Art by Keegan Chua

UI Artist/Designer at Gearbox Software. Illustrator and Designer, MICA alumni, nerd. Have a question? Want to work together? I'd love to be in contact with you: [email protected] Check out my site: www.keeganchua.com

[keeganchua]

Recently beat Metroid Prime for the first time (I know) It was really good! I was feeling a little inspired to make something and keep practicing my Illustrator skills in my spare time. I made the color variants in Photoshop.

[keeganchua]

Making a concerted effort to improve my Illustrator skills because I generally use Photoshop for like 99% of my design work. I know Chief’s helmet design changed for Infinite, but I’m bouncing between Halo 4 and 5 on my Halo series replay, and I’ve gotta say I’ve still got a lot of love for those designs.

[keeganchua]

I recently played through The Evil Within 2, and really enjoyed it. I kind of bounced off the first one because I found the pacing and delivery of the story so obtuse that I was just confused a lot of the time. But gameplay in EW2 was so tight that it clicked almost instantly for me. Something about horror set in abandoned Midwest American suburbia is an instantly appealing setting for me.

I definitely recommend checking it out for anyone who wants something spooky to play. I feel like this game flew under the radar for a lot of people, and I wanna get the word out there now.

[keeganchua]

Started this the other night, trying to work on my graphic design skills for fun. I tend to fall back on just doing illustration in personal work because that's my background, so I've been feeling the need to do more design stuff when I'm doing art outside of work. The truth is, I learned all of my design skills on the job and sometimes I feel a tinge of imposter syndrome about not studying graphic design at all in school 😂. Also adding some of my font exploration, and some of my process. After picking a base font I started with moving shapes around, adjusting the foot of some characters, making it pointier at the joints, apexes, and vertexes. I had an idea to make some random cuts, like it's getting slashed to ribbons. So I took that into photoshop to paint over, brought it back to illustrator and tried to incorporate some of the movement and momentum I liked into the final.

[keeganchua]

Ghost of Tsushima photo dump pt. 4

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More Ghost of Tsushima photos! Still really enjoying this game. Photo mode is a ton of fun, and I always find myself sinking a ton of time into scoping out interesting shots.

[keeganchua]

At the start of quarantine I made a list of mostly backlog stuff that I wanted to play because of new games getting pushed around the calendar. I’ve been…playing a lot of games due to not being able to go anywhere and feeling some creative burnout from work and *gestures* the current state of the world. Mostly the gamers I’ve been playing are last gen, but some current gen stuff has snuck in with the occasional new release. Figured I’d try and start illustrating some favs in an attempt to be slightly more productive. Asura’s Wrath is CRAZY though. It’s a spectacle, and a joy to look at. I really loved the art style. I ended up getting the DLC as soon as I finished because that original cliffhanger ending is…no bueno. But I love that it’s basically a season of a Shonen anime, and the entire thing is Asura headbutting gods til they explode. The game’s art style has this hatch-y and hand painted aesthetic, so I wanted to incorporate some of that into the doodle. Also, hand lettering is hard. I’m bad at it, but I wanna get better. That might be a thing that I try and work into other pieces.

[keeganchua]

This is a process vid for my Asura’s Wrath piece posted here I used procreate on my iPad Pro, which I really like for quick illustrations and sketches. Sometimes I might take things into Photoshop for some final touches, but I figured this was good enough. I’m not trying to be super precious with this stuff.

[keeganchua]

At the start of quarantine I made a list of mostly backlog stuff that I wanted to play because of new games getting pushed around the calendar. I’ve been…playing a lot of games due to not being able to go anywhere and feeling some creative burnout from work and *gestures* the current state of the world. Mostly the gamers I’ve been playing are last gen, but some current gen stuff has snuck in with the occasional new release. Figured I’d try and start illustrating some favs in an attempt to be slightly more productive. Asura’s Wrath is CRAZY though. It’s a spectacle, and a joy to look at. I really loved the art style. I ended up getting the DLC as soon as I finished because that original cliffhanger ending is…no bueno. But I love that it’s basically a season of a Shonen anime, and the entire thing is Asura headbutting gods til they explode. The game’s art style has this hatch-y and hand painted aesthetic, so I wanted to incorporate some of that into the doodle. Also, hand lettering is hard. I’m bad at it, but I wanna get better. That might be a thing that I try and work into other pieces.

[keeganchua]

Jin Sakai Another drop brought to you by Ghost of Tsushima’s photo mode, focusing this time on portraits of Jin.

