K-Pop

This painting I really like. I started with a picture of this Korean singer named I.U. I painted her face and hand and hair with the yellow, orange, red and purple scheme, and then did this psychedelic background. I'm happy with how everything came out except for her teeth, so I may go back and try to fix them.

acrylic on canvas

16"x 20"

Self Portrait

This one I think came out pretty well. I drew a whole bunch of rectangles arranged like bricks, and then did shading with some red and orange colors. I like it, but I wish I would have picked a different picture of myself to use as a reference.

acrylic on canvas

8"x 10"

Summer

Here's a picture I painted for my girlfriend. It's from a picture where she is posing next to this strange statue in Incheon, Korea. I jazzed up the colors a little bit, and this is what I got.

Hand

This painting is definitely one of my favorites. Probably my favorite painting I have done. It's just a hand, my hand. I first drew many, many, tiny triangles and then shaded to make it look like a hand. At first I didn't know what to do with the background. I had something with color outlines, but it looked pretty bad. Then a friend suggested to put in an out of focus, dark background, and I came up with the rainy look that I have now. I'm just really pleased with how it came out.

Box Tunnel

This one is not one of my favorites. I just thought that the effect was going to be stronger with the vanishing point of all the boxes in the center. Even so, it turned out OK, at least good enough to make it onto my blog.

acrylic on canvas

18"x 24"

Trapped

Here is a painting a little bit similar to the lion one. It's supposed to be a man, trapped behind a wall. I think that message comes through. I painted it in about 10 minutes, and without looking at any kind of reference. I think thats why it came out like it did.

acrylic on canvas

10"x 12"

Sunrise Sunset

These paintings I'm going to go ahead and list in one post because they go together. It's the last of the tree and plant themed day, and probably the best of the day in my opinion. The backgrounds are inspired by a sunset I saw on halloween night 2010 in Malipo Beach, Korea. I also really like the way the trees came out and the branches look fairly real to me. It's supposed to be one tree, seen at two different times of day.

Fractal Tree

The next tree and plant related painting is one that I pretty much copied out of a fractal book by Benoit Mandlebrodt. In the book, though, it's black and white. I added all of the colors as well as the blue sun.

acrylic on paper

11"x 17"

Tulips

Here is the second in the day of tree and plant related posts. It's flowers. I painted this one for a friend, and I think it turned out OK. It's a little sad that my favorite part of it is the background.

Dual Tree

Hello, and welcome to a day full of tree and plant themed paintings. Are you excited yet? I like to paint trees, or some kind of two dimensional representation of them. One of my favorite parts is how the branches can cross and mesh together without overlapping. That's basically the theme of this one. It's kind of like the dual tree lanterns I painted, except on a canvas and with a different colored sunset background.

acrylic on canvas

14"x 18"

Tree Beard

This one is pretty cool, I think, and some of my friends have really liked it. I painted it from an image that popped into my head when I was sitting in a kimbap restaurant in Korea with low bloodsugar and looking up at a weird colored light at the ceiling.

acrylic on canvas

12"x 24"

Honeycomb Fractal

This painting was just sort of an experiment when I was trying to paint some fractals. A fractal is mathematical term for something that you can take a small piece of and it's similar to the whole thing (self similar). So this one is the hexagonal shape with more hexagonal shapes inside of it and with more hexagonal shapes inside it. You get the picture.

acrylic on paper

11"x 17"

Flower Lantern

This lantern was a gift I painted for my little sister when she graduated from college in 2010. It's pretty simple, just a giant flower on the top and bottom of the lantern. I like how the shading looks on the flowers, but my favorite part is probably the background yellow and orange colors.

acrylic on paper lantern

diameter ~12"

Walking

This one has a strange story. I have never painted anything like this before or since. It started when I was trying ot paint a self portrait with the colors, and I hated the way it was looking. I took a tissue to it to smear it out, and I really liked the way it looked. Then I just kind of finished it off and ended up with this.

Dark Bird

And back to the paintings... For this one, I just wanted to paint a bird. I started with just red and black, and it seemed a little empty. Then I went and added the color grey to bring in some shading, as well as all the little birds that are flying with the big bird.

acrylic on canvas

16"x 20"

Rainbow Lantern

Hooray, another lantern! This one is triangular shapes that come from each end, and then there are waves that intersect through the triangles. I chose the 6 basic colors of the rainbow, and then where the wave intersects I put the complementary color to the one next to it. This one looks the best when it is lit up, but I don't have a picture of that.

acrylic on paper lantern

diameter ~16"

Tunnel

Here's another painting that is one of the first ones that I did. It's basically just a tunnel with rigid square patterns on the bottom and a tent looking thing on top. It's looks OK considering it was one of my first ones.

acrylic on canvasboard

14"x 18"

Cubes

This one is not really my favorite, but it's OK. I wanted it to have more of a three dimensional effect to it, but that didn't really happen. I started with just a grid of 3-D cubes, and then it transitions into just 2-D hexagons.

acrylic on canvas

12"x 24"

Planet

I'm going to spend the rest of Thanksgiving night to post some more paintings, because I most likely won't post many on Friday or Saturday. This one is one of the first paintings I did, and I'm pretty proud of it. It looks a lot like a planet, but I like to think of it as if you looked at something really small, like an electron. Maybe it looks like that. Who knows?

acrylic on canvasboard

9"x 12"

Gorilla

Here's a painting that got really positive feedback when I showed it to people. But unfortunately, it is unavailable because I have already promised it to someone. Anyway, it's a gorilla. I think that the colors I chose turned out really well for it. Somehow green, purple, and gold look good together.

