Four chars: drawing chengyu so the joke lands

Chengyu are four-character Chinese idioms. I drew them while I had to stay in Australia waiting on a U.S. work visa. Neocha Magazine wrote about the backstory.I drew tone and timing in the captions, not textbook glosses, so the humor could still read in English.

Scope

2017 to 2022 · 300+ panels on Instagram (@four_chars). Mostly chengyu with captions in everyday English. When a literal gloss felt flat, I rewrote until the joke could still land.

My role

Self-taught ink; captions usually took longer than the linework.
The goal was a laugh you could feel, not a perfect dictionary reading of every character.

Impact

Neocha wrote about the project. Instagram passed 10k followers over those years.
Comments turned into messages about how people actually use the phrases.
Dribbble (@four_chars) · older scraps and works-in-progress

Flat color and bold one-liners

Poster-flat backgrounds and chunky shapes. I'd pair a textbook idiom with an everyday phrase and try to get a laugh before you zoom in.

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Splashes, motion, movie brain

More paint and motion than tight ink, with film stills on my desk and palettes borrowed from whatever I'd watched that week.

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Sketchy panels and food crimes

Looser pencils and a lot of food setups. If a pun fell flat in English, I redid the caption instead of hiding behind a literal gloss.

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Quieter rooms and outdoor stills

Slower compositions: corners of a room, small props, skies where the metaphor sits in a lamp or a horizon instead of shouting the joke.

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Three weird wide posters

Full disclosure: this stretch is shamelessly Nintendo-coded. I drew it while I was neck-deep in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I kept stealing mood from cliffs, shrines, anything that read even slightly Hyrule to me.

Three horizontal pieces with real empty space (mirage, glow, spotlight). I wanted the quiet areas to feel tense, not just padding around a figure.