This is just a post to share all the mess behind polished paintings. You can see the underpainting, the half-done paintings, brushes thrown randomly on the desk, the palette almost falling off the desk.
Sometimes, the process means more to me rather than the final result. I enjoy painting fast and playing with colors, so the moment the painting is finished or rather I see that I can’t do anything more. It feels like waking up from a dream and I’ll need to wait until next night for another dream.
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.
One of the perks of being an illustrator working with small authors is that I get to read many interesting stories and visualize it with my ideas. Every illustration has a story behind, but below are some of the most significant projects of mine in terms of storytelling.
A series for a personal story from childhood to adulthood.
A story of two teenagers with Sherlock Holmes inspiration
A classroom story
Two illustrations in a poetry book about a female growth after relationships
Over the past few years, I have received numerous requests for couple illustrations for a variety of purposes—weddings, anniversaries, personal gifts, and even editorial use. The style preferences vary widely, from cartoony and humorous to deeply emotional, as well as partially colored sketches to fully painted pieces.
Here are some illustrations are allowed to publish for my personal promotions.
Above are a few monochrome drawings in a series of illustrations for a poetry book about love.
A couple married with two daughtersAn old couple, commissioned by their granddaughter
Here are some illustrations that I’m allowed to share for personal promotion. One of the biggest challenges in depicting love and affection is avoiding clichés. The most common pose—standing close with hands around each other’s waists—is often requested, so I strive to add a unique touch to each piece. Personalization is key: incorporating meaningful details from a couple’s memories, such as a special place, a significant object, or a shared symbol, can add layers of meaning that only they can truly appreciate.
An illustration to show the family’s hobby timeAn editorial illustration
A doodle design for a wedding invitation, all the drawings are based on the couple’s memoriesA couple commission for a coming child with Easter theme
Couple illustrations are one of the most challenging commissions I take on. They require not only technical skills but also strong communication and an in-depth creative process—analyzing details, categorizing ideas, and translating emotions into visual elements.
Despite the challenges, creating couple illustrations is always a special experience. It’s rewarding to see how these artworks hold special meaning for each couple. I hope these illustrations bring joy and lasting memories to those who receive them.
Welcome to my little collection of green colors. Green is hard to get it ‘right’ because the fresh paint from the tube always feel artificial. Green is often used to paint nature, especially trees. Trees, bushes, plants are not solid objects, they don’t have distinguished planes that we know for sure light is hitting on. They are made of thousands of leaves, each reflecting light in a different direction.
If nature is just a factor in the painting, I can rely on the texture of the paper to do the trick and just put a few layers for wide range of green tones.
Sometimes I try painting green in weird combinations. In this painting below, I try a combination of burnt sienna, green and purple – it turned out not good, but it was a fun experiment.
In this painting below, I actually use yellow and white more than green. Titanium white mixed yellow can create a cooler yellow suitable for the background.
In this sketch below, I use a few green paint (permanent green, leaf green) mixing with yellow, red, blue or brown sienna to create a wide range of tones so that I can imply that there are multiple types of plants.
This is a fun experiment with green lighting over different objects. The green Russian doll and the white paint package have the most range of colors since they are made of reflective material. In contrast, the flower and banana tend to lose their saturation and doesn’t reflect as much.
In the painting below, I added ultramarine blue when I mixed the dark tones for the trees, so that the oranges can stand out more. I also add horizon blue to the background trees to differentiate the main one.
This one is to play with the green in the shadow and in highlight. The yellow house and the red roof made the process simpler with just three main basic color: yellow, blue, red.
Here are a few pieces painting digitally. Apart from the highlight created by sunlight, other parts of the fruits have some blue since they are in the middle of branches and leaves.
I try to think of the trees as made of multiple balls and add scattered highlights to show the texture of the tree.
As we wrap up this collection of green-themed paintings, I hope you’ve enjoyed exploring the shades of green with me. There’s still room to explore with green in particular and expressing nature for me, see you again in another collection in the future!
It’s the time of the year when you look back over the past twelve months to see what you have accomplished. In retrospect, 2024 to me was struggle after struggle, from arts to personal life.
A year of failed and rejected projects
Overall this year I worked more on series rather than individual commissions, especially since the introduction of generative images in the first few months of the year. The new exciting AI interests people with an illusion of getting good artworks for free. However, the flow of personal commissions starts again from October, which is not so surprising to me at all. The basic brick of generative image is data, not creativity or emotion. Personal commissions do not only need likeness, but also personal touches and modifications from both the artist and the ones being portrayed.
