2011

Happy 2011 !
Hope everyone had a great holiday break, and having a great fresh start of the year ! I've been delaying on posting for my travels...due to the extreme cold weather conditions, disconection from the internet, food poison, pollution, and holiday laziness... and so on ... "f(-. _ -.);,..
but here they are, a clearing of 2010 -

After setting off from NYC, I arrived to Edinburgh, Scotland, in December, visiting my friends Alice & Andrew for a week. It was absolutley a beautiful city ! Even in the coldest Dec. winter since 1962 ( -13C ~ -3C), and with the heaviest snow ever seen in the history (!?).  The sun rose low around 8:30am and set around 3:30pm, I went out sketching, but could not stay in one place ever too long.... my toes and fingers would got totally frozen! So most of the time I could only get the drawing down quickly, take a mobile photo, and finish coloring the sketches next to the heater with a cup of hot tea !

Then after the week in Edinburgh, I went on a 3 weeks trips with my friends, which you'd find out as the sketches are posted -

- Edinburgh - 

                                                      

  - the Cameo Cinema  -            

      

- Paris Apartments - 

- Rainy Sicili - 

- Rome - 

 

N.Y. - I've not gonne too far...

12-02-2010
Well, I've not gone too far,...
New York was my first stop on this trip, briefly visited some lovely old friends here for 2 days 2 nights, and planned to fly out at 7:45am on 12-02. I had troubled my kindest friends who I visited and stayed with to get up at 3:30am, drive out from White Plains at 4am, we came across a car crash accident on the fwy side at 5 am, my friend helped set up the emergency flares on the fwy, then dropped me off at the airport at 5:30am, exactly 2 hrs-ish before my 7:45 am international flight ! Nice ! and sharply on time ! ... However, as I was confidently self-checking in my luggage, the airline person came over and wondered if I was going to Santo Domingo......Santo Domingo !? I'd love to visit there one day, but...I wasn't ! Read my flight schedule again, then realized, it was supposed to be "7:45PM" instead of "AM"!!... ohoo nooo ~~~ with terrible guilt, regret, and dumbfounded..... too shameful and sorry to call my friend back... I stayed at the airport for another 5 hrs waiting for the luggage storage to open, then transited to Manhattan to kill time before my actual flight at night.

Beside all the stupidities I'd made,  the day actually turned out to be a great one after all ! I got to spend some time walking around the city, trying out famous burger joint, and got to sketch a little bit. Though the temperature quickly turned from cold to freezing, I end up retrieving into a cafe facing the Madison Square Park, and found a lovely view right outside of the window. How a lovely city !

" Expedition ! " ...here we go !

11-31-2010 
Here I go, set off onto a little expedition of mine from San Francisco ! From now to the early next year, I'll be traveling here and there visiting friends and family, exploring places I love, and places I've never been. It's a rare fortunate chance and time in my life, I got to, and better use it well ! Hopefully there will be easy wifi on the way, that I'll get to upload some sketches here !

ROUND ROBIN Available online !- Update

Round Robin is NOW available on Katy Wu's blog ! We have a limited run of 300 books, all books are numbered and will be signed and sketched !

Here is another illustration I made for the book -

Quick, quick, Sketch !

Took a swift 4.5 days trip to Tirol, Austria, for a family wedding a few weeks ago, we stayed with family around lake Achensee, a lake between high mountains. As we arrived at late night in the complete darkness, the second day morning view out of their apt. was especially spectacular ! It was a sudden realization of being in a perfect Austrian mountain town calendar ! the only equivalent I could relate this to was probably - waking up right in front of Half Dome in Yosemite ! but in a very sweet setting of lovely music box wooden houses with lots of colorful balcony flowers, cows and horses strolled in the green meadow, and all these surrounded by high mountains with trees started to change their colors into Autumn flame....lovely lovely... unfortunately, as usual, traveling on a family agenda with a tight schedule, I started a sketch, but never got to finish it before we left this dreamy place ! but I thought it was probably just enough to express that bit of an impression....
Also, I got to spend a few hrs in Munich before my flight back home, few hrs was definitely too quick for this amazing historical city, where every turn was a new view of architecture and time.

Round Robin & Mr.R on Gallery Nucleus !

Gallery Nucleus starts to carry Round Robin on their website ! 

As well as a limited postcard booklets of an Expedition with Mr.R( the Raccoons), Daniela Strijleva's Collected Sketches, and Katy Wu's Tiger Bee Comics and Tiger print ! Please take a look !

So, What exactly is Round Robin about ?

In this book, me, Daniela, and Katy, three of us played a word game - we each takes turn add a random word to make a list of 15 words,  and each page contains 2 words that are connected to the page before and the page after. Say, p.1 => X+Y, p.2 => Y+Z, p.3 => Z+Something......and so on. The words are random, can be noun, verb or adjective..... Each artist would take turn making an illustration inspired from the 2 words given by the two other artists.

The process was very fun and challenging, as it throws you out of the comfort zone, because you probably would have never chosen those particular words yourself ! And the best and the most 'magical' thing about this is, each artist can interpret each word very differently that it's always a great surprise to see the next page !