[keeganchua]

In an effort to use this blog a little more regularly, I’m going to try and use it for a little more than just my personal art that I post every 9-12 months. I’ve been playing a lot of games since the pandemic started, since we can’t go anywhere. I’ve got a huge backlog that I’ve been working my way through as new games started having their releases effected by the state of the world. I’ve been keeping some notes on those, but today I wanted to focus on something recent! I like Ghost of Tsushima and its photo mode quite a bit. So here’s a little photo dump of some shots I’ve taken. I’ve got some more that I’m planning on putting up in a second post. We’ll see if I can keep it up as I progress into the later acts of the game. I’ve never spent a ton of time with photo modes in other games, but something about the environment art and setting of the game really spoke to me in a way that encouraged me to experiment! I’m quite fond of the ability to control the wind and particle system. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t taken a ton of photos with cherry blossoms billowing in the wind. This game is really beautiful, and I can’t heap enough praises on the art team over at Sucker Punch. They knocked it out of the park. Thanks so much for giving us such great tools to document this incredible world! Regarding the actual game and its gameplay though, I’ve really enjoyed my time so far. Combat mechanics feel really good! I like the stance switching tech, because it’s kind of like a mind game of rock/paper/scissors with the different enemy types. Most of my time has been spent exploring the area of Act 1 and doing side activities. At times, I think the exploration in this game evokes a feeling similar to how I felt when playing Breath of the Wild. There have been times where I’ve just stumbled on some interesting locations randomly, or saw something in the distance and thought, “what if I could get over there...”, and eventually found something in that spot that made the trek around that cliff worth it. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this game as much as I currently am, so if you’re looking for a recommendation then I say check it out!

[keeganchua]

I’m always like, “Man, I miss drawing”, after finishing an illustration. And then I’ll go like another 6 months between drawing anything else again.

[keeganchua]

Got commissioned by my best friend and his wife to make some artwork for his Raspberry Pi arcade cabinet, back in like April. The only notes were that they wanted themselves and their pets incorporated somehow. It took a little while to fit it in to my schedule, but I finally finished this last week and I kinda like how it turned out.

[keeganchua]

Here’s some fan art for the game I’ve been working on. The launch party is tonight, and I can’t wait for people to finally get to play it next week! The past 3 years have been wild. I don’t really do a lot of drawing in my spare time these days, so I’ve been noodling on these over my lunch breaks and started over on all of them more than once as I got more confident in my line art again (looks at how close inktober is). That’s enough of my rambling. The game is out next Friday, 9/13, and I hope you all enjoy it! . . . #Borderlands3 #letsmakesomemayhem #Borderlands #fanart https://www.instagram.com/p/B2FMDmMjgbx/?igshid=rhfywrl303ef

[keeganchua]

Been thinking a whole lot about Shaman King recently. I was entirely obsessed with this series as a kid and into my teens. #shamanking #fanart #yohasakura #manga #procreate #sketch #drawing #ghostboy https://www.instagram.com/p/BzGgU46DlvQ/?igshid=1cwk5zju01lr3

[keeganchua]

I've been chipping away at this the past week when I felt up to it. It's not something that I particularly enjoyed drawing, but the act of doing it brought some sense of catharsis. I must have stopped and started a version of this 3 times over this past year. I wanted to have something done on the one year mark but my anxiety got in the way. October was a real bitch. My favorite season is now something that I dread and am an anxious mess over. I tried to use inktober as a productive distraction this year, so that I'd come home and draw every day rather than eat my weight in ice cream or become a couch potato. But I just couldn't bring myself to keep that going the last couple days. . Mom would have killed me if she knew I made a portrait and it wasn't when she was young and healthy. But the hardest aspect of this was trying to capture her likeness at an age I never knew her, pieced together from looking at old blurry photos. I did my best considering the circumstances, and her physics defying curly hair, but I'm not sure I quite got it. The image of her in my mind has been mostly overshadowed by all the years of illness and being bedridden. . I've still got an unreasonable amount of regret and remorse over time not spent and things left unsaid. I still think of you every day. I miss you every day. Love you, mom. https://www.instagram.com/p/BpxeEt1hIuw/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1604aw0z7kbbd

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24. Twisted Thorns

Role: Boss. Queen’s Guard.

Watch out! Thorn is an officer in the Queen’s Guard. They use their whip as a ranged attack and to pull you in close to deal damage with their spines. They’re weak to fire and axes.

Real talk, I dunno if I’ve got the time for more involved illustrations of scenes. So for now I’m thinking of finishing off the rest of drawtober/inktober with boss designs. Sorry if you stayed for the other stuff!