Works done at Illustration Academy

Everything for this piece was to be in a flat style. Here, in the setting of West Bottoms, it portrayed a man appearing nostalgic whilst he strummed his guitar, syncing his soothing music to his emotions. The overall is pretty warm as I wanted to create the mood of sun set and I thought a nice, deep warmth will help to reflect the nostalgic mood. However, it turned out that it didn't work well as I was told that I still needed to push more in showing a better contrast between the warm and cool colors. I felt that it is tricky.

I learnt the most from this piece, Death Railway. Basically, we needed to bring the ghost story from where we came from to the setting of West Bottoms in Kansas City. My story related to the period of Japanese Occupation in Singapore where prisoners of war were sent from Singapore to Thailand to construct a railway. Many died while at work due to diseases, lack of food, rest, and being given cruel treatment from the Japanese . This led the railway to be known as a Death Railway. Honestly, this assignment from Sterling Hundley is pretty challenging as it takes quite a deal of courage to dig up and read the ghost stories during the ideation process as I'm usually not comfortable in knowing the ghost stories. In the end, I really had fun in producing this piece that was done in mixed media - acrylic, ink and collage.

For this, I chose to do a portrait of Mother Teresa as I grew up in a Catholic environment at schools and was influenced by the stories of her. She is one of the people I looked up to. The media for this piece is acrylic, watercolor, oil and color pencils, trying out Chris Payne's techniques that were shown during the demo. It is pretty cool and I really enjoyed working on this piece too.

There is another, last assignment which shall be posted later.

On the whole, it has been really awesome to be able to learn such huge information during a month of summer program at the Illustration Academy. It is definitely a great privilege to be able to learn from the professionals directly - Mark English, John English, George Pratt, Brent Watkinson, Sterling Hundley, CF Payne, Anita Kunz and Jon Foster as well as being surrounded by talented students. Above all, much love and thanks to my dearest sister for this opportunity and my family for their unwavering support.