As the lunar new year holiday concluded this past weekend, I will conclude this series talking about Asian families. Many perceived differences come in the ways we express or apply our values which, in and of themselves, are universally similar.

The Asian family hierarchy begins with the oldest generation. These members are the most revered, because of the wisdom they often hold in the years of life they have acquired. I think we all can agree that the older we get, the smarter we get. Therefore, during holidays and other family celebrations, the oldest members of the family are paid respect in the form of a prayer and offering, and are given whether they are alive or have passed on.

The nuclear family consists of parents and their children, and each member has certain expectations and obligations to the other.

Parents protect, advocate for, and give their children the personal tools needed to succeed. Parents must be their children’s educators, their protectors, their guidance counselors; in effect, their job is to arm them with the coping skills they will need to live independently in a very complex world. The perception of Asian culture is that of harshness and that Asian parents only value success. While it’s true that Asians value success, when looking at it from a different perspective, it is also true that they simply do not believe it is in their child’s power to FAIL.

Children in return are expected to contribute to the family by behaving, listening, and helping out where possible. Children should be respectful of their parents, not take for granted what is given, and should work hard for the opportunities their parents are giving them.

Asian families are frankly like any family. We fight amongst ourselves, and sometimes don’t even like each other. What is inherent is that every generation interacts and is involved in family dynamics to move the family forward into the future. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Happy New Year everyone! May the year of the monkey bring us all good luck, good health, prosperity, and good food!

So, what food would NOT be eaten during the Lunar New Year celebrations? It has to do with a color that is associated with death for many Asian Cultures. Guesses included eggs, flour, and, er, SNOW (Um, we don't really EAT snow, though it's acceptable to do so!). This food is white, or very pale beige....

The answer is tofu. But not ALL tofu is bad luck. Just the plain, uncooked variety. There are some tofus, like the fermented stuff, that is brown on the outside and pressed in a way to give it much more density, that is actually considered lucky, because it has the same shape as money! Gosh, it's seems like it's ALL about the looks, eh?

Let’s finish up our discussion on Illustrator versus Photoshop before we get back to the process of self-publishing.

In the beginning, Illustrator was a great 2D graphics tool. In graduate school, I learned to use it as a set-up to my illustrations. This illustrator file could be brought into Photoshop, where I could then do the “real” painting, adding form through highlights, core and cast shadows, and airbrushing in all the beautiful variations in color that occur when light hits an object. But what happens when I needed to change, say, the color of an object in the image?

Because we used Photoshop in place of traditional painting, we used the tools in the same way we’d do so with traditional techniques, like airbrush. First, I’d make a frisket, which is like a stencil; in Photoshop this was called a mask. Then, I’d adhere the frisket on my board, or, make a selection in Photoshop. Finally, I’d grab my airbrush, or airbrush tool, pour my paint into the reservoir, or select it in the color palette, and then paint. Excellent!

Now, traditionally, if I want to erase what I’ve done and re-paint it, I’d have to attempt to erase it without damaging the surface of the medium (paper, canvas, illustration board). Bad things happen when the medium’s surface is damaged, like uncontrollable bleeding and splotchy patches. Then I’d need to clean out my airbrush reservoir, re-apply my frisket, and finally re-paint the new colors.

Photoshop makes this process much easier, since I can specifically select the area I want to erase with the mask I had already created, and erase that area. Then, with that area still selected, I can re-airbrush all the bumps and dips on the surface, all the highlights, core and cast shadows, and reflected lights to render that surface to look real. Kind of a pain, but still easier than traditional.

In contrast, with Illustrator I can also create these undulations, core and cast shadows and highlights using shapes. If I need to change colors, it was a matter of selecting the shape, and then clicking on the new color in the swatch palette. And scene.

Illustrator, from the beginning, was my choice, because I just KNEW that I would be making plenty of changes to the illustrations, the color scheme, the background colors and textures, the layout, everything.

Next up, we’ll get back to the specific production technicalities with gutters!

No, I'm NOT 1.5 months late in wishing you a happy new year. But I am a day late in ushering in the year of the monkey! So, Happy beginning of the Lunar New Year holiday!

I want to take advantage to talk about some unique cultural distinctions in holidays, superstitions and food. Too often, these differences make us feel like the cultural gulf is too wide, for just as westerners are accustomed to wearing a white wedding gown to symbolize purity and chastity, wearing white symbolizes death in certain Asian cultures. It’s simply a difference, and should NOT separate, but rather define, our individual heritages.

I’ll start off with the significance of dragons (I think it appropriate, yes?) in the Chinese culture in particular. The Chinese believed their people were the "descendants of the dragon,” and since Centipede Dragon is half-DRAGON, this is a logical place to start.

The dragon is an amalgamation of body parts from nine animals: a deer, a camel, the devil (that’s no animal!), a snake, a large cockle, a carp, an eagle, a tiger and an ox.

The dragon is symbolic of kindness, friendliness, wisdom and is a protector. It is the ultimate symbol of good fortune.

Dragons were thought to control when and where rain would fall, and hence, the success of crop growth. With strength in its tail, dragons could control floods with one mighty smack upon a river bed!

And finally, the coming of two dragons together in opposite directions form the yin yang sign, a sign marking eternity.

During the Lunar New Year celebration, firecrackers are thrown at the feet of dragon puppets during parades to keep the dragons awake in order to continue bringing good fortune throughout the coming year.

Next post will talk about food traditions!

So, the question I posed last post was, why did I choose to make my drawings in Adobe Illustrator versus Adobe Photoshop?

The obvious answer is that I had no way of knowing that in the production of the book (since I never expected to self-publish), that transparencies would cause such a headache. But what I’ve learned in being an Illustrator for almost 2 decades now, is that the flexibility with Adobe Illustrator far exceeds that of Photoshop. So when time is the essence, as well as the ability of an illustration to be tailored to another use, well, Illustrator wins out.

First, let’s talk about scalability, using this very crude example of what happens when you try to blow up the size of a small picture originally created in Photoshop. We learned before that Photoshop stores the image as pixels in a grid. If the original picture was small, say 1 inch by 1 inch, and you set your document at 100 dpi, that means within that 1x1 inch square, you have 100 pixels of information. The more pixels you pack into that square, the better detail and more subtlety in color shifts and changes you’ll achieve. But you’ll also have a much bigger file to save!

Now, if you decide to make that picture 2x2 or 3x3 inches, you have to distribute those 100 pixels over a canvas that is now much larger than your original 1x1 inch canvas. So original pixels #3 and 4 that used to be next to each other now have empty space in between them.

What Photoshop then does is uses a clever algorithm to make up the pixel color in between each original pixel. So in this image, each original pixel is ideally placed in the center of the now much enlarged grid square. With all the empty space in between each original pixel, the algorithm looks at the next original pixel in closest proximity to the first one, and fills in each empty pixel space in between with a color that is also “in between” the colors of each original pixel. Looking at pixel #3, the color of each pixel moving left toward pixel #2 becomes lighter, to match the pixel color in #2. In moving right, the pixels in grids #3 and 4 are the same color, so, the pixels in between are also the same color. The algorithm is much more clever though, because it has to sample the original pixels in closest proximity in ALL directions. Hence, it “recreates” the shifts in color in this way.

But the algorithm isn’t perfect either, and therefore, often as good as the theory sounds, the results are not so pretty. Sometimes the result is muddiness, fuzziness, and just a lot of noise within the picture. Not so with Illustrator, which uses math formulas to store its information and is therefore not affected quality-wise when you want to scale up or down.

One point for Illustrator!

Next, we’ll talk about what happens when we try to change the image itself.