“Year of the Horse” Chinese New Year Artwork

“Year of the Horse” Chinese New Year personal artwork done in Flash/Illustrator.

Chinese New Year 2014 is the year of the horse, so I created this piece of artwork to celebrate the new year.  I did not want to go with the traditional style and colors of Chinese New Year art; I was aiming more towards creating a piece of artwork that was intricate, technical and classic.  Best colors to achieve that are my favorite 3 colors: black, white and red!

There was a lot of expression done in this artwork – instead of normally planning out what I wanted to do, I just went uninhibited and crazy.  I added details that I thought looked good, pattern designs, blends, etc.  The Chinese character of ‘horse’ is added on top in red to give it a small bit of color to contrast the black and white.

I just did whatever I felt was good and at the end, I created this piece of artwork which I think looks awesome.  No plans on what to do with this just yet, I did create some art postcards and will send them out to people.

There are two versions of this design; the initial design had a black Chinese character “horse” in the background, with a red one on top:

Which I like, but felt the black character made it too dark and hard to look at.  So I got rid of the black character and kept the red as the final design:

Some of the postcards I had made with the design; think they came out great!

If I have any left over and you want one, leave me a comment and I’ll get back to you and let you know if I can send you one!

Happy Chinese New Year!!!