manda bear! - Amanda Loka's art blog

it's cold outside!

2012-02-09T15:53:00.000-08:00

Milk

y u no bigger inside?

This banana n peanut malt was fab

but my arse was cold

and so was my throat

y I no buy something warm?

like um...

a fire?

the view from the goodfellas booth

2012-02-09T15:52:00.000-08:00

There was no space in that Italian restaurant

for two pandas!

Except this one booth in the back, facing the kitchen

We felt like Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro

in Goodfellas...

I was Joe Pesci of course

(on account of my height)

but the panna cotta

was very smooth

and I was happy.

sketchcrawl january 2012 - union station, olvera street

2012-02-08T18:26:00.000-08:00

Drew and Ian inspecting a portfolio

And yes... an Asian man with epic hair. Epic metal hair.

Union Station view toward the entrance

Union Station tower from the garden courtyard

Statue of Carlos III, King of Spain at Olvera Street

angry rice cooker

2012-02-06T13:22:00.000-08:00

Based on a true story!

she was so fluffy

2012-02-02T00:02:00.000-08:00

Oh honey, you can take my chair any day.

It helps that I was eating the most amazing egg salad sandwich when she asked me this question.

sita and the golden deer | sinta gandrung

2012-01-05T09:57:00.000-08:00

First post of the new year is an illustration from the Ramayana: where Sita, wife of Rama meets the golden deer in the forest. This deer is pure evil and is designed to lure her away from the safety of her cottage and the magic circle of protection around it, so that the demon king Ravana can abduct her while her husband is away looking for the exact same deer... anyway I think that's the story.

I grew up with a Balinese statue of this where the woman and the deer were carved from the same piece of wood and she was almost kissing it. I don't know what happened to this statue. I think we didn't ship it to America.

My dad is getting a print of this for his (Chinese?) New Year's present, but he totally has no idea.

pub people

2011-11-17T17:25:00.000-08:00

In an effort to loosen up, I tried drawing while having a pint.

First she was alone... She was so nervous, I thought she was waiting for a date.

Then her friends showed up. And more beer showed up.

Some people, however, seem slightly tense. Is it the sports on TV? Or the topic of discussion?

But overall, everyone else seemed to be having a reasonably good time. As was I, although I had to witness Barca slaughtering some random Russian team. Boo.

chinese diner

2011-11-16T16:24:00.000-08:00

Drawn very quickly at a Chinese restaurant on the back of the placemat. I like the placemat paper for drawing though, it was very smooth :)

summer, good night!

2011-09-30T12:01:00.000-07:00

I've been in denial about it for a while, but summer is over.

It's the best summer I've had for a long, long time, because for once, I did not have to go through summer completely broke :)

Also I wore that sundress a few times, which made me happy.

Hopefully this will be the first of some what-I-wore posts. And the beginning of more regular posting.

Happy Friday everyone.

all day errday

2011-07-27T13:32:00.000-07:00

This is actually something I did for work. I posted it because I like the weird design and line quality and because... this is my life now. My laptop is like an extension of myself. I wish I could spend an entire day just drawing in sharpie or something. It's creepy how much we're attached to our computers, iPads, smartphones, and other devices, even tiny little kids. Everywhere you go you just see a bunch of self-absorbed beings sitting with headphones blocking out the world. It's an entire lifestyle which encourages people to live inside their heads -- or I don't know where -- detached from reality, and not in their actual world. It is a filter through which we view our lives.

I'm not sure I like it, but there's nothing I can do about it. I would like to take a vacation from it, however. Just go somewhere with a lot of paper and write and draw on actual paper. Or not.

you can call me flower,

2011-07-25T18:15:00.000-07:00

... I don't mind.

The artichoke is a flower, in case you didn't know.

This is the color test... which I also kind of like.

ringa ringa

2011-06-02T16:31:00.000-07:00

Kind of old sketches, from last year. Drew them next to each other. Needed to bust out some drawings after a very uninspiring day. I don't usually draw this girly... or maybe I'm just in denial.

sketching: zoo

2011-06-02T16:27:00.000-07:00

Langur from the zoo. Very exciting fauxhawk to draw, and execrable habits. Licking his own toes, eewww.

How does this tree look like a ballet dancer, I don't know. It's not from the zoo though.

bored. nothing to do

2011-05-19T19:20:00.000-07:00

A patch of a color test I did for an illustration. I'll post the whole thing after I'm done with it. This cute little boy was watching me when I was painting this. I silently sent good thoughts his way: "You will grow up to be an artist! You will go to art school. Your Asian parents will ask you why!"

I did most of these in Starbucks today when I had to download something via ftp client. It took 2.5 hrs to download, which is nearly untenable enough. There were at least 3 more people in the group above but they got up so fast! Oh well.

