Penthouse Sep - Fullpage

Penthouse Sep - Spot

Work’s been great, terribly busy over the last few months. Haven’t had time to put up new stuff for a while, so getting the ball rolling again with these two for Penthouse. They are a bit risque, so I’ve cropped them – click on the thumbnails to see the whole image. These ARE meant to be erotic so you’ve been warned!

These two were for Penthouse’s erotic fiction article. The story was about a lady who goes to get her Macbook repaired and ends up having a fling with the three Apple store technicians.

It was a fun thing to work on. The ‘enter’ pic was actually my husband’s idea – I thought it was a little cheesy but it seemed to work well with the article. I was asked to eliminate any references to Apple in the imagery, which was fine. It struck me as a bit odd that it’s alright to name companies and brands in prose, but not so in graphics.

Anyway, hope you enjoy them. The next work-related stuff I’ll be posting will be educational (for kids… not that kind of education).

alternate full page sketch

Alternate spot illustration

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.

]]> http://blog.charlenechua.com/2010/06/cg-narrative-in-games/feed/ 2 http://blog.charlenechua.com/2010/05/summer-camp-monster/ http://blog.charlenechua.com/2010/05/summer-camp-monster/#comments Fri, 28 May 2010 13:00:25 +0000 Charlene Chua http://blog.charlenechua.com/?p=895

Did this fairly recently as a promo to folks in the kid’s market. It was meant to be a Spring thing, but I suppose it fits in with Summer as well. On a side note, the NY trip was great. Went to Surtex and the National Stationary Show, met clients, hung out with friends.

Worked on this a couple of months ago with the good folks at Mclaren McCann Toronto.  The project was for World Vision’s Spring 2010 direct mailer. The job was to create an illustration for the envelope, which would be repurposed for the letter and note card inside. Additionally, I was asked to illustrate a little mask for kids that was to be printed with lenticular printing (remember those plasticy cards where you turn them and the image changes?).

The project was great fun and I really enjoyed working with the art director on creating the masks in particular. Their concept was ‘in like a lion, out like a lamb’, and the mask alternated between a lion’s face and a lamb’s. It was a bit of a challenge getting the design to work, since usually animal masks are molded to create the depth of an animal’s face, or else have some other materials attached to give the impression of fur. I tried using some more graphic elements to emphasize the two faces, while still keeping them friendly for the kids.

Here I am holding the masks:

The project was turned around quite quick – 2 or 3 weeks from start to finish. I did a main sketch for the envelope, and several versions of the lion and lamb characters to get the right pose for them:

Pose varients for lion and lamb characters

Sketch for enevelope back, with die and trims indicated.

Early rough for the lion mask

The project is featured as a case study on Mclaren’s website, so if you’re interested in learning more about the project do check it out here.

]]> http://blog.charlenechua.com/2010/05/world-vision-spring-direct-mailer/feed/ 3 http://blog.charlenechua.com/2010/05/interview-with-hile-design/ http://blog.charlenechua.com/2010/05/interview-with-hile-design/#comments Thu, 06 May 2010 16:14:00 +0000 Charlene Chua http://blog.charlenechua.com/?p=879

Thanks to Dave at Hile Design for including me in their latest interviewee. Please visit their blog for the whole interview. While you’re at it, check out their work - Dave Hile is a former illustrator himself, and now runs his own design and advertising firm.

These were some of the unused sketches that I did last year for the laptop skin project for Acco Brands. You can see the final art of the ones the picked here and here.

Did this some time ago for Penthouse magazine’s erotic fiction article. This is the fullpage illustration, and it was accompanied by a spot. You can see both illustrations on my website: fullpage and spot.

Did this recently for Lucid Media. It’s the cover for the issue featuring Canadian director Atom Egoyan. The illustration is  portrait of him, with characters from his various movies woven into his hair. the watermark background is based off Armenian patterns in recognition of his heritage.

Here’s the work as it appeared (the inner black and white spot was another cover concept that we decided to use for the article instead):

Here were the roughs I did. I normally don’t do color roughs, but decided to for this one: