Azadi: Illustration

Azadi (pronounced Ah-Zah-DEE) is the Farsi word for "free." This is an illustration consisting of two of my characters for my comic of the same name.

Set in the near future (about 2015) in Iran, Azadi follows the story of Khosrow, a young Bahá'í who has been displaced from his family as a result of the internal conflict within the country. Khosrow is trying to look for his family (and survive) when he comes across Niloufar and Arash, two young adults who are trying to gather people to restore Iran to its former glory, with hopes of removing the oppressive government in exchange for a more free Iran.

Pictured below is Niloufar hiding from the main villain, Bahram, who is a member of the Revolutionary Guard.

Azadi: Character Designs

Here are the two character designs for my Azadi Illustration, Niloufar and Bahram.

I wanted to add an accent to each of their designs. I like the play of the green and the red, since green is a very important color in the story. 

Azadi: Views Of Tehran

Two views of the environment for my Azadi illustration.

Koala Is Bored

My final animatic for 2D Animation. This made me realize just how much I love storyboarding and making animatics. 

Identity Crisis

A comic in animatic form I did for my Asian American Literature class. This whole concept was based around how much identity played an essential role in the things we read.

Specifically, I was inspired by a quote from Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker:

"I thought English would simply be a version of our Korean. Like another kind of coat you could wear."

I then formulated my concept around identity as clothing. You can wear whatever sort of clothing you would like, and the clothing you wear says something about yourself. If you want to communicate something else about yourself, you can change your clothing to give a different impression. It was around these ideas that I created this piece.

Tribal Face Cards

This year, I created a standard set of playing cards, complete with two jokers. The concept was to have four different tribes as the suits. Each suit, instead of the standard suits, has its own suit that represents something of its corresponding tribe.

The four tribes I worked with were from all around the world. They were the Inuits, the Yoruba, the Cherokee, and the Australian Aborigines.

The hands come from a design on Inuit shaman parkas.
The stars represent the Cherokee nation; there are seven points, each representing the seven major Cherokee clans.
The snail shells come from the Yoruba creation myth. The dirt stored in the snail shell was the dirt from which the earth was made.
The circles are symbols found in Aboriginal art. Lines drawn in the same fashion represents travel, while the circles represent where the person has stopped.

I spent the whole semester working on these cards, and I'm pleased with what I've turned out. This inspires me to create more playing cards in the future!

Maya

A character design I worked with all year for my Animation and Comics classes. This is when she was still a work-in-progress. Maya is a 14-year-old stuffed-animal enthusiast and general lover of cute things. Her pint-sized companion there is Koala, who comes to life unlike all her other stuffed animals.

Note: the reason for things lining up incorrectly in the 3/4 and side views are because this was drawn for the purposes of cutting apart in Toonboom AnimatePro and reassembling as a jointed character.

Twin Gods

An animation I made about the god Quetzalcoatl and his brother Tezcatlipoca.

The Siren

An animation inspired by Alexander Petrov's animation The Mermaid. Though it says "mermaid," the creature in question is a siren. So I decided to play with the idea of a siren, targeting not a man, but a woman. 

Too Soon

A comic about two women finding love after the man dearest to them both dies. Written and drawn by me. A very challenging story to condense into 6 pages. I learned a lot from this comic, and spent a lot of time working on it.