Rough sketches of twin goddess

I had an idea for two characters for Project Apricot and very quickly the mythology behind them developed in my head as well.  Here are two initial sketches of the twin goddess who command the power of bells and sound waves.

Morning Pick-Me-Up 2

Did a first pass at coloring "Morning Pick-Me-Up".  Didn't get too far, but it's a start.  The colors are not quite what I'd like them to be, but I'll figure it out later.

Tea for Two rough sketch

A quick sketch of sharing tea between two friends.  Will color later.

Mid-Autumn Festival

It's a few weeks late for the Mid-Autumn Festival, but I was really happy for moon cakes this year, and started thinking about lanterns and my childhood in China.  This is a small doodle tribute to the Mid-Autumn Festival.

Rough outline of "Morning Pick-Me-Up"

I'd like to keep up the pace of the last two days where I post one sketch everyday.  Today, I was working on something a bit more ambitious and I'm still not happy with the outline of the guy character in this one, so I guess I'll post just the in progress work and call it a night.

Cheryl and bunnies

This one is for Cheryl and her love of bunnies.  She's been working too hard and bunnies help her get through the day.

ballerina pixie

The sketch of Dani, and the little caricatures of Michael and me turned out so well, that I'm trying to explore this style some more.  This one turned out fun.  And it gives me a good chance to sharpen my use of colors.

Cat Pirates!

Over the last 5 years at work, I've started going to more and more meetings.  That happens to correlate with the amount of idle doodling that I do during the day.  (It helps me concentrate in meetings, really!)  As a result I've developed an entire style of doodling that features cats.  Lots and lots of cats.

Here's a sample of the style and content of my doodling.  I present:  Cat Pirates!  I whipped this one up in photoshop partly because I need a new cover photo for facebook.

And here's my new profile picture, inspired by my trips to The Counter and their burger customization system.

No Replacement For Practice

I'm finally married!  The blog id (misstingtingwu) is no longer accurate.  I contemplated migrating this blog to a different account, but decided to let it stay put for now.

Domestic life has been good, but between settling in with the new husband and planning the wedding for the year before, I'm now woefully behind in my existing projects.

So it feels that much better to be able to pick up the tablet again.  I'm making a new goal to do some sketching every other night, or continue work on one of the already started sketches.  Here are three to start things off.  Both for Project Apricot.

Update on the Flowers - Day 2

After two days the only significant change is still in the peonies.  One of the ones in the flower box is starting to wilt. 

The others are opening more and more, but are still in a good state.

It seems like the best plan for peonies is to get them the day before the wedding when they're in the closed form, and on the day of the wedding, they'll be just I want them.

Update On the Flowers - Day 1

In an effort to gauge how far in advance I can get the flowers and put together the centerpieces, I'm taking pictures of them to record how they're doing.  After a day, they still look great.

Here are all the arrangements

The only significant difference is in the peonies (and the dahlias to a smaller extent) who bloomed in the last 24 hours and are at their lush, full prime.

Here are two of the arrangements to compare the peonies between day 0 and day 1.

Flower Arranging

I decided to take care of flowers an my own for the wedding originally with great enthusiasm, but more recently it has felt daunting.  As a first step to that, Viv, Hoyt and I made a trip to SF Flower Mart this weekend to see if we can find all the flowers I want to use, check out prices, and get some for a trial run.

It was a wonderous place!  So many flowers, so fragrant, and so overwhelming.  I didn't find garden roses, which is unfortunate but I did pick up some peonies, dahlias, and hydrangeas. 

 Hoyt is holding the flowers, feeling like he just won a beauty pageant.  Isn't he lovely?

Here are $40 of flowers.

I started off by trying a technique I saw on a tutorial, by making a grid over the flower box with tape.  (I'm supposed to use florist tape, which I didn't have, so this is just good ole scotch tape.)

Then I started inserting in the white hydrangeas, since they take up the most space.

Then I added in some dahlias.

And I kept going with the peonies, and the green hydrangeas, adjusting as necessary until I got the coverage I wanted.

That wasn't so bad.  I repeated the process with the smaller flower box.  And even after that, I had a bunch more flowers left over so I went to work filling a vase, a watering can, and these lovely juice jugs we recently got from World Market.

Here are all the arrangements I ended up with.

 And here's what $40 of flowers from the flower mart looks like after some work :)

Surprisingly, I really love the two simple arrangements in the juice jugs.  I might reshape my vision for the centerpieces to make use of them some more.  The girly part of me comes out around flowers.  This sure was a nice little one day project.  We'll see how things go when we have to do this for an entire wedding.

Invitation designs that didn't make the cut

I experimented quite a bit with wedding invitation designs before deciding on the cartoon version of Michael and myself.  The original concept of graphical drawings of voluminous, layered flowers like the peony and the ranunculus.  We also liked the idea of silkscreening a graphical design onto wood cards/veneers.

I dug up some of the photoshop experiments.

Playing with colors and basic layer of concentric circular shapes.

 With wood grain background.  Varied the color in one "flower", and played how the color should be applied.  But let's face it.  They look like boobs.  Especially that one.

I put together some more interesting color palettes, and tried layering some more complex shapes for the peonies, and at the same time, went basic with the ranunculus.  

The two below are about the furthest I got with this theme and design.  They're not bad and I think we could have gotten something nice out of it, but it didn't seem feasible to silkscreen that many colors at this complexity.

Wedding Invitations

I've been keeping this one under wraps for a while.  It's our wedding invitation design :)  Now that we've mailed out invitations, I can happily post it.  It was a nice collaborative effort with Michael.  Fun at times.  Exciting at times.  And, honestly, a bit frustrating on a few occasions.  But we're both very happy with the final result!  I'll post actual pictures of the printed final product eventually.

And the wedding website is at tingtingandmichael.com.  Can you believe that wasn't already taken?  :)

Tea cups

I have a great fondness for tea.  I love the history of it in Chinese culture, the richness of the tradition of proper brewing technique, (sometimes) the convenience of bagged tea, the warmth and the flavors.  It invokes thoughts of sitting by the window on a rainy day or early Saturday mornings of working on my latest projects.

Now and then I notice some pretty adorable tea cups as well.  Here I've collected images/links of some fun, modern teacups.

These are tea cups designs such that over time and repeated use, the stains from the tea would bring forth the hidden pattern in the tea cups, adding beauty and reversing the idea of wearing down a item's value.  (By Bethan Laura Wood.)

These mugs have hidden floral stamps on the bottom, and turns those pesky stain rings into lovely prints.  With just two different types of stamps, you can already do some pretty interesting things.  How fun!  (By Valeria Miglioli & Barnaby Barford)  You can order them here, but they are pricey!

In a similar vein, there's this maze-like saucer to trap coffee drips.

Here is a very modern and interesting take on the tea cup called The Skase.  (By Steve Watson) 

Here are some adorable hidden animal tea cups, which you can find on amazon.

I'll end this post with a modern, minimalistic cup by Molo Design.

Sanjay Patel's Fun Indian Exhibit at Asian Art Museum

I just had a really lovely birthday :)  I was jokingly told that I was past my prime this year, but it doesn't feel so bad so far.

Michael took me to the Asian Art Museum which still turns me into a giddy kid.  Aside from their usual exhibits, they had the Maharaja exhibit.  The highlight for me was the work by Sanjay Patel that was being displayed all over the museum.

Sanjay's extensive work illustrated many Hindu dieties as well as a Maharaja's parade, and more.  The works are visually fun, intricate, and exciting.  They are a bold, fun modern take on classical material, which he lovingly handles.

His work also reminds me of the visual storytelling of the Samurai Jack series.

Love it!