This really should go under drawings&paintings, but I didn't get my hands dirty, so it won't. My friend needed an illustration for flyers and a program for an Easter presentation. I had him model a gesture and I "painted" this image in photoshop using a graphics tablet pretty much the same way I would've with oil. All the painting, none of the mess!

An epic conclusion to my 4 months of photo restoration & digitization work. This is only a small sample of the nearly 1000 photos I digitally archived.

Just another distraction from my photo restoration project. It's not very thoughtful colorization work, but it amused me that that it took less than half an hour to go from the scanned image to this fake painting... yet, the restoring work will take a good 4 hours to complete. I guess the good thing is that when I'm done, I'll have hundreds of amazing historical photos I can play with to my heart's content!

It'd been over 2 months since I've started the photo restoration project and I am officially two-thirds way done. Here I was playing around with the art history brush tool to remind myself that photoshop WILL be fun again once I'm done with all the cloning, healing, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, filtering, and soul draining curves adjustments.

When my mom returned from her first trip to Vietnam since leaving the country in 1980, she brought home a pile of old photo albums. She asked me to make copies of them if I had the chance... that was over 4 years ago. This summer, I went to Vietnam and visited my grandmother, several uncles, and their families for the first time in my life. Upon returning home, those albums collecting dust in the drawer took on new significance and meaning to me. These people and places weren't strangers in a foreign land anymore... they are family. These photos had survived time, war, and an ocean's journey.... they are treasures. This gallery is a very small sampling of the work I'm doing in restoring the photos which number in the hundreds. Each one taking somewhere between 15 minutes and 5 hours of work to complete. Place the curser over the image to see the finished work.

My sister assigned me the task of creating a logo for a shooting club she's a member of. She wanted it to be generic... I gave her generic, but created a woodcut quality in the linework and used a bold serif font to add an old fashion character to the graphic.

A photo journal of my summer 2006 Europe Backpacking Trip. Hundreds of photos and stories.

I was demonstrating to Nathan how easy it was to churn out abstract designs in photoshop. I took an image of lines and shapes he made in illustrator playing with the tools then added a bunch of layering effects and filters. In about a minute, voila! From that quick demo, he was inspired to make his site, abiscus.com, more interesting visually.

This was a quick design i created for my friend's classical guitar site. It probably won't be used for the final site, but it was something to give me inspiration for the design scheme.

An image i churned up in 3D studio max because i was bored.

An overhead view of blocks falling I modeled in 3D.

A simple modeling project of a letter block. My sister bought a new desktop for the house, so I'm finally able to start working in 3D again.

I created this poster design to promote the Greater Hartford Chinese Martial Arts Tournament, though it wasn't officially used.

In May 2005, my martial arts school hosted the Greater Hartford International Chinese Martial Arts Tournament. I designed the official logo for the event, and it was used on the competition
---medals and apparel---

For my poster design, i decided to use the time elapse outline of a person doing a tornado kick as the main image. It took a very long time to process the video, and trace each outline by hand, but i think it really shows the beauty of his motion.

My idea for the wushu tournament poster was to show the artistry in the dynamic motions of wushu. A still image couldn't really convey that idea, but I thought maybe a time elapse image would. Luckily, I had a nice library of motion outlines from my wushu site content panel animation. This was just an image i was playing with.

This link will bring up a page of photos I took in spring of 2005 or random events, people, mostly wushu related. I used photoshop to subtly alter or enhance many of the images.

In spring of 2004, I took the plunge and bought a current generation digital camera, the Fuji s7000. I've had many great adventures with the camera but I never printed or posted many of the pictures online. So one week, I took a nice variety of photos i took throughout the year and used photoshop on most of them and shared them online. This is a link to a page with those images.

One evening, Nathan brought over a handful of his high voltage gadgets to show me the dangerous but beautiful energy they released. We started experimenting with long photographic exposures capturing the light emitted from the devices. Then we started posing in the shots and using a flashlight to selectively illuminate what we wanted. We came out with a bunch of crazy images. Here's a link to a page of those images. NO photoshop was used whatsoever and all images are single exposure! See if you can figure out how we made some of the images.

Christmas was pretty lame in 2004. But then Nathan came over with his sister who was on leave to bring cheer. Actually, he needed me to take photos of him for a travel visa. Of course we turned it into an art project, and I made this fake CD cover with one of the pictures. For the title, Nathan wanted something sophisticated, something... 5th avenue. We couldn't come up with anything, so I just typed in "something 5th avenue". It was pretty funny.

