My Art From High School

Lian's greatest hits from her teenage years

I can’t believe it’s nearly been 10 years since I graduated high school. How awful.

In honor of me reminiscing about how horrible high school was, I thought I would share some of the artwork I did while I was in school.

For those who don’t know, I went to a Christian American high school in Taiwan. I am neither Christian nor American but when we moved back to Taiwan after eight years in New Zealand, my Chinese was so bad that if I were to go to a Taiwanese school I would probably go from grade 7 to grade 1. The school was really into sports. There was a huge gym, an outdoor pool, various courts and a massive track and field. The art room however, was in the tiny windowless back room in the gym. The art teacher was pretty much nonexistent so all the work you’re about to see is all just from a self-taught teenager messing around.

Strap in folks, it’s a long one…

Freshman Year (2010-2011)

My freshman year of high school, I had just moved to a transferred to yet another new school so I became the designated ‘art kid’. I didn’t make a lot of bigger artwork freshman year (that I can find on my laptop) so enjoy these sketchbook pages from my freshman year.

I was extremely influenced by Mattias Adolfson during this era after I found his Blogspot during Blogspot days. After I found his work, I was determined to learn to draw in pen without any pencil underdrawing so I started only using pen. It was because of all the practice I did with pen drawing early that I pretty much still just use pen in my sketchbooks.

I actually had the chance to meet him later when I was transferring from London to SVA! I entered into a poster competition in Taiwan and got into the finalist exhibition. Mattias was displaying his sketchbooks at the show and I gave him a little card I had drawn. He let me flip through his enormous sketchbooks and gave me a signed copy of his book:

Starstruck baby Lian meeting her art idol at the time

Good old Swede Mattias also used watercolor so I began to practice my watercolor.

On the left is an incredibly accurate self portrait of myself as a tomato and my desk in the apartment we lived in for a year during freshman year. We moved back to Taiwan when I was in 7th grade and we proceeded to move apartments every single year up til my junior year.

You must be wondering, who are these weird blobby characters that inhabit every, single, damn, page of my sketchbook. Well… This was heavily influenced by my obsession with the game Grow Cube back in middle school which featured little round guys. It appears you can still play the game now, on crazygames.com (I kid you not this is the name of the site). If you’re too innately satisfied with your life and don’t need to fill the void in your heart with a dinky game, you can see what the game looks like below:

Those little faceless guys standing on the edge are the reason for all of this and probably why my characters today look the way that they do.

Anyways, I just really liked draw a lot of these guys doing different things.

Sophomore Year (2011-2012)

Yeah, we’re still drawing the weird guys and I pretty much drew them consistently through high school so please bear with me.

I started making more finished pieces during this time. I became obsessed with drawing these really really elaborate hair pieces which I became very known for in school.

I was super proud of the pieces above that I did at the time and to be quite honest I still like them! This was the first time I tried out painting on fancy Arches paper and I was slowly learning how to use a dip pen.

A story! A very SHORT story that I did in my sketchbook. I guess this can be seen a precursor to my debut book coming out next year… The stamp on the bottom right was actually carved by my dad who used to design and carve them when he was young.

YEAH! More HAIR! So much HAIR. These pieces were HUGE and were sold to the designers/architects who helped us to design our last apartment we moved into where my parents still live.

Junior Year (2012-2013)

This is the era that Lian learns how to use photoshop and add in textures.

These are a tomato series that the family my sister tutored commissioned from me. I still think these are cute.

And more random pages from my sketchbook below. This was my first Moleskine sketchbook after pleading my parents for years to shell out the expensive $24 for a sketchbook after only ever using cheap $2 sketchbooks.

I was obsessed with making these weird imaginative structure things at the time. I think the obsession came from Chris Riddell’s illustrations in the Far Flung Adventures. I really liked Corby Flood when I was a middle schooler.

Since college was slowly coming up, I began practicing realistic/observational drawings that I could eventually use in my portfolio. The one above was from a photo around my neighborhood in Taiwan and the one below I painted on the spot. I remember I was super proud of it at the time.

My biggest inspiration has always been Shaun Tan and you can totally tell by this piece. If you haven’t checked out his books, definitely try to! They’re absolutely gorgeous.

Senior Year (2013-2014)

After years of pleading my mother to get me a fountain pen so that I could be the next Mattias Adolfson, she finally caved and got me a Pelikan fountain pen. The pens that Mattias uses are all a couple hundred dollars so we settled for an infinitely cheaper version. However, she did agree to let me order the same ink Mattias used which we had to specially order from America. I think the shipping cost more than the ink itself. But, this was in 2013 and I’m still using the same bottle so at least my mum got her money’s worth!

Here are some more sketchbook pages, from a short family trip we made to Turkey with the clinic my parents worked at. It was around this time that I was trying to diversify and break away from drawing my dumb little grow cube inspired characters. I realized that I needed way more diversity in my portfolio for college and little grow cube characters with pointy limbs and no facial expressions was pretty limiting. I was going to say that I’ve diversified my faces but my character’s faces are all still just comprised of dots and a line so I guess I haven’t grown THAT much.

Here are some sketches of my dad sleeping, my perpetual muse:

During this time, I was trying a lot more experimental work during this time in hopes of becoming a more “serious” artist. I also cheated the system at school and got away with getting two “independent study” periods where I could “pursue art” on my own. The reality was, I just really didn’t want to take any more math classes.

This is a scan of a tiny painting inside a frame which then inspired these little figures I made and took very dramatic photos of:

This is also the “Lian Discovers Digital Painting” era.

Of course, no high school art portfolio would be complete without the “Pretty Tumblr Girl” era where everybody just drew skinny white girls off Tumblr and unfortunately I was no exception…

And all that lead to the culmination of my high school “portfolio”, this project I did for myself after I graduated:

I still really like this series and I think it’s definitely the starting point for where my work is now. It’s also the series that I showed Adam when we first met at SVA and he told me he was super intimidated of me because of it but that’s a story for another time…

And that’s it folks! If you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe below to see more revealing posts about my childhood and finally learn the answers to how to draw like me…

The answer is Grow Cube.