Series illustrations does provide a better and more stable income than personal commissions. However, to prove that you are able to complete a large amount of work with consistency in quality, it takes much more efforts. Truthfully, I failed in a few significant chances that stays in my mind longer than I expect.
A rejected piece in a project for a Chinese museum
A year of stagnancy in learning
I also failed in my learning goals this year. It feels like I have arrived at the stagnant part of the learning curve. My self-set up curriculum started falling part in June, I felt stuck in learning Storyboard. After procrastinating for a month, I decided to drop this subject and maybe come back to it again. Other studying goals felt frozen, and I couldn’t see any improvements except from sketchbooks piling over in the corner of my room. I must have passed the exciting beginner phase of learning arts now, no subject seems completely new now. It’s now the phase of repetition and patience.
My whole system of working and studying became too much for me to handle at certain points. I set up a complex Notion dashboard in January, and after a period of complex projects requiring quick turnarounds, the whole system started crumbling. The daily to do list of Notion was unlimited, which gave me a false idea of my capability. Furthermore, I missed using papers, the idea of ticking done to a task and how my pen moved across the papers. I’m still using it as store some lists and resources for blogging, and happy to be back with my handmade A6 notebooks.
I forced myself to learn things I don’t really like, hoping to cultivate a new aspect in my arts. In the first few months, I learned animal anatomy and started reviewing human anatomy in the later part of the year. These new knowledge doesn’t show up right away in my paintings, even the personal pieces. It only came to the surface after a long time brewing, it started with my realization that my artworks lack spirits or liveliness. I’m starting with small animals and human silhouettes.
I started to feel the urge to add more details, every now and then when I looked back some old pieces, I felt I could have added more characters to the scene instead of going the easy way. Of course, this led to less paintings done and a major portion of each need to be done at home instead of at the place. Being a quantity person, I can’t help thinking “I’m doing less this year”.
I overworked this one – I kept changing and adding objects
A year of resilience
A few sentences I often tell myself this year is “hang in a bit more”, “I can tolerate this a bit more” and “be resilient”. These reminders come from a podcast story I hold close to my heart—the story of Abigail May Alcott Nieriker. She was the inspiration for the character Amy in Little Women, but her real-life journey is even more inspiring. Abigail didn’t give up her dream of becoming an artist to marry a wealthy man; instead, she achieved recognition by exhibiting her work (of a black female!) at the prestigious Salon in France. She did marry eventually, but it was for love and much later in her life. (Interestingly, Laurie was entirely fictional and not based on any real person.) Her story is a true testament to perseverance and determination. She is a hard-working artist, passionate painter and devoted educator -I deeply relate to her journey—I sympathize with her struggles, feel inspired by her resilience, and see her as a role model.
Another source of strength and motivation for me is literature. I read many novels by Kazuo Ishiguro this year: An Artist of the Floating World, Klara and the Sun, Never let me go (a re-read), and Annie Ernaux: A girl’s story, Shame, A Woman’s story. The most interesting novel is The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, weirdly writing about almost the same thing I wrote in my journal but in a more beautiful way. Here are a few passages that I love:
70) But when I thought more deeply, and after I hadfound the cause for all our distress, I wanted to discover its reason. I found out there was a valid one, which consists in the natural distress of our weakand mortal condition, and so miserable that nothing can console us, when we think it over (Pascal, Pensees).
49) Seated on the edge of the bathtub, I explained to Edmondsson that perhaps it was not very healthy, at age twenty-seven going on twenty-nine, to live more or less shut up in a bathtub. I ought to take some risk, I said, looking down and stroking the enamel of the bathtub, the risk of compromising the quietude of my abstract life for … I did not finish my sentence.
50) The next day, I left the bathroom.
Literature consoles me differently from social media or modern psychology. Instead of labelling, it just describes. It tells a story of thoughts, emotions and imaginations. How do I feel this year? I feel like a caterpillar slowly breaking my cocoon to realize that I’m still a caterpillar. At least, I’m still crawling forwards.
I received the request for this project when I was so confused about what direction to go with my life. I was already working on some small commissions, but things was going nowhere.
For this project, I actually offer to do the first sketch for free since I wasn’t sure about myself on how to draw the whole series. The author was asking for a series of detailed ink drawings for leaves and animals. I’m still amazed now by how much trust the author had in me and how smooth things went.
