2024: Year of the Dragon and then some!

The Year of the Dragon has a lot of alternates in different cultures, I decided to cover all of them! This was a lot of fun, but drawing 9 characters wiped me out! Note that I started this blog entry with the Snail on the posted date, but kept updating it until posting the Dragon on Feb 15, 2024 (several days after the actual Lunar New Year >_<U). I feel very relieved that next year’s Zodiac features no alternate animals!

2024 is the Year of the Wood Dragon according to the Chinese Zodiac, so I conceived these characters as a group of Rangers (in the fantasy RPG sense), but for a futuristic setting. My aim was to make each character feel very distinct from the others, but still make sure the group’s costumes and colors felt unified and balanced as a whole.

Size chart below!

Rabbit & Co


Last time the Year of the Rabbit came around, I was enlightened to the fact that in Vietnam they celebrate the year of the Cat rather than the Rabbit. A little research this time around and I learned that the Gurung of Nepal also use the Cat, while the Malays use the Mousedeer!

That sounded to me like a good excuse to draw a Rabbit/Cat/Mousedeer crew for the year of the Water Rabbit (and Cat and Mousedeer). And hey, this time I actually finished the drawing in time!

Okay ya nerds, Gong Xi Fa Cai! ✌️

Wayback Wabbit

This one is going WAY wayback, two full zodiac cycles back to the Year of the Rabbit 1999! 😬

The drawing on the right is the original–back then I could not run Photoshop on what I’m sure was a very busted, dusty, and ancient PC. So, in my pre-digital era, I would draw and ink the lineart on paper, make photocopies of the finished inks, and color over one of the photocopies with markers or color pencils. I did it this way so that if I screwed up the colors, I wouldn’t have destroyed the original lineart too… and trust me, I screwed up the colors plenty of times!

The drawing on the left is a scan of the lineart, with brand-new digital 2023 colors. I always find it a fun exercise to color old lineart… it’s like a collab with your younger self. 💀⌛️👶

WATER TIGER

What’s that you say, we’re already several months into the Year of the Water Tiger? 🌊🐅 This post is absurdly late? And a surfer/street-fighter tiger lady is a totally random combo? Yet here we are… Happy Belated Year of the Tiger! BTW, the character on her outfit is a stylized archaic form of (tiger).

METAL OX

Happy Year Of The Metal Ox! 🐮 I decided to interpret metal as heavy metal 🤘 as well as bionic 🦾, and a humanoid ox woman had to be blue like Babe the blue ox 💙, because punny, convoluted, and weird is my jam. FYI the design on the shirt is a stylized archaic form of 牛 (ox). 🤓

[RABBIT PUN OR ROBOT PUN HERE]

I set up another Sculpey project for my niece and I, very similar to last year’s project. It’s not just the Year of the Rabbit, it’s the Year of the METAL Rabbit, so I chose a robotic rabbit as our subject. Here are the results:

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The gold rabbit with the red eyes is mine, the silver one with the dark blue eyes is my niece’s, and the terra cotta one at the bottom is the prototype that I made while planning the project. If you’re curious about the process, please check out last year’s project (the process we used for this year was very similar). I would point out that my rabbit has extra “rivets” in the ears–I wasn’t sure how I felt about that (maybe it’s too busy?), so I didn’t have my niece add that to her sculpture. All in all, I think these turned out nicely!

One of my brothers-in-law observed that the rabbits have a Cylon-esque quality. However, knowing myself, if there’s any subconscious sci-fi influence at work here, it’s probably from the Daleks! For the record, if this post had been made a month later, the title would have been EASTERMINATE!!!

Wascally.

Today is Chinese New Year’s Eve, which means tomorrow is Chinese New Year, which means the Year of the Rabbit is nigh! Nigh, I tell you! Here’s a drawing to commemorate the occasion:

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I crafted this piece to stand in contrast against the one I drew last year. And yes, her bling is a gold carrot pendant. Hey… carrot, karat! How clever am I? That wasn’t even on purpose! I am crushing it today!

Gong Xi Fa Cai, you nerds!

[TIGER PUN OR STRIPE PUN HERE]

Changing it up a bit today–step into the third dimension with me, won’t you?

Knowing in advance that I would be watching over my seven-year-old niece on the day of of Chinese New Year’s Eve, I planned a little art project for the two of us. All it took was some Sculpey (colors: terra cotta, white, and black), thin wooden dowels (to internally support the connection between the head and body), some beads (for the eyes), two wooden plaques, and some high-strength adhesive (to glue the beads in, and to glue the finished tiger to the wooden plaque):

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The top two rows are photos of the tiger that I sculpted, the third row is my niece’s excellent work, and the fourth row is the partially finished prototype that I sculpted a few days prior to project-day.

To break it down quickly–I sketched out the rough geometric shapes that would be necessary to build the tiger, and then built a partial prototype to make sure that it would be do-able, and made some basic notes about how much Sculpey would be necessary for each part. I planned out the project so that I would sculpt along with my niece, showing her along the way how to make each component.

On project-day, the first components that I sculpted with my niece were the claws, teeth, nose, and inner ear. We baked those pieces first, so that they could be easily inserted into the un-baked components. After that we sculpted all the white parts, then the orange (terra cotta) parts. Next, we assembled the components, and lastly sculpted the black parts and added those last. It was important to move from the lightest colors to the darkest, because Sculpey leaves just enough residue on your hands to stain the other colors. It was inevitable that some of the white would get stained, but the results would have been a lot messier if we had started with black.

My niece did a great job–she really didn’t need much help creating the components, except for the stripes, which were all cut by me. I think you can tell in the application of the stripes that she and I were both starting to feel fatigue, and I sort of rushed us through that part because I just wanted to finish the project while I still had her attention.

After the sculpting and assembling, we made indentations in the head with “decoy” beads in the spots where we wanted the eyes to be. We removed the beads, and then baked our almost-finished sculptures. I didn’t want to bake the beads, because I didn’t know how the heat would affect the plastic. And I threw away the “decoy” beads, because they now had residue from the black sculpy on them.

After the sculptures baked, we let them cool, and we each picked out eye colors from the bag of multi-colored beads. My niece chose a lighter sky-blue, while I opted for a mid-range blue/cyan. I don’t trust seven-year-olds with high-strength adhesive, plus at this point her attention was fully absorbed by Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets playing on TV, so I attached the eyes for both sculptures, and then fixed each tiger to its wooden base.

If you compare the finished pieces to the prototype, you can see that the prototype actually has a better, more defined torso. I can only attribute this to the fact that I didn’t have the time to fine tune each piece on project-day, but overall I think things turned out well, and it was a lot of fun. I’m a so-so sculptor at age thirty-decrepit, but my niece is advanced at age seven!

The Lady Or The Tiger?

Chinese New Year falls on Valentine’s Day this year. However, like non-Chinese New Year, the festivities take place on New Year’s Eve (in this case, Saturday the 13th), so please plan your celebrations accordingly. Incidentally, it’s the year of the Tiger:

click above for larger view

This piece was a lot of fun to draw and color. I wanted to do something less direct than my typical “here’s a picture of this year’s Chinese Zodiac animal” schtick, and I’m happy with the results.

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Happy New Year! Guh Wha–!?

It’s the year of the pig! (That’s on the Chinese Lunar Calendar, if you didn’t know)

My technique is getting pretty routine now which means two things:

  1. I should probably start trying some new things, and…
  2. I don’t have much to say about this.
As for why the pig is blue and purple with amber-colored eyes… I guess I just felt like giving him some fanciful colors.

Fun Fact: One of the rejected titles for this post was Should Auld Acquaintance Be Pork-ot. Seriously!