Doodling

I like visual arts since young. Like many of the kids born in the 70's in Hong Kong, I grew up with tons of Japanese animations. Below is a piece of fan art I did on paper (and later scanned in for some typography design).

I was never trained professionally in art. When I was a teenager, my artistic mind was quite "Western". I would question myself "should there be outlines at all?", and I actually disliked the imprecision inherited in Chinese paintings or folk arts. I figured out on my own ways to do precise drawing, which I later found that similar methods are also presented in standard instructional materials. I was a "realistic" artist.

But one day I saw two Chinese paintings by Ah Chung and they struck me. Here is a later version of one of them. I suddenly realized the beauty behind simplicity. Those works are philosophical in that they introduce new ways of thinking or explain how we should live our lives. I admired Ah Chung's wit, as well as his simple artistic style. Since then, I seldom drew things realistically, and picked up a more freehand or cartoonish style. "What is relief!" I said to myself. And I started to really appreciate freehand-style Chinese ink paintings.

In 1993, I bought my first graphics tablet because I wanted to make artwork on a computer. But soon I realized that what I really needed was an image scanner rather than a tablet because tablets (or at least the one I got), together with the software available then, couldn't give me the same control as with pencil and paper - there was some deviation between the reported position and the real point of contact, the stylus tip slided easily, and the stylus didn't sense pressure. Tablets at that time were mostly designed for CAD applications, not 'fine art'. Later tablets are pressure sensitive, and this made it easier to sketch. But still I found myself often first drew on paper and then scanned them into the computer for coloring. Below is a few examples.

And a few pieces done entirely on a computer:

In 1999, I started to learn Chinese ink painting by watch instructional videos (by the way, the best set is this by Ning Yeh). I also tried doodling in this medium. Previously, I only used them for calligraphy. It's really hard, as you basically can't make any correction. You have to know your tool and medium really well and be confident when you make the strokes to give vitality.

Artist Wei-Shan Wu came to our university in 2000, and I painted him in this piece to commemorate his lecture on sculpture. He like this work a lot and wrote the following complimentary words onto it (actually on a printout of a digital copy).