Lunchie

The weather is great outside and it's Friday! Donna and I went to eat Vietnamese food at the River Market during our lunch break... It's the best!!! So yummy!

Free bookplates for you!

I have a little something for you; it might come in handy if you have lots of books and like to lend them to your friends. I've created some bookplates for you to download. They are free, but they are for your own personal use only, so please be nice ok! :)

To download the bookplates, click the photo above for the larger file. Print it out and trim each bookplate following the crop marks! Voilà and enjoy!

Today's Doodles

Shy Girl. And another quick one before I took off work...

It's the same old question every single day. We ended up having corn-on-the-cobs and Palermo's thin pizzas (available in U.S. supermarkets) for dinner. They are really good pizzas... yummy!

Two new inspiring blogs for you to visit

I am very lucky to be able to work with many talented artists everyday. Two of them, Donna Van Hooser and Jon Kelly Green, just recently started their own blogs, and I would love to share them with you. (Hint: Bookmark and subscribe to these two blogs. You will be so inspired by their working process and many artworks to come! I promise!)

The first one is Donna's SunDog Mosaics. At work, Donna sits one cubicle away from me, and we are very close friends. She has been a designer and illustrator for Hallmark for 21 years and a mosaic artist for 18; she is a well of knowledge and I learn from her everyday. Donna makes the most amazing mosaics and she is lightening fast! Right now in her blog, Donna is showing the progress of a mosaic piece featuring her cat Edwina. (We all love to see an artist's working process, don't we?) She also has an on-going project of making 101 doodle mosaics (all of them are 12"x12" in size) based on the doodles found in our friends' sketchbooks. Donna also has a Flickr site where you will find more photos of her works.

Above: "Emily and Oscar" (ungrouted) mosaic by Donna Van Hooser

The next one is a brand new blog: "Action Art by Jon Kelly Green". Even though Kelly's blog is brand new (born just yesterday), for years he has been running Studio-Rama with fellow artist Jen Rarey (Hint: if you love designer plush toys, you have to visit Studio-Rama and click Jen's plush page). Kelly's works are so much fun and full of energy, and he creates the best character designs, as you can already tell by the header he made for his blog! Kelly doesn't have a Flickr page yet, but if you follow his blog, you won't miss any great artworks coming your way in the near future.

Today, I...

...doodled during a morning meeting and unexpectedly got bangs during an afternoon haircut session.

I am learning Spanish.

I use Pimsleur's Comprehensive Spanish system to learn it at home. It requires no books, only by listening and repeating, just like the way we learn our first language. So far I am having fun, and I highly recommend it. : )

Softee: The Shoe

Softee just recently finished recordning two brand new songs "The Shoe" and "Hip Haunt" with the help of recording engineer / producer Chris Cosgrove. Check out our website for the new tunes and other songs! :)

Also, the 2009 Pitch Music Award nominees were just announced, and we are so excited that Softee is nominated under the best pop bands category. You can vote for us by going to this link!
(Anyone from anywhere can vote, so don't be shy!)

Penélope's Granny Bag

How are you, my friends? I've been so busy at work... Yesterday I even forgot to eat my lunch. Yeah, it's that kind of workload again. It happens. So if I haven't been too productive, that's the reason...

Meanwhile, I'd like to share with you the bag made by Penélope Argos. Penélope wrote me an email couple of weeks ago after I posted the granny illustration, asking me if she could use the image to make something for her daughter. I was so flattered and more than happy to say yes! She was so nice, and boy, was she fast, and she is really good... I mean, LOOK AT THE BAG! She put the granny on a blue bag for her daughter, and she told me a little story about her Granny:

"When my Grandmother was still alive, and I was little, she used to live with us. She was a very fragile old lady and couldn't do much, which bothered her a lot. Her only escape was that every Thursday she used to go out with a friend, and they said that they would go to buy buttons. It was her way to say that what she was doing with her friend was nobody's business... She carried along a blue and white cloth bag (with the little squares)... and she came home with a big smile and a little something to offer me. Somehow I never forget it. When I saw your Granny I knew that it "had" to be a blue bag."

Isn't that a cute story? Thanks for sharing it, Penélope!! XO

Bad Cloud

I hate thunderstorm... I am really scared of it. We've got lots of rain in the past couple of days (Some areas got tornado; something we have to deal with when living in Kansas.), and it will be raining tomorrow and Friday, too. Enough already.

Characters: Mr. Piggy and Granny

I was playing with textures today. Here is little Mr. Piggy playing music.


I started off this one with a giant head, thinking I was going to draw a monster, then it became a granny... At least she is nice.