The next two were done while watching Escape to River Cottage, which is a British TV show about organic farming and cooking. The English farmers on the show could be shoved willy-nilly into a movie adaptation of some Dickens novel and they'll still fit right in. The host, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (the guy holding the dead bunny) has been known to eat roadkill for lunch and participates in such shenanigans as racing a wheelbarrow while dressed in a lobster costume. He's awesome. Now I wanna be a lobster for Halloween.

Well that ate a quarter of my day. The end.

milk & early may sketch dump

2011-05-17T14:25:00.000-07:00

Milk is a cafe in Los Angeles and it's got MACARON ice cream sandwiches, in addition to a bunch of other crazy products like chocolate hazelnut madeleines and Nutella ice cream bars. The cool high-ceilinged interior smells like chilly desserts; judging from the Art Deco details on the building it was probably built in the 1920s. I saw a dude eating a Caesar salad when I was leaving and felt a slight pang of envy, it looked so delicious.

This very serious boy was reading a huge book in front of a dim sum restaurant. He burst out to his grandparents mid-read: "OMG grandma and grandpa this is the best book ever!" etc etc. I thought it was a Harry Potter novel but he lifted it up and I saw that it was The Pacific by Hugh Ambrose. The kid can't be more than 12. I would actually clock him as a 10 year old.

Once upon a time, I was that kid. I tried to read Jane Eyre at age 11. I read Eiji Yoshikawa's Musashi and started on the novels of Agatha Christie at around the same time. Um. Asian nerds unite?

the root connection

2011-05-17T13:50:00.000-07:00

she is the root connection and

she is connecting with me

-Patti Smith, Dancing Barefoot

waiting to be colored. these lines freehanded with sharpie marker

oha! panda loves japan

2011-05-16T18:58:00.000-07:00

"I cannot imagine what kind of sentiment a card made by apparatus might convey."

-Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford

teleplay written for the screen by Heidi Thomas

Well I made these cards by hand and they'll be sent through CalArts to tsunami survivor kids in Japan.

I hope it makes someone happy.

ETA: I chose to put in the photos of the watercolor because the scans of watercolors are always uniformly lame. The translucence and fine layering of color that are unique to watercolor are lost in the scan. Gah.

curtsy

2011-05-14T00:21:00.000-07:00

I used to really not like drawing with Sharpie.
But it's okay now.

accidentally sophia loren

2011-05-13T23:21:00.000-07:00

These were from life drawing last week, the model was awesome. I love this pose and expression of hers, I felt like she was channeling Sophia Loren or something. I could totally see her being this Southern Italian housewife (fishwife?) who then gave birth to generations of Sopranos, LOL.

More to come from this same class. It was a good day.

life drawing: the myth of perseus, part 2

2011-05-05T01:22:00.000-07:00

He wasn't playing Perseus the entire time... sometimes he was Perseus' grandfather, sometimes he was Perseus, sometimes, some other guy. And no gesture lasted more than 10 seconds. So it was interesting.

sketching: trees

2011-05-04T19:06:00.000-07:00

be BOLD.
be resolute.
be cheerful.
be happy.
be confident.
smile!

I think he has no idea, how grateful I was to hear his words.

jenny bravo

2011-05-03T00:57:00.000-07:00

Life drawings: trying something different with sharpie.
Wait, I forgot to put that under 18 nudity disclaimer.

life drawings: the myth of perseus

2011-05-02T22:57:00.000-07:00

reorganization, needed it is.

2011-04-14T22:18:00.000-07:00

I'm currently not liking the way this blog has been so disorganized. It's like I just use it to dump artwork because people need to view it online. I haven't put a lot of thought into it and this irks me. I don't like doing things without a lot of thought.

So I might shut down for a few days just to gather stuff and rethink, what is the purpose of this blog? It's also currently not very well designed. I know I'm not going to spend a lot of time into designing the page but something which serves as an online presence deserves better treatment from me than what it's been getting.

Probably I will have a separate 'official portfolio' blog and this one would just be for other stuff. Feh.

mrs. peacock

2011-04-06T22:22:00.000-07:00

I'd forgotten about these designs. They are based on David Sedaris' description of his bizarre nanny, Mrs. Peacock. I did an animal version, of Mrs. Peacock as a demented lady peacock carrying her signature dish of sloppy joes (I myself have horror memories of sloppy joes from the school cafeteria, ugh). I did a human version too but I like the weird molting bird woman better :)

non-suckling pig

2011-03-30T22:38:00.000-07:00

Part one in the Strange History of Bacon, the Racing Pig.
(to be continued)

the future's open wide

2011-03-29T15:31:00.000-07:00

So this is a wedding present for my friends Roz & Aiden who just got married this past weekend, my first time making an illustration as a present. It's actually a very handy idea. Wonder why I haven't done it before.

