I had art events almost every weekend of January 2012: Sketch Fest, then Portraits After Dark (which used to be Portrait Days), Sketch Fest again (another one!) and finally a day at the National Museum with the Urban Sketchers of Singapore. If you’ve liked my FaceBook art page, then you’ve been keeping up with all the new little pieces of art as well as the bigger paintings and their progress; If not, this is my January post more or less summing them all up! (And the month isn’t over yet! I’m submitting 3 portraits within the next few days to Portrait Adoption, the site for all your role-playing and fictional character portrait needs.

Some of the results for the Sketch Fests of January, of which I’m proud to say two have sold:

And January 28th was the day of the local urban sketchers day at the National Museum of Singapore. I only had an hour’s time, but it was enough to produce the following:

Like my first urban sketch walk, I only completed one painting, but this one only took 50 minutes whereas the last had taken almost 2.5 hours! Instead of spending close to an hour just on pencil lines and checking perspective, I used my quick-portrait method, but on speed: Just watercolour pencil lines as rough guides for horizontals and proportions, then blocking in decreasingly small shapes with watercolour, and penciling in the details right after, sometimes while the washes were still wet. I found myself holding the paintbrush quite often as one would for Chinese brush painting, that was the speed at which I was going! The technique needs more practice, but I’m happy with the first attempt at using this method for outdoor painting.

I hope to tackle more frequent blog posts for the rest of 2012; though if my rate at producing pictures this year keeps up like it has this January, I don’t mind if blogging has to take a back seat to the art!

The website has gotten an update with 4 new paintings going up: Along Came a Spider, The Reading Tree, Pandora (2012), and Erfyl, book cover art for Alexa Chipman’s fantasy novel of the same title. Go peruse!

Pandora and the Reading Tree are in fact available at my Etsy store now (and the NEWYEAR 20% discount coupon is valid until the end of January). Work-in-progress photos can be seen in the in-progress album at my Facebook art page.

Happy new year to all! I’m still dazed and jetlagged after 2 weeks in the US (Note: traveling for over 27 hours with a 2-year-old in coach class is, to put it mildly, challenging) but I’m looking forward to a new year of new art and projects. Spring Blossoms has been uploaded to the site, though some of you who LIKE my FaceBook page would have seen it already! (Liking my page on FB has perks!) The high-resolution image has also been uploaded to RedBubble and FineArt America so you can purchase prints, and I’ll soon add it to Zazzle as well (along with others I may have missed) in case you’d like it on other products. (The 5” by 7” card will be up on Etsy soon as well.)

With sleepiness and fatique hitting me at odd moments, I’ll be taking it fairly easy for my first painting of 2012. It’s going to be a mermaid ACEO. You’ll see the progress scans or photos on the FaceBook page.

And, there’s an EMG Sketchfest this weekend!

I’ll be out of the country the last two weeks of December, and Internet access will be limited where I’m going (even if it’s in the US). I will be closing my etsy store after this weekend. If you’ve missed X’mas shopping from me this year, don’t worry! I’ll come back in January with new items and a sale.

I’ve also got a new painting up at my FaceBook page, where I did promise I’d put up my works-in-progress.

And again my best blogging is at Fantastic Portfolios! You’re invited to skip there to read about Paypal, Occupy, and the Little Guy.

Illumina: Fantasy Art by Janet Chui is now on FaceBook! Visit the page, hit “LIKE”, and you’ll be able to see my work-in-progress photos, sketches and new art while you’re on FaceBook. Special etsy coupons will be occasionally be released there; If you want to be on top of ALL sales and discounts, make sure you’re signed into my mailing list as well. (Sign-ups are at the bottom of my website’s home page—remember to respond to the confirmation email!)

December Sketch Fest has come and gone, and with all the Christmassy prompts (which were extra inspiring—so much so I didn’t get to sketch as much as I wanted), I did manage four sketches altogether:

And three still available for sale at my Sketch Fest profile page!

Christmas shopping? My etsy store still has some great items, including a custom portrait painting for just $15! This introductory offer will end December 13th, so move fast.

New art added to the site:

Art that was retouched :

I’ve also been blogging fairly regularly at Fantastic Portfolios (or “F-logging,” as I call it) and for some reason have more stuff to post about there than here. Maybe because it would be hubris to make myself sound like a fantasy art expert on my own blog—but it’s OK on a site I run! So hop over there and enjoy the entries. Lots about art-making, art-improvement and business.

I’ve also been trying to add as much as I can to my etsy shop in time for Christmas shopping. If you don’t see an item there that you want, just send me a note!

It was a busy weekend, but I managed 2 pieces, “In the Dark Places” and “Raven Steals the Sun”. Both are around 5 by 7 inches in size:

And still available for sale at my Sketch Fest profile page!

I’m not sure I can make it in time for the “Spirited Away” deadline at this rate, but at least I’m happy with the progress so far:

(You can click on it for a bigger version.)

I also just discovered WIPNation, which ecnourages the posting of WIP shots—but the quality of level there is, frankly, intimidating. I’ll get around to it though, I swear!

Enchanted Visions’ latest theme is “Spirited Away”, and I couldn’t help making this little sketch in my sketchbook (click to zoom in):

Right now, it’s been transferred to A3 paper (30 × 42 xm, or roughly 12 by 16 inches), and while I can’t wait to put paint on it, I actually will be away from Oct 15th to 20th.

For the IF theme “Contraption” for the week beginning 7th October 2011 (click to enlarge):

“Creation” was actually completed less than 2 months ago during the weekend following EMG Sketch Fest August 2011. The sketch as it first looked after an hour can be seen here.

I loved the idea of a female Creator who would recognise, in the midst of some SRS WERK, that help could be gotten from making some helper machines (or “Builder Beasts” per the original prompt!). I’m not normally a fan of drawing machinery, but made it fun by designing them around surrealistic animals. There’s a horn-and-bubble-blowing beast, a nip-and-tucking beast, and a, well, clockwork overseer with multiple magnifying lenses.

The permalink for this image on my website is here.