Stripes

Here's another painting I made as a gift. I gave it to my older sister because she let me stay at her apartment when I was finishing my thesis. It's a bunch of stripes, and I really like the colors. I guess the point of it is that the stripes on the left start out at the opposite orientation as those on the right, and then the gradually turn until they are aligned.

Yellow Elephant

Back again with another painting of an animal. This one is an elephant where I limited the colors on the elephant to yellow, orange, and blue. I think it turned out well. What do you think?

Hand Lantern

And now time for another lantern. Thanks for reading, by the way. According to the information provided to me by the Blogger website, a lot of my readers are from Russia. I'm not really sure how that happened, but it's cool.

This lantern has 4 hands on it. I got the idea for it when I had my hands together like on the lantern, and realized it would be a cool design to have on the lantern. I think that the colors turned out really well, too. I hope you like it:

acrylic on paper lantern

diameter ~16"

Bella

This painting is pretty cool. It's a figure of a woman outlined by a bunch of circles. It's supposed to be a super hero who is flying. It turned out well.

acrylic on canvas

18"x 24"

Transform

This painting isn't too exciting, but I might as well put it on here. It was inspired by a dress I saw on a lady in Korea. I just really liked the colors of orange and the bright blue with each other. Here's what I came up with:

Dogs

Here's a painting that was actually commissioned. My friend Jackie, who I met in Korea, asked me to make a paintings of her dogs. It turned out well, as you can see. People who have read my Korea blog will remember the details...

C Chord

Hey look! It's a bonus post for today. Mostly because I didn't plan to write another post today. This is another one of my favorite paintings. I started with making the tesselation pattern over the whole paper. The pattern is made by drawing 3 dimensional cubes but using 3 sides from different cubes that look a little like a sailboat. Then, I drew my fingers making a C chord from looking at a photograph. I don't remember for sure, but it's at probably 3 to 4 hours of work already, shown below:

From there, I used my judgement to color each cell based on the photograph. I'm guessing there's a way to do this with computers nowadays in much less time, but I think it's cool to have a handmade painting like this:

acrylic on paper

5.5"x 13"

Triangle Lantern

This lantern is defnitely in my top 5 favorites of anything I have painted. It started with two small circles near the top and bottom holes. Then the circles were connected with rounded lines to each of the other circles to create 4 triangles. The fringes were colored in with a gradation from yellow to purple. It turned out pretty spectacular!

acrylic on paper lantern

diameter ~16"

Bear

This one isn't so great, because it's a little boring and the color choice isn't my favorite. I painted it mostly as a companion piece to the previous 'Runner'. It's a bear.

I think that it looks pretty cool when it's next to its companion painting. I painted the fringes in each picture to mirror each other. Actually no matter which way the paintings are positioned with respect to each other, the fringes line up.

Runner

This painting I almost gave as a gift a couple of times. Then, for whatever reason I didn't. I like it a lot, even though it's very simple. It's the shape of a man running composed of colored fringes. I really like the colors!

acrlyic on canvas

16"x 20"

Two Suns

This was a little bit amazing to me, but I actually sold this painting. It's a picture of a tree, based on a fractal shape, and then two suns are shining on it. And there's sort of a weird checker thing going on in the sky. It didn't think it was that great, but one of my friends wanted to buy it.

Wavies

This ones pretty simple. It's just a distorted surface split into a bunch of boxes. I chose the colors pretty much randomly, but they look pretty good. I also really like the three dimensional feel that this paintings gives. It's probably better, though, when you're looking at the actual painting.

acrylic on canvas

16" x 20"

Sun Setting

This one is one of my favorites. It's painted from a picture of a tree near lake Mendota in Madison, and then I divided the sky into mostly four-sided shapes. The coloring transitions from yellow and orange to blues and purples. It's also the second biggest painting I've made.

acrylic on canvas

24"x 30"

Tringles

And for today, I have three paintings from 2009. Yay! This one may have taken me the longest to make out of any painting in terms of actual time. I started by drawing tiny triangles on the canvas. Tons of tiny triangles. Then I actually tried to make a few snakes and monsters, but it didn't really turn out. It turned into some kind of abstraction that you can decided what it is.

acrylic on canvas

16"x 20"

Shapes Lantern

This lantern is pretty sweet, I think. I started with drawing a single straight line on the lantern, and kept going and going with it until the surface was split into a bunch of 3, 4, and 5 sided shapes. It turned out pretty well using the warm colors.

acrylic on paper lantern

diameter ~8"

Buddha's Face

This one was inspired by my trip to Thailand, because I saw statues of Buddha pretty much all the time. I was trying to see if I could split the image into gold monochromatic solid colored cells and also overlap another color scheme. It turned out OK, but not great.

Here are just the gold cells to make the face:

And the full painting:

acrylic on paper

African Pot

And now more paintings! It looks like I have around 50 or 60 to post for now, and then I'll post them as I keep on making them. This one is pretty simple, it's a pot that I got in Africa, and then I added a lot of lines around it. I did a lot of that at the time. Anyway, it was a gift for my Mom.

acrylic on paper

Guitar

This one is from a ways back, and I still really like it. It's from when I still wasn't great at paintings, but I really like how the shapes on the body of the guitar look like arms and legs.

Max and Dexter

Here's a painting I made for my sister for Christmas 2009. So its pretty much just a picture of her cats' heads. I was going to try to make it like their heads are popping through some paper kind of like Porky Pig during "that's all folks," but that didn't really work out. It's still pretty cool, anyway.