Tag: creativity

2025 look back, better late than never

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I usually update portfolio at the end of a year, as a way to look back on what I have done and celebrate small milestones in my artistic journey. However, 2025 was a tough year for me in every aspect so you are reading what should be posted 3 months ago.

This year I was under heavy influence of AI. The number of commissions has reduced by about 60%, and even though I had a backup plan, I still felt terrible with the whole world. Even though I believe arts cannot die here and there are still people making arts, I can’t help the anger rising in me when a client asked me: “Can you fix this AI-generated image for me?”.

That’s possibly why my favourite pieces of the year are mostly hand drawn. Maybe in the dark moments of being invaded by vague feelings and fears, holding onto physical things comforts me and gives me hopes.

Anyway, life needs to go on and I need to keep painting. I do paint for a living, but I realize I must keep painting for me, or my sanity.

Poetry illustrations

This is the only series/ book project I worked in 2025. Or the only one that left any positive impressions. I got to paint a wide variety of subjects, mostly romantic vibe. The subjects were actually chosen before the project, so my main responsibility was coloring. I have no idea whether this book is published yet, all my clients seem to disappear mysteriously.
These paintings are actually small, they are made to put together with poems. I completed the series bit by bit in 3 months or so, before I started my second job in June.

One thing I have decided this year is to slowly say goodbye with Fiverr account. This was a difficult decision although projects there didn’t interest me as before. Truth to be told, not all projects or commissions I got were my strengths or something I wanted to develop skills on, yet, at the time I believed I could stick together until something better came. My original plan was to build a strong website with other connects to keep the flow of work, but life needed me quicker than I thought. This project was possibly a nice goodbye to my 5-year freelance journey, which was also started with a poetry book.

Painting old houses and nature

So far, you might have noticed that the tone of this post is pretty negative. I just can’t help it – my mental health went straight off the cliff this year. That’s why I didn’t learn anything new, despite having a list of new skills I want to add (animation, composition, anatomy, etc – I even set up an Excel sheet for the courses I wanted to take). This year I spent time just painting spontaneously, scrolling the images from old trips or old days – the good old days. I have a whole post for Huế , from my trip in 2004.

Another topic I love to pain is painting nature, flowers, grasses, etc. Touching grass does help with mentality 🙂

This low period makes me wonder a lot about what is my purpose in this career and how to sustain it in this world, even if AI does not steal my job. I wonder whether other occupations require as much the amount of mentality as being an artist. I wonder whether I’m trading my mental health for a dream job. Don’t get me wrong, painting is my favourite thing to do, and it’s the best way to appreciate life. It’s just that working as an artist requires much more than just making art, particularly working alone.

I feel like I should have known all of these things right from the start. Or I did such a good job of blinding myself because it felt so good making your childhood dream coming true?

Challenges

Another thing to keep me on track this year is doing challenges, 30 days of painting something by a rule. It aligns with my principle of “painting for the sake of painting” for 2026. It gave me a sense of purpose everyday or a kind of ritual when my days felt like falling apart.

Art shop

Lucky envelope for Vietnamese New Year

Anyway, with the support of friends, I made another effort of making a living on my arts by open a shop selling stationary in Vietnam. There’s a lot to learn about running a shop with physical products, and working with others over long distance. Again, I feel this is something I should have known and thought about before opening the shop. But operating this shop allows me to hold my digital arts in a physical form, which I rarely get to do. I hope to keep it running, even without profit, as a passion project.

After all, what’s now?

You may ask how’s everything after 2025. The answer is, well, I still paint and draw as much as I could. But I feel exhausted holding onto a career that means a lot to me and nothing to others (not including friends, of course). Maybe my beginner’s luck has run out, maybe I’m not as strong and hard-working as my expectation, maybe there’s a reason behind all of these struggles. Or maybe not 🙂
Honestly, I don’t know. I wish someone would tell me what to do, but deeply, I know I should solve this mess by myself. After all, I did make some beautiful things, show parts of my mind to the world and have some good times. All parties and all nightmares have an end.

Personal Painting Collection 2024: Portraits, Practices, Pleinairs

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2024 saw me going up and down with painting, beginning with an intensive period of doing portraits and then a loose period of painting random things to find out: what do I want to paint? Some context: for the past 2-3 years, I have been allocating my efforts on the technical side rather than idea sites; since I often stuck by techniques. Sometimes, it was confusion while mixing colors, other times, it was problems about anatomy, perspective, etc.

