michaelvelasquez

I used my standard process on this one. Started off as traditional pencil and ink in my Stillman & Birn sketchbook. I was testing out a new Kuretake Zig Cocoiro Letter Pen for inking and wasn't happy with the result even though I liked the overall composition, so it was off to Procreate for another pass. I'm undecided on the Zig Cocoiro. Inking wasn't its intended use but the stiff, fine point brush tip does offer some nice line variation; I just feel like I'm going to break it every time I push down a little harder.

I usually lay down some very rough shading before adding any color. If I do a good enough job with the shading in black and white, then I'll just use this as a multiply blending layer on top of flat color layers (like I did here), as opposed to adding shadows using darker tones of color. I think this one may be better in black and white, but I'm not mad at the time I spent adding some color.

A monochromatic watercolor done for Inktober 2018. This is from a popular photo of Bruce Lee. I'm not thrilled with how the wooden dummy turned out and I had to do a little Photoshopping to make it passable, but overall I like the result. You can see a unique, spotted texture produced by watercolor on the regular, non-watercolor Moleskine sketchbook paper. Since it's not meant for watercolor, the paper gets a little warped, more so on this painting than others I've done in the same journal. I'm not sure why; maybe I used more water than before?

It's impossible to fully describe how influential Brandon Lee, his death and “The Crow” have been on my life and personality. As an Asian American kid growing up in Central California, seeing Brandon Lee on TV in “Kung Fu: The Movie” was the first time I remember consciously identifying with someone who looked like me in popular media (a much cooler and more handsome version of me, of course). It's crazy, but the fact that he was the legendary Bruce Lee's son was completely secondary to me. He was a naturally charismatic, sexy, badass, non-stereotypical Asian American man and I was hooked.

“Rapid Fire” is an underrated classic with a lot of inventive action sequences and fight choreography for the time in an American film. “Showdown In Little Tokyo”, despite being blissfully unaware of its own racism, is still a fun movie I watch a couple times a year. I've got a much watched VCD copy of “Legacy Of Rage” which has a pretty nuts final shootout. Brandon Lee managed to shine even in the “so bad it's good” C-movie “Laser Mission” with his self aware and sarcastic sense of humor.

But “The Crow” is a damn masterpiece that set my emo, teenage world aflame. It really changed the entire culture around films based on comic books and showed just how dark they could be while still retaining mainstream appeal. I usually hear Tim Burton's “Batman” being given credit for this instead and while it did come out 5 years before “The Crow” and was hugely influential, it's still a Tim Burton film through and through and never quite breaks free from his distinct style of camp. By comparison, “The Crow” paints a genuinely bleak, nihilistic portrait of society, then fills it with glimmers of sincere hope.

Sincerity is a word that constantly pops into my mind while watching “The Crow”. It's impossible to separate the film from Brandon Lee's death during filming, but even if he'd lived, I've no doubt it would still have had a massive cultural impact. You can just feel everyone involved in its creation firing on all cylinders, like they all know exactly how special this project is and don't want to mess it up. Lee's performance especially is seared into my brain. He's furious, forlorn, maudlin, charming, sardonic, tortured and in love all at the same time and it totally works. I feel like I based all my facial expressions in high school on Eric Draven from “The Crow”. I've owned this film on VHS, widescreen VHS, DVD, Blu-ray and digital download.

I rushed this watercolor painting at the end and I wish I hadn't. It was done on Fluid Easy-Block Watercolor Hot Press paper using Winsor & Newton Cotman watercolor paints. Where the shadow of the crow is on the left, I had originally painted building lights but I messed up badly and decided to paint over them. This is a still from the pawn shop scene. I'm glad I made a scan of the painting before I filled in the background, which you can see below. In retrospect, he looks great on the white background and I think most fans would've been able to tell exactly which frame of the film it's from.

This is a drawing of model Kitty Louvit, known on Instagram as @areyoukitty. I am jealous of her abs. I did a quick initial ink sketch and you can tell I didn't think much of it by the blurriness of the cell phone photo I used as the reference layer in Procreate. I used Procreate's liquify filter to get it closer to the proportions I wanted, not exact but also not too far into caricature. The final result doesn't do Kitty's striking features justice but I think someone who knows her would recognize the likeness.