When I found that haterade.com was taken, I took a try at hatorade.com. Unfortunately, it was another boring poorly developed site. This simple text logo was created in photoshop, with effects layering to create dimension.

One day in wushu class, my friend Rich mentioned the word haterade, a play on the word gatorade and hate. I thought it would be an awesome drink to market, maybe an energy drink with herbal extracts and a shot of hard liquor. Unfortunately, the web domains were already taken. I came up with this quick logo in 3Dsmax nonetheless.

I wanted to recreate a cut paper collage i did in high school in 3Dsmax. It was much easier in 3D, the program does all the thinking as to where the light falls for you.

It took me forever to to figure out where the array dialogue was in 3Dsmax. Once I did, I wanted to create a vast array that went on into infinitely, forgetting that it would mean millions of polygons for my laptop to calculate, somebody get the fire extinguisher.

I was going to make a short film starring a cube when i was gung-ho about 3Dsmax. Of course the realization that my laptop couldn't handle such a project set me back. It took me 3 minutes to render this one image. Only minute of video would take (let see, 3 minutes times per frame times 30 frames per second times 60 seconds in a minute divided by 60 minutes in an hour) 90 hour to render... never mind.

After some investigation, Nathan figured out how to do caustic lighting in 3Dsmax. This allows particles of light to behave realistically when traveling through materials and fun for making gems.

This was the 3D rendering I made to tag my Christmas presents that year.

One of my favorite effects, volumetric lighting, gives light a tangible quality like its travelling through fog.

After a long and exhausting process of trying to come up with a logo for my site, I came up with something simple and graphic. The colors blue and orange have sentimental symbolism to me. For the text, I revisited my original art I made for my last patriot book project.

For my digital imaging final, I continued my theme of memory with a large poster of myself being wrapped in stills from John's video project.

I had forsaken most of my college experience, but it was all coming together that year and finally getting interesting. I started taking a lot of pictures of friends senior year. Before that, all I had pictures of were wushu experiences. The whole obsession with documenting my life has not faded one bit, hence all the pictures on my site.

Another piece from the series where I put myself in the paper.

Senior year, I had an obsession to hang on to memories, create memories, make sure I experienced everything possible. There seem to be people who are always at the right place at the right time and have a richer human experience, and I wanted to reference that with this project. In all 5 of the images, I made fake newspaper clippings using photoshop. Everything was created digitally, the layout, the halftone pattern, the fringed edges, and even the tape.

My theme for my digital imaging class was memory. In an early project, I represented the idea through a series of images featuring CD-ROMS that I drew in photoshop.

Shattered memory. What do you lose when you break the only copy of precious digital images? What do you lose when your hard-drive is wiped out by a crash or virus? We are absolutely dependent on technology that lets us hold volumes of photo albums in a single disk, but it's the intangible nature of digital memory that makes it so fragile.

A letterhead I made for the proposal which the school used for quite some time after that.

Another page for the proposal.

Another page for the proposal.

The content page of the mohegan sun proposal. This whole project took me about 3 weeks to complete which was quite annoying because my summer vacation began and I was stuck in front of a computer constantly revising over and over because the committee writing the proposal couldn't figure out what they wanted.

Wushu USA, a non-profit found by parents of wushu center team members, was looking into corporate sponsorship to fund equipment expenses, international travel for tournaments, and events. They wrote a proposal asking the Mohegan Sun Casino for a $250,000 in funding. I designed the layout for this... but unfortunately, it didn't work out.

After learning that the illustrator pen tool wasn't broken when I was trying to use it, I realized that illustrator was a whole new monster to conquer.

It's funny looking at this picture now and realizing that i had absolutely no concept of color.

Here in my early days of photoshop, I still thought that effects were the greatest things ever. This is a color drawing I did of my character from Last Patriot, which i scanned in and altered in photoshop.

This is one of the first things I ever did in photoshop. Actually, most of the image is a paper collage I scanned into the computer. The only thing added in photoshop was the lens flare on the spoon and the title. It just amazed me how easy it was to add cool effects with so little effort. The image was used for the cover of a book made by our senior English class, Chicken Soup for the High School Soul. I never actually received a copy of the book because I was skipping classes.