My dear gem of the ocean

Art, illustration, sketches and etc. by Heather Chen

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Goldfish in an aquarium, with anacharis plants

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Plant from apartment courtyard, from reference

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Two goldfish under water lilies that are fading in cold autumn weather. Digital painting in photoshop to simulate acrylic paints. The brushes here are from Cale Atkinson’s wonderful PS brush pack.

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A bright digital painting of tropical fish swimming. Used the lasso tool in photoshop to make shapes like paper cutouts. First painting done on my Surface 3 tablet PC!

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concept sketch for a story illustration for Roman Muradov’s skillshare class Expressive Illustration

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unfinished artwork from last year. it’s kind of okay unfinished.

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Haven’t updated all my new works for a while. These are all the digital watercolors I did of June last year, with the last one from earlier this year. It’s quite a difference from the first one to the last. All done in Expresii, an art program that simulates chinese brush painting.

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Pastel drawing of my cat, June, from life. Done in photoshop with @kyletwebster Pastel Palooza brush, that I absolutely love the textured feel of. 

(The brush is free for download on gumroad. Buying all the pastel and sketching pencil brushes is totally worth it btw. All the nice parts of drawing in traditional media without the clean up.)

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Art Camp 1 color studies !! Mostly Monet and Corot, sure am learning a lot about colors. All done in photoshop ~25 minutes each. Finally just about done with 1st week of lessons, only took... 2 weeks.. (but I’m 3 times faster at these now??) Excited to do a whole master study next. o_o

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Art Camp 1 studies done in black and white using 4 values. Most of these took a long time (30-40 min) but near the last 4 was completing them in about 15 minutes each. You can watch the first Art Camp 1 instruction video on how/why doing master studies will help to improve your art on youtube with digital painting demonstration by Noah Bradley. I definitely feel like I’ve been learning a lot, even if I managed to turn this into a much more complicated exercise than in the video. :’)

Master paintings by Corot, Monet, Frederick Waugh, George Inness, and others. Painted in Photoshop on Surface Pro.

Not much life updates except physical therapy is going well so far, but it doesn’t leave me with much energy left to do art. Trying to do a bunch of studies so at least I do a little art every day though!

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still alive

Plans right now are uh, bad. I was going to get up to speed on drawing and then announce new commissions availability, new tshirts, and new projects. Instead I got severe asthma and I’m taking a lot of meds for it and I still can’t seem to do anything that I planned to do. I’m also doing physical therapy for my back issues which saps up a ton of energy and is painful but my PT thinks maybe I’ll be able to walk again if I do it a lot (but no guarantees since no one knows why I’m ill)? Fun stuff @_@

I’m trying to do art camp studies in the meantime to learn digital painting but so far they are very hard to do! Also I’m a mod there in the chat room (powered by discord) and if you’re looking for a place to hang out and talk painting, you can? So far it’s a small bunch and everyone is pretty nice, and everyone is welcome!

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Two linocut style pieces I finished last month. Okeanos Explorer discovered a new ghostly white octopus off hawaii, and my little cat dreaming of canned fish.

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Changing medications for my chronic illness (systemic mastocytosis) made me unable to do any art for a long time (can’t believe my last update was in august??). But I’m finally on the mend now, and starting up the Art Engines. Here are two experiments from earlier this year. 

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Ink blot raven. Sketch for a tshirt design maybe?

I lost my two month daily art streak by med changes and basically slept forever. (IBS? mastocytosis? TRY GASTROCROM™ TODAY) Now let’s see if I can get another art streak going, maybe, if my health cooperates.

Also look, tiny cuttlefish having a party.

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Little cat sketch of the softest, littlest cat (10 min, ink brushes in manga studio)

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Sketching figures from the pixelovely ref tool. One day maybe I’ll be good at this.

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Getting all my ducks in a row to give them hugs because I love ducks and how soft they are. I’m having many fun health problems lately. But soon I’m going to try a new medical treatment that should make me have invincibility superpowers relatively much healthier. I don’t think anyone reads the text here, but I painted some salamanders.