Using limited color palettes is what I’ve always enjoyed and one of the most comforting parts of my creative process! This discipline helps me focus on the meaning of each scene rather than getting lost in choices.
For this series, I study a scene from several angles and select the composition with the strongest contrast and storytelling. I outline with watercolor and add details with colored pencils, letting each medium serve a single, clear purpose. Every color and mark is chosen to keep the image readable and focused.
At times, I add text as I’m currently learning Japanese and picking up new vocabulary these days, or add imagined figures and characters to make the drawings more playful.
Everything comes alive in a drawing when there’s a face for readers to look for and connect with, doesn’t it? The process was a valuable exercise in working quickly and capturing moments without being precious, and the series was created for enjoyment with minimal edits afterward.
Time-lapse of painting one of the pages above. Enjoy!
Peachtober Illustration Series
The Cobalt Blue Series is a collection of paintings I created alongside a set of drawing prompts called Peachtober in 2025. To focus on storytelling and the narrative aspect of my illustrations, I decided that each drawing would be no larger than my palm, roughly 3.5 by 5 inches per piece. This small paper size became a quiet form of discipline .
For this series, I started by creating a brief for myself based on a single keyword, spending 10 minutes in brainstorming stories and my childhood memories that could grow from it, and making thumbnails and examining values for another 20 minutes to find the best composition to tell each story before coloring. I repeated this creative practice everyday for 30 days in October.
Before I sometimes felt overwhelmed trying to nailing everything in one painting, such as line work, values, color, fun characters, and detailed backgrounds. Yet with such tiny paper, there wasn’t even room for perfectionism or self-doubt, which made the process incredibly joyful and freeing! Hope you feel the joy from looking at these characters too.
As a final touch, this hand-illustrated series was later printed as a set of 2026 calendar postcards. With these limited prints, I could share joy with friends and family and wish them a new year full of adventures and creativity. For now, I’ve run out of stock, but you can sign up to be notified when more are available.
