When I first moved to NYC in 2012, I attended as many social gatherings as I could in an attempt to expose myself to my new community. By happenstance, at a Kickstater event, I met artist and Illustrator Matty Huynh. Matty's sumi-e inspired brush work and mental grasp of the more ephemeral qualities (and impact) drawings can create, left a lasting impression on me. We stayed in touch, exchanging our latest comic works at events like MOCCAfest and CAB. Eventually, Matty would reach out to me for assistance on projects of ever-growing scale. Working with Matty pushed my innate skills further and helped me to expanded into territories of the arts that I had yet to explore -- all while gaining the experience of working with clients that would have otherwise been out of my reach.
Like Matty, I was dedicated to creating traditional drawings using brush and ink, but in order to work on these larger projects I had to become acquainted with rudimentary forms of animation. The first of these projects was in coordination with BAM: the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The work was very refreshing and combined technical expertise with traditional drawings. The result was unlike anything else I'd experienced up to that point.
Immediately following the Other Lives Project at BAM was something more akin to my usual area of experience -- publishing. An animated trailer was to be provided for the book "Esfir is Alive," published by Bedazzled Ink.
By this point, Matty was taking on multiple projects at once and enlisting other illustrators to help out. A follow up to the interactive comic adaptation of Nam Le's, The Boat, was done for the Smithsonian Asian American Literary Festival.
At the same time, we worked on a short piece for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center's culture lab: CTRL+ALT in New York City's Chinatown and SOHO districts.
Most recently, assisting Matty culminated in an extraordinarily large mural done for the famed New York Historical Society's retrospective of the Vietnam War. The first of its kind. See also, this nice NY Times article on the exhibition.