The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Back to feedPost
Some drawings deserve another life.
There are a few drawings that still make my heart ache a little when I look at them.
They aren’t my newest work.
Actually, they come from the very beginning of my digital painting journey.
They were a raw part of me.
A person sitting by a window with a cup of coffee. A quiet afternoon. Someone simply looking outside.
I wasn’t trying to make something beautiful.
I think I was drawing a question:
Will a day like this ever come for me?
I had gone through several very difficult years—staying beside my parents through their illnesses and eventually saying goodbye to them. And after that came another kind of hardship, one created not by life or illness, but by people.
Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I started pulling out the little worlds that had been living quietly inside me.
Eventually, that world became LALATOWN.
And some of these drawings were born along the way.
The funny thing was, I loved them deeply—but I never quite knew what to do with them.
A sticker?
A print?
Should they just stay tucked away in an old folder?
Years later, I found another answer.
Now those little people can wander across a page again. They can follow a pencil, become a background, repeat themselves into a new neighborhood, and become part of somebody else’s drawing.
They became brushes.
And somehow, seeing those old, raw pieces of myself return to the world in a completely different form makes me very happy.
Maybe that is one of the rules of LALATOWN:
Nothing has to be finished just because its first life is over.
Here, you can have a second chance.
A third.
A fourth.
A fifth.
As many as you need.
Welcome to my Endless Opportunity Town.
Welcome to LALATOWN.
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Trending
retrofuturism
Share your favorite designs from the past exploring the distant future. Or your own take on the aesthetic 🚀
halftone
Dots. Texture. Grain. Let's see your designs using the halftone technique.
Midjourney
Creatives are showing off what they're making with Midjourney.
colorgrade
Video editors sound off: How do you enhance the mood of your video in color grading?
Related posts
What do you get when you combine photography and painting?
This weekend I used Midjourney to explore a visual direction that blends painted flowers into a photorealistic scene, bringing the two mediums together into something slightly surreal.
Using the new v8.2 Edit Model with personalization, it understood the prompt well, even though I only attached the subject as a reference.
Prompt is included in the comments.
What do you think of this style?
Really cool direction! Blending painted textures into a realistic garden scene works so well. Looks great!
Memento Mori VI — WIP [P2]
Memento Mori VI — WIP [P2]
Another day, another opportunity to keep inking.
Still a long way to go, but I’m getting there:
Kogy — AI Companion Toy / UI/UX Design
Designed the landing page for Kogy — a plush, keychain-sized AI companion that learns, plays, and keeps you company throughout the day.
The tricky part with products like this: lean too techy and you lose the cuteness, lean too cute and it stops feeling like a real smart device. So instead of the usual soft-pastel illustration route, I let real hero-scale photography of the plush character carry the whole page — its actual texture, its little smile, its scale as a keychain — wrapped in bold, high-contrast orange and oversized type.
A small character-selector strip (Lumi, Mochi, Poppy) hints at collectibility, and a live scrolling stat ticker at the bottom (questions answered, active companions) keeps it grounded as a real AI device, not just a toy.
Genuinely one of the more fun briefs I've worked on.
The live stat ticker (questions answered, active companions) is what sells the AI-device framing here, not the photography — a plush toy with a counter reads as a running system, not a static product shot.