Russian adventures!

Or something like that. Been listening to Russian folk music and it gave me ideas, nothing too elaborate (or even remotely Russian related actually...) but fun! Hey!

Some of the aforementioned anime-art

That second one isn't really anime-style per say... depending on your point of view I guess. It's used as a new header image on a website I work for. The website has a strong anime-oriented userbase, and boy they really didn't respond well to the image on the site's forums! "Weird happy beach bums" "pseudo anime style" "Disney style" are among the terms that were used, in a negative sense. Frankly I don't really care about all that, I'm fairly glad with how the pic came out, but as a professional work it got me thinking "maybe I didn't evaluate my audience adequatly". Anyway, it got OK'ed from my superiors, so I guess it fit what they wanted.

Btw, the awesome inking on that one was done by my friend and coworker Kidkoum/Saka in Painter 7, he's frikkin awesome, go check him out!

It's been a while!

So yeah, I'm back from California, the trip was great! Here's some sketches from the past weeks :D






That last one has major drawing issues, watch how I try to hide this by adding artsy coloring! :D

When I was in California for the past 3 weeks (well, I've been back for a week now), I was hanging out a lot with some friends who are truly amazing artists, Jeannie and Kid. They're among the artists I used to idolize when I first started out as a manga/anime fanartist online, back in the days. Anyway, this kind of got me back into drawing anime style, because it's so pretty and stuff, but then it got me wondering, what style do I want to draw in? I've been trying to draw more "European style" (whatever that might be) for a while, but now I get back to Anime and it's all delicate and sexy, and I really enjoy it, but it's really lacking the dynamic and fun qualities that the other style has. So yeah, here I am being a classic young artist going "Waaaaaah, what's my style, where do I fit in, insecurity, existancial questions, Waaaaah" and then I think "shut up existancial artist, who cares what 'style' you draw in, stop thinking about that crap and just draw, for Pete's sake". And I go "ok"

And now my Brain goes "Ooh look at you, you're writing all weird on your blog, ladida mister artist" and then I go "No, I'm just writing stuff for fun, I'm trying to be looser in my thinking and expression", and then Brain goes "Nan Han, you just wanna look all free-spirited and artsy" and I'm like "Gosh, aren't we over-analyzing here just a bit?" and then Brain goes "Hmm, maybe we are". I worry a lot about what people might think of me, weither it's about my art, my writing, or just my plain being, and it's really dumb.

If you can make sense of this above, good job! I just felt like letting some thoughts out, I guess this is part of what blogs are for.