Wednesday 27 January 2016

2016: Happy Chinese New Year! 新年快樂!


Drawn By: WrittenDusk

Happy Chinese New Year!  新年快樂!

恭喜發財! 大家身體健康 , 萬事意.

I wish everyone great health, prosperity, and joy; that everything you do this year would exceed expectations.

The meanings of the words to the left roughly translates to: "When flowers bloom, riches come", "Good things comes in twos".
                                                                                                                                                     


This is the first Chinese New Year drawing I've posted here, hopefully I could kept this up like I do with Christmas drawings.

Honestly this drawing started off a bit uninspired, but I slowly got more inspired as I continued working on it. There are actually some Feng shui elements in it, haha.

The colours and patterns on the clothing were the hardest portion of the drawing. Trying to mimic the clothing I see in Chinese period dramas needed more thought than I expected. Firstly, I found that patterns needed to be coloured only slightly different from the main fabric colour. This barely visible colouring variation creates an illusion effect that parts of the clothes is brighter than other parts; kind of mimicking the effects of silk embroidery. Secondly, since I was only using one shape for the patterning, varying the shape's size looks much better than just using the same size throughout. I wanted to cheat with just one size, but it just didn't cut it, haha. Also I felt that, after looking up more examples, a more mechanical patterning looks better and is more accurate. Mechanical meaning a set patterning order for example: 1100110011; as opposed to a more random patterning.

The second hardest part was the tree in the back. Its a plum tree by the way. I took a good amount of effort to mimic the traditional Chinese brush painting, but not nearly as much trial and error was needed compared to the patterning.


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