Trip to LA

This past month I was in LA working.  The weather there is beautiful!  Now back in NY, these drizzling days make me miss LA's sunshine even more...

A lot of thanks goes to my good friend Dony on this trip.  He made this thing possible!  Met me the first night for dinner.  Took me and the ppl in the studio to ramen every friday.  Introduced me to his friends.

I was living on Sawtelle and Santa Monica, sharing a place with my awesome roommate, Chris.  He offered to pick me up from the airport.  He seemed very nervous with a stranger in his car.  But he's still very considerate, asked me if I had lunch or not.  We went to In-And-Out burger for lunch!  LOL  Right off the plane I got a taste of LA, nice!  I met his girlfriend, had dinner with his friends, met his twin brother, met his parents, met his dog.  Haha, I missed you all.  Before I left, Chris bought me a goodbye dinner with his gf and friends.  All you can eat Korean bbq, meat lovers heaven!  Thinking about it now makes me really hungry haha.

Roger's friend Ed lent me his awesome electric bike, my yellow iron horse lol.  This babe took me around LA most of the time.  I love her.  I rode all the way to the beach, 30 minutes on electric.  I got lost mid way and went inside a gas station to ask for a map.  The guy was nice enough to point out the direction, saved me the money to buy a map.  He started flirting with me in the end,  "it's so far, u are going to get exhausted, how about I take you there? "  LOL, my bike is electric, I am sure I can get there without a drop of sweat.  Ed and his wife Debbi took me out for dinner several times. Tofuya, Brazilian cafe.  Yum!

Shawn is another guy I need to say thank you million times.  Regardless how far he lives from Santa Monica, he picked me up every weekend, and showed me around LA.  It was really fun hanging out with him.  We caught up a lot of things. Blizzard, Night market stinky tofu, Indian beer house with hot waitresses, Optimus Prime's footprint on the wall of Observatory (lol), Kodak Theater, Venice Canal,  Balbo Island with 5 million dollar houses.  I regret I didn't bring a camera..T_T

Jan is another guy I have to say thanks.  He made this working experience really fun.  He's also the one that I ask for places to go.  I really enjoy working and chatting with him.

All other friends I met, Mark, Joe, Jean, Michelle, Thanks!  Hopefully I would have the chance to work with you guys again in the future.

Because all the ppl I mentioned above, LA is so awesome.

One of a Kind weekend!

This Sunday, since I got complimentary tickets to the one of a kind show, I thought might as well go take a look.  Well, it turned out to be OK.  Nothing too surprising.  There are some really pretty jewelry, pins, but I don't really wear them.  The price they were selling it at, definitely screamed out they are handmade.  But one booth, just made my whole trip worth it, is the booth at the cafe room.  I probably wouldn't notice it if we didn't sit down and relaxed a little bit.

It was an ornament painting booth! The nice lady saw us walking over and asked us if we want to try paint one.  Of course!  I love doing random things like this!  Best, it was free! Haha!

So we sit down, and the lady gave us two heart-shaped blank glass ornaments.  She started teaching us how to use different kind of paint on glass.  After a short one minute intro, we were off to create our one of a kind ornament!  We even bumped into Roger's old friend who was painting a unicorn right across the table from us!  Small world, lovely Sunday afternoon!

This is mine,

now all I gotta do is find a tree to hang it on!

I had an awesome weekend!

This weekend was especially cool because my art cells felt revived!

This Saturday I went to an awesome event held by Picto Plasma.   Craig Redman, creator of Darcel, was the first speaker.  I like his presentation, and how he works his idea and lead him where he is now.   Blog is seriously a new way to shout out your thoughts.  I am enjoying it too.

Second one is Rilla Alexander.  Rilla recently completed her book, "Her Idea".  Her speech, out of all four, was the most inspiring one for me.  I could really feel a connection with everything she said.  She talked about how she struggled with her idea booms, and how she find what she really wanted to do after 10 yrs of commercial work.  This made me think a lot of myself.  I am in a stage where I feel confused too.  I have so many ideas just like she has.  But like what she said, new ideas always seem better.

"Please don't give up on me," one of her idea sadly lied in the garbage can.  I almost thought that poor thing lying in the garbage was something that I dumped out.  Work with one idea at a time.  Push it, stretch it, believe in it, do whatever I can with it, be loyal to it.  And eventually it will grow.  One more thing she said that was really interesting was that, commercial work seems to push you away from putting your soul into it.  That's why she saved her soul for her book.  But then she realized that she can't just divide herself into two, one does commercial work, the other one does her book.  I really want to find out what she will be doing two years from now.  Will she be fully devoted to her book? or will she be back into commercial world again?

Next is Nathan Jurevicius.  He's the creator for Scary Girl.  I learned one thing from him.  Lawyers are important when I become famous. haha.

The last one, Peter de Seve.  He is the character designer for Blue sky's Ice Age.  He showed a lot of his work in the speech.  I have to say, he's a really nice speaker, grabs my full attention.  He had been in this business for a long time, and the path to get where he is now, is not as smooth and easy as one would think.  And I got this from him!

Sunday I went to a drawing meetup session.  It was really nice to sit in a tea shop and draw on a Sunday afternoon.  Here are some of my work,

I wish next weekend can be this inspiring too!