Tag: illustration

Collection of artworks

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.

The in-between moments that matter

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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.

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.

Narrative Art Collection 2024

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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

Couple-themed Commissions 2023 – 2024

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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 daughters
An 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 time
An editorial illustration
A doodle design for a wedding invitation, all the drawings are based on the couple’s memories
A 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.

The green color in my paintings

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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!

Art Journal Entry: 2024 look back – a struggling year

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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.

The very first big project – the one that launches my freelance career

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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!

Hanoi houses and streets in my sketchbook

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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 house
A summer street
A 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 painted myself working at night – breaking down my process

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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 :))

Drawing the human face and painting portraits

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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.

Unknown source
Source: Freepik
Model: Ludan, from Vogue
From: beautiful people

My most recent course

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 Image
Actress Pınar Deniz
Based on photo by Photographer Sirli Raitma
Based on photo by Photographer Leslie Zhang JiaCheng
Unknown source
Credit: @Paradise studio
Model: Jessica from Croquis Cafe
Photographs 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.

Process of a distorted street scene

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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 long-lasting affection with coffee shops via paintings

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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 day
A 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 decor
Traditional 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?