Some process pictures:

I gave them the house of Christian Bale's character in 3:10 to Yuma because I think that would be kind of funny and also I'm lazy... Anyway congratulations guys once again and here's to an adventurous future. Cheers.

the argument

2011-02-23T00:25:00.000-08:00

So I made some subtle changes to this old post. Perhaps I'm a little obsessed but I like it much better now.

I would love to do this as a pose test but that would take too long.

there will be (strawberry) blood

2011-02-22T14:38:00.000-08:00

the iron princess - excerpts

2011-01-11T14:19:00.000-08:00

These are excerpts from this massive action sequence I boarded out for my portfolio. There are no spoilers.

I still don't like the title, but it's an homage to the title 'Princess Iron Fan' a really old movie directed by John Woo.

This is not the ending.

P and A

2011-01-11T13:50:00.000-08:00

P and A from Amanda Loka on Vimeo.

So I've finally stopped feeling self-conscious enough to post, that's right, my 1st year film from CalArts.

Okay.

it's not easy

2010-08-31T13:53:00.000-07:00

having this exact hair. It's actually an oddly unmanageable hairstyle.
Just sayin'.

the truth is...

2010-08-07T15:26:00.000-07:00

I am Iron Man.

chinky eyes

2010-08-02T23:14:00.000-07:00

Production still from 3rd year film, Elixir. Not many people know this but I'm a big fan of chinky eyes.

Also suits, and looking sincere. But since this was my film, I got to do what I want.

wayang battle droid

2010-07-26T22:38:00.000-07:00

Installation at the 2009 Character Animation Gallery show, co-created with Kristina Mickahail. Paper sculpture: bristol paper, wire and spray paint. Based on Balinese shadow puppets and random robot designs.

Blueprint & construction design of robot by me. Kristina did some of the decorations and painting.

taroko gorge

2010-07-22T12:40:00.000-07:00

Taroko National Park, Hualien, Taiwan. September 2008.

Island of the Gods - storyboards

2010-07-20T10:58:00.000-07:00

To move forward, click the right arrow, to move back the left arrow on the bottom of the slideshow. To see it bigger click on the center of the image. It will take you to the album on Picasa.

monsters of fail

2010-07-20T10:36:00.000-07:00

intelligent pigs

2010-07-19T23:29:00.000-07:00

Okay there's a story behind these pigs. They are very smart because they are always being read to from these scrolls of Chinese philosophy. And they become so intelligent they develop a curse...

tokyo olympiad

2010-07-19T23:21:00.000-07:00

Color/image script, study from the film Tokyo Olympiad, directed by Kon Ichikawa.

brush and ink, part I

2010-07-12T01:32:00.000-07:00

brush and ink scroll, about 3 ft sections out of 50. more coming up.

day and night

2010-07-12T01:27:00.000-07:00

My friend Nalena totally thinks those are cupcake trees. Ha. I'll take it as a compliment.

emotional collateral

2010-07-10T02:37:00.000-07:00

Been frustrated a lot lately. I hope I'm coming out of it though.

the ladies of the court

2010-05-13T02:17:00.000-07:00

These drawings are really old but I'm still proud of them. This is the first year I have not put them in my portfolio!

I like encrusting things with gold, it's fun.

it's tea time somewhere...

2010-05-13T01:50:00.000-07:00

Orangutan & walrus having tea together. There is something I still need to fix but I'm not gonna tell you what it is.
I love orangutans. Their eyes are amazing. I used to love drawing them at the LA Zoo.
Damn I haven't gotten to the zoo in ages.

the giants

2010-05-13T00:59:00.000-07:00

These are my giants. On the left is Corny Cole and on the right is Mike Mitchell. They were so instrumental in my education as an artist, these two guys.

These were inspired by portraits of the Zen masters, paintings by Zen Buddhist monks of really awesome and wise dudes. Corny encouraged me to apply to CalArts when I was terribly insecure and afraid. Corny's thing was that I should learn to be a complete filmmaker and not just focus on one area. Besides that, he was just effing hilarious. Mike would keep telling me weird random things that made no sense, but which I then assimilated... by osmosis? And when he saw it in my drawing he would go, "That's the stuff!" Which is what I wrote on top of Mike's portrait. That's like Mike's Zen koan.

Mike passed away at the beginning of the school year and soon after Corny had to leave for health reasons. I would like for Corny at least to see his portrait, the crazy life drawings I did this year and my film. I hope I can show him stuff and hang out with him, however briefly, at some point.

We all miss them, and because they are giants they left giant voids in our hearts.

this is a test, this is only a test.

2009-01-23T18:34:00.001-08:00

i'm testing. this will be my new art blog.
hopefully i can delete the old one that never went anywhere.