I based many details on botanical illustrations from old books, which I dug up from Internet Archives. I do use photos from Google and other stocks sites, yet they tend to be not as useful. What I look for is an image showing the full branch or plant in clear lighting, and online images tend to be either close-up shots of just the flowers or have a strong contrast.
This project consists of about 30 ink illustrations for 30 poems about nature. It came like a magic touch, and kept me afloat for a whole three months to be able to receive more commission request.
I don’t do much these ink commissions anymore, since I’m working more with colors and full scene illustrations. I still look back this project dearly, since the payment helped supported me in those early days and I had a collection of animal and botanical illustrations in my portfolio.
Yet, birds, animals and plants are still my favorite topics to sketch with ink particularly, I have loosened my grip more, creating an impression rather than detailed inking. I have been taken up with studying animal anatomy carefully to be correct – a small anatomical mistake can make the whole drawing look off!
I spent most of my life in Hanoi. When I was a kid living in my grandparent’s house, I was surrounded by copies of Bùi Xuân Phái, a Vietnamese artist famous for painting Hanoi houses in the 20th century. It was probably the first seed in my affection for this city.
A rainy street
A typical Hanoi houseA summer streetA small house
My affection goes to old houses, mostly those with cracks and weird innovations. They are the witnesses of Hanoi history and my own life. Now I live in a modern apartment with elevators, but I still remember running down the stairs full of plants pot, old furniture and and beehive coals.
Trang Tien Street
The street where I grew up
A silent corner in autumn
A street at noon
Many old houses in Hanoi are painted in yellow, which is a reminiscence of French colonization period. French often painted important buildings in yellow, and the reason is still unknown. It could have a symbolic meaning of an upper class, but yellow paint was also a cheap option at that time. Even after the war, there are still many houses and buildings painted in the similar yellow tones.
An old house covered in ivies
From my grandparent’s house window
I left my grandparent’s house when I was was ten. Many areas of the city are being upgraded with modern architecture, yet, the street where I grew up remained almost the same. I don’t know how long they will stay the same, but I’m grateful for that.
Luckily, even though old houses are being pulled down due to safety reasons, Hanoians don’t have less love for our history of architecture. There are cafes being built resembling houses from the last century, furniture being kept from generation to generation, exhibition showcasing how and why these houses were built and loved and artists incorporating elements from childhood into artworks.
If you ever come to visit Vietnam, let’s stop for a second to watch these small houses stacking next to each other on the streets. It’s possible that many generations have lived in these houses and new hopes are being created despite two wars, economic downturns and most recently, an international disease.
I took a class about composition and one of the homework was to copy and get creative from the arts that I need in grayscale.
I chose this scene in the movie ‘Only Yesterday’ from Ghibli because it feels intimate, it can be the room of anyone and I just need to step over the frame to be in the same room.
Inspired from that, I want to paint an arts room, a room that I would build if I have all the money I could.
I want to use night ambient light, a kind of soft light going with a strong light, light from the bulb. In that way, I could light up the whole room, yet still keep the focus on the main character (me :))
Human face is always a hard subject for me, since it’s easy to draw it ‘wrong’ and hard to fix it ‘right’. The annoying thing is even if I realize the face is ‘off balance’, sometimes I can’t point out which part need fixing or how should I re-draw it later.
That’s why it takes a long time for me to be able to draw a face that I can feel satisfied with.
My start
My first proper learning would be Proko’s drawing face videos, which is based on Andrew Loomis method. Later, I discovered Andrew Loomis wrote a whole series of books about arts, especially about figure drawings and portraits. The book I read, “Drawing the Face and Hands” was published in 1956, yet it’s still useful in learning the general structure of the face. The books were divided into male, female, teenager, kids and a small section at the end about hands. He often began with building the blocks first, then slowly adding features. The proportion of human face is similar among all people, yet, age and gender make the main difference.
I tried copying the sketches in the book
The only few drawbacks of the book are it don’t have any exercise or suggestion about practices and it was written in 50s language, which is lengthy and flattering for me. However, I can still feel the warmth and efforts of Andrew Loomis in his first few words opening the books “Now let’s get to work in earnest”.
The first course
Later, when I took the course “Deconstructed: Drawing People” by Viktor Kalvachev, he shared his method learned from a criminology professor to recognize faces based on basic shapes. Actually, you can see that section free on Schoolism channel.
Together, I found it easier to draw faces from images and came up with my own design for commissions.