My belief is that I would perfect my techniques or style to some point before thinking about what I want to express with my works. Well, it turns out that arts doesn’t work like that, and I get annoyed by endless practice and studying sessions.

But let the story begin with the first few months. I was into learning about colors (again) and portraits. Portrait paintings were to recall my anatomical knowledge and to boost my color skills. Mixing skin tones is still something I need to work on.

This is my favorite portrait of the whole year.

One big shift in my color usage is towards a brighter palette with bolder color choice. It possibly coincided with my switch to Holbein acrylic gouache, but also my slight change from just painting from dark to light or reverse to painting from the boldest color to neutral tones. It’s not an intentional thing, it’s more about keeping my palette organized so that I can avoid over mixing.

One thing I have been thinking about is how to add “life” into my paintings, or to be more specific, movement. My paintings use to have a nostalgia vibe, because I mostly painted the places I visited, the places that I met someone and talked with someone. The later paintings of 2024 has something else with bolder and brighter colors.

My summer trip to Quang Binh (Phong Nha), Hue, Da Nang (Hoi An) deepened my interest in painting traditional architecture. My only regret is that I should have taken many more reference images.

In the last months of 2024, I turned to painting nature, flowers and gardens in particular, as a method to relax. It’s also under the influence of writing about female artists, Rachel Ruysch, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, etc who use flowers as a subject and a recurring symbol of femininity. They allows me to work quickly with not-so-bad results, work freely wihout a reference image and can be used as gifts in rushed events.

Looking back, 2024 was a year of shifting perspectives—from focusing solely on technique to questioning how I want to express my ideas. While I haven’t found all the answers, I’ve discovered new directions, from bold color choices to the love for life and nature in my paintings.

I guess that’s it for a year.

Art Journal Entry: End of 2024 Summer

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I will be exactly 26 in a few days and I often find myself dwelling on the past, not necessarily my childhood or adolescence, but the years after graduating from university. Though I kept a big journal, I still wonder how I have got over all of these things. I don’t share my journal, because it’s very personal and I mostly wrote about my relationship with people rather with arts. But I think a journal about arts could be shared, hopefully helping anyone reading get over the feeling of being lost in our 20s.

As a freelance illustrator, summer is often the slow season. People go on holiday, there are no big celebrations and this year, with generative images and recession all over the globe, it’s even a slower summer for me.

I tried to take this as an opportunity to improve my skills and were ambitious when I plan for the summer. I was already ambitious when I wrote down my new year resolutions, even though I have never completely achieve them. I want to continue paint landscape and improve my portrait, storyboard, people in drapery and animals skills.

It was smooth with animals and portraits because I started practicing with them already in spring, I just need to finish them as I go. Storyboarding is surprisingly hard because there are not much to remember, it’s more about imagining a camera running around in space and merge them with your perspective skill. It starts growing too hard and I have to decide to delay learning it, trying another source of book and lectures.

Sketching people in drapery is figure sketching but a new level. I practiced figure sketching with nude models or minimal dressed models so when the big challenge is to imagine how their arms and legs move under the fabric. And choosing what folds to tell the story; there will be folds that can be memorized and folds you just add because of a specific pose.

What I didn’t plan to study is learning to use Procreate, because I’m still not sure whether to get an Ipad or a new laptop. But I decided to get an Ipad, because I prefer something lightweight and minimal. I never fully use and understand Photoshop and it’s too heavy, Procreate works much better for me, it’s just drawing.

Some Procreate sketches

Apart from new skills, I still try to paint landscape both outdoors and with images I gather myself. This summer I painted a lot with my Holbein Acrylic Gouache, which has brighter tones compared to my old Nevskaya Palitra gouache.

It sounds like I have learned and done a lot of things, but actually I felt like a crap all the time. When I started freelancing and studying arts on my own, I believed after a few years, things would get easier and even if I’m not a genius, I must have gather skills and projects along the way. I did gather new skills and projects, but the feeling of having nothing and being nobody is still the same. I guess that the curse of being an artist.

Goodbye Summer. At least we weren’t lazy.