

The piece is probably more inspired by the game, Rockband than the festival itself. I really have no idea if people still wave lighters around at concerts. But heck, it was cool when they did…

My husband is an avid gamer and game reviewer. One of his passions is tackling the matter of narrative in games by examining their current state in the medium, and anticipating their development. This piece was done to accompany one such feature article in C&G Monthly, a Canadian pop culture magazine focusing on comics and video games.

Being married to someone who is passionate about games, it’s inevitable I suppose that I share some of his love for them. I’ll admit I’m much more of a backseat gamer than one that actually plays games, mostly because I don’t have the reflexes for many games and I tend to panic under the time-sensitive stresses that are core to the gameplay of most games. But I do enjoy watching the games that we buy, in  particular the ones that have good storylines.

Rough concepts for the illustration

To me, the current attitudes towards stories in games is similar to the attitude people had towards comics when I was growing up. Comics were viewed as this sub-par combination of badly drawn pictures and bland, 2-dimensional stories for children and no-too-bright adults. In recent years, thanks to successful movie adaptations (or so i think), the public has come to accept that it is possible to tell a deep, meaningful and engaging story through comics, and at some level  it’s more socially acceptable now. Games, in turn, have moved in to fill the spot vacated by comics to being the pariahs of  storytelling.

Which is a darn shame because while some games still have bad stories, there are some stories to be enjoyed in the still-developing medium.  Stories in games are uniquely experienced, both as gamer and observer, and the bottom line is that it’s a bit unfair for people to dismiss the stories or to simply say that there is no story to be had.

So, when my husband said he was doing a piece about narrative in games, I wanted to cook up something that helped illustrate the article in a nutshell, in a way that looked hopefully more mature and intelligent. It’s not much, but I hope that combining a thoughtful essay with a picture that isn’t just space marine/bikini warrior will help to eventually get people to realize the same thing they did about comics – that both comics and games don’t need to be stupid entertainment for kids, and that you can get some good stories out of both.

Went to the Toronto Zoo a couple of weeks ago with some friends, and we had a great day just drawing the animals. It was rather so most of the animals seemed to be rather inactive, which made it easier for us to draw them. Below are more sketches of various critters: (more…)