A 60-day portrait painting challenge
Feeling okay with my line drawing/sketch, I start to look for more ways to paint the face. There are realistic approach and stylish approach, color and lighting setup are also considered. I want a bit of fun so I try the Digital Painting Workout by Woulter Tulp (also a course on Schoolism). The course’s main purpose was to practice digital painting, yet the instructor prioritized portraits because they are subjects that can be tackled in 30 minutes or so. For each day in 2 months, I spared 30-40 minutes to paint an image based on the instructor’s guidance. Each painting focus on one goal only: value or color or rendering, etc.
The useful side of this workout is that it allows me to learn painting both way: realistically and stylishly. I learned that there’s endless possibilities about painting a person, the important point is to paint how I feel about the person.
The most recent course I took is about color, and the subjects used were also portraits. This time I used gouache for the whole course, trying to mix color traditionally. The side effect of this course is that my portrait skill improved a lot as well.
Credit: @Lee Avision/ Trevillion ImageActress Pınar Deniz
Model: Jessica from Croquis CafePhotographs by Paolo Verzone, Egyptologist Monica Hanna, from National Geographic
These paintings aren’t used for commercial purposes, just for education and promotion only.
I aim to use realistically but not in order to copy the image exactly, the important is to paint how I feel about the model, how I think about her, what’s the real or the imagined story I could tell with her eyes, her skin, etc.
What’s next?
I want to learn more about human expressions and experiment with specific lighting, especially dramatic/ theatrical set up to tell a story. And I will need to revisit the face structure to keep my knowledge fresh, but with a different approach/method to keep the art as fun as I originally started it.
As person growing up in a city with buildings, sometimes I feel lost and falling behind. Buildings, though they are frigid structure, get taller every year. They get pulled down to be built taller and taller; while human, or me, doesn’t. I can’t break myself down to rebuild me to a better person.
Together with the book “Dora Bruder” by Patrick Modiano, I come up with this idea of a girl getting lost in a city, a crowd of cold blocks stacking over each other.
The sketching for this illustration actually took longer than the painting. There are a lot of windows to draw and I have to make sure the perspectives are distorted out of reality. About color, I already have the idea of using orange-yellow tone for a nostalgia vibe, which indirectly determined my choice of shadow (purple).
That’s it! I love this illustration because I love the book and I’m proud of me taking time with all these windows.
My grandparents are big fans of coffee, growing up with them, I always smelled coffee in the house. Though I didn’t take to drinking coffee until my twenty-something, the smell of coffee is something I associate with a shelter and a cozy place.
A winter dayA gray cafe
And there is a cafe for every single need of people in Vietnam, as long as I could specify how I feel and what I want. Most of the times, I prefer a quiet working cafe with a few floors, high desks and chairs, with bright lighting and lots of windows.
I like to do still life studies with coffee glasses and cups as well.
A modern asymmetric cafe
With the growth of social media and online reviewing, coffee shops start investing in interior design, good-quality chairs and tables. They become great subjects for me to paint as I observe how interior design affects how people talks and moves. Lovers meet, friends gather, strangers look at each other. All happens at a coffee shop.
A cafe with Tet decorTraditional Vietnamese coffee phin (filters)
What’s my favourite type of coffee? “Bac xiu”- coffee with lots of milk. It usually has a warm brown color due to the milk. It tastes moderately sweet with a strong aroma from Robusta coffee beans.
A lazy coffee at noon
I usually go to a coffee shop in the mornings, the silent period. Most people would just get a takeaway before rushing to their workplaces and for more than once, I’m the only customer sitting. I don’t mind the baristas taking their time to make my drink and sometimes they have time to bring the cup to the table for me even though they don’t have to.
A summer day
There are people in my life I label: ‘coffee people’. They are the ones I never talk with but know the faces, and they know mine. It’s weird I never find the attraction to start a conversation, but they become part of the coffee shop. If anyone creates a cafe theme theater stage, ‘coffee people’ must be there. They have no lines but they have to be there.
I went to coffee shops even on rainy days. It takes more efforts but it’s another kind of experience when it rains heavily outside and you are in the warm lighting indoors sipping a warm coffee cup. The coffee shops becomes a valid shelter.
Morning light in a cafe
There’s always a compelling collision of light at a cafe. Light shines through windows, light reflects from glasses and cups, polished coffee machine, light specially made to make you feel attracted to more coffee. We are put under the spell of designed space and light.
Coffee counters is a source of inspiration as well, with lots of objects and activities going around them. And the design may be similar but this counter just feels different from the other one.
Let’s take a break here and enjoy our first (or last) cup of coffee for today, shall we?
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.
Jeanne Lolness 