It's always strange drawing real life people. If you tag them if feels like you're asking for recognition or worse, permission after the fact for appropriating their image. It feels a little stalker-ish but as an artist I enjoy drawings faces of people that catch my interest. When requested by the individual subject, I will always remove a drawing they aren't happy with.

f/3.5, 1/60, ISO 200, 50mm, Canon Rebel T3i, Canon EF 50mm f/1.8

I shot this in front of our living room window which has those thick, yellowish-white, scratchy curtains that so many apartments come with. To avoid having to Photoshop out to much detail from the curtains, I overexposed them and used a large white reflector placed behind the camera to add some fill on our bodies.

Here's the original RAW file. I cropped by wife's lovely lower back curve to better sell the symmetry but in retrospect, I feel I may have done her a disservice. Ha.

I had tried out a few color versions but once I saw it in black and white, I knew I was going to stick with that. Nothing was really gained from the color and monochrome really highlights the essentials; our silhouettes, bellies, negative space, and expressions.

I saw a DVD for the sequel to the 2005 “Dukes of Hazzard” movie in the bargain bin at Wal-Mart and realized I had no idea they made another movie or that the original did well enough to warrant one. I watched the original TV show with my parents when I was a kid and remember having a General Lee Hot Wheels toy. Anyway, Daisy Duke was on my mind because of Wal-Mart, which makes sense.

This one started out as pencil, then traditional inks but I really botched her face. It can be hard sometimes to define young facial features without making them look too muscular or old. I liked everything else so I brought it into Procreate for inking. I laid down some rough shading that I couldn't seem to improve upon with subsequent revisions. It was subtle but conveyed what I needed it to simply. That happens sometimes, where you nail what you were going for right off the bat. I decided to keep the colors simple to match.

When my wife and I found out she was pregnant with our eldest son, we figured we'd better get some traveling done before he popped out. So we visited her brother and extended family in Japan.

I took these photos on my iPhone 4s during our visit to Kyoto. They were edited in the VSCO app and Photoshop. While in Kyoto, we stayed in a “hostel” which was more like a resort. Seriously, it was better than most hotels I've stayed in and considerably less expensive.

I drew this portrait of my gorgeous wife using Faber-Castell PITT Artist Pens and Prismacolor Premier markers in a Leuchtturm1917 notebook. I have two Leuchtturm1917 notebooks and I strongly dislike them both. I bought them when I was just starting to get back into drawing and was sampling a bunch of different papers, pencils and markers. Both Leuchtturm1917 notebooks started falling apart at the binding within a few weeks of purchase. The paper also bleeds through too easily, though I suppose it wasn't necessarily made for marker art.

I'm compelled not to waste the damn things, though, so I sometimes use them for quick, throwaway sketches. I have a collection of notebooks by various brands with only a handful of drawings in them, sometimes because they genuinely aren't great and more often because I'm finicky.

One thing I find myself missing from college in the late 90's early 00's was all the wild hair styles and coloring. Am I mistaken or is brightly colored hair not as big a thing anymore?

This piece started out in my sketchbook. I “inked” it again in Procreate and added the initial colors. I notice I still haven't figured out how to draw fingernails.

It felt it needed something like a night market in the background to spruce it up but filling in backgrounds is something I'm not very interested in and rarely have time for. I grabbed a royalty free stock photo by the talented Jezael Melgoza on Unsplash and blurred it in Photoshop. I then changed the overall lighting in Photoshop to better match the background as well as adding a diffuse glow.

I made this in Adobe Illustrator as sort of a birthday present to myself. I originally drew it using Posca paint pens but wasn't thrilled with the result. Even on a bright white marker paper where the ink pretty much sits on top of the surface, the colors were really muted (the below scan has its saturation bumped way up).

I remember being bummed that Marvel didn't explore Tony Stark's alcoholism in Iron Man 2 but obviously they knew what they were doing and the way he deals with his PTSD over the course of the films has been very compelling. Team Cap for life, though.