Category: Ryan & Me

I’m sure I’ve said it in here somewhere that I realized I do more art when it’s warmer than during the winter. It’s technically spring even though it’s snowing but it is currently raining, so I’m getting right into it. I’ve done two traditional ink paintings that I’m totally in love with in the past few weeks, and I’ve been putsing with Stealing from Raquildis and I’ve gotten over half a page done (…that’s a bigger accomplishment than it sounds). I’ve also done a bunch of art for work-related things like TNMT for my students or like turning my coworker into a super adorable chibi.

It’s hard not to describe this picture without sounding sappy because of who inspired it. What was the most interesting about was only using two colors (blue and yellow) and creating such a range of tones anyway. To be fair, I used both my blue inks so they were actually really different colors. My favorite parts ended up being the watered down drips on the right. And weirdly the contours on his face; they always draw my eye. That and the swoop of his bangs. The hand got way out of control and I tried too hard to correct it though. I actually did the piece in two phases, which is pretty unusual for me because usually I just do it in one shot and consider it untouchable after that. I was expecting to fix the hand but felt no compulsion to do so when I came back for it, so it’ll be one of those things I don’t really mention unless someone notices it, because it’s more likely just in my head. Looking at it now I kind of wish I didn’t mark off the side of his face on the yellow side of the image because it may have been more dreamlike, but I remember struggling with it not having a boundary.

I should probably get a better picture than this of the canvas. I think it’s scaled down since I cropped the photo on my phone. But it’s also blurry because I rushed to take the picture too. This was a really profound piece for me, but I’ve already kind of talked about it too much so that I don’t have a strong desire to write about all of it here. One thing that didn’t come through in this photo (I’d totally get up and go take another one but my cat’s draped across my lap) is how great the depth of the paper bits looks when they’re glued on but, like, the top one there isn’t all the way glued down. Also the bottom corner is super metallic and you can’t tell. I love how most of the edges are within the canvas rather than bleeding right up to the end of the canvas, but it kind of makes the work seem poppy.

This piece ended up being a bit of a declaration of self, and surprisingly I would say two weeks or something later the message still resonates with me; I haven’t stopped this conversation with myself. I wanted to ask myself if I could still be myself when I’m with someone else. And I wanted to ask myself if it was still okay to have weaknesses, or to feel emotions that are new to me without letting them destroy my own integrity. The answer is yes, I’ve found, but when I was doing this, I left the question unanswered via the scraps of typewriter paper, which ask over and over again: are you sure?

This one is super old and I finished it a long time ago but I haven’t been super proactive about getting things up on my blog. My boyfriend’s cat is the size of a small horse and he’s very aggressively cuddly so he’s not often allowed in the bedroom with us. But on this particular morning we let him in and he could not believe that he got to be with us. He was sprawled between us or on me or in someone’s face the whole time and it was super precious.
I wanted to see what the sketchy coloring style would look like because my new tablet allows for a lot more scratchy lines than my old one. I do like it but I’m not sure how much.

This came before the purple painting up there. I always turn to Lucienne when I want to be stronger. Her abs look great, and I love the bright red lines that add highlights.

So I hate to brag about a gift (for my precious coworker’s birthday) because that just seems like the epitome of arrogance, but this piece was kind of a big old “look what I can do” for me. The last time I drew in a chibi style was in the 8th grade and I used colored pencils and printer paper for it. I remember in my days of scrolling through stock anime photos and staring at the shading on those beautiful drawings and feeling like I could never achieve that. There’s nothing perfect about this picture by any means, but setting out with a goal of making this picture look as froofy and adorable as possible – and kind of sort of accomplishing that feat – made me feel like I’m now the artist I would have wanted to become. It’s not like I’m gonna work on “honing down” my skills as a chibi artist but I love feeling like I could basically draw anything I wanted and end up happy with the product. There’s something to be said for now having the tools to do something like this. Of course I wouldn’t be able to do this traditionally. But I can also do epic stuff traditionally. Like, to humble myself a bit I just need to remind myself that I didn’t get into Uptown so clearly I have not risen as far as I could. But in terms of what I longed to be when I was a kid drawing pictures, it’s pretty cool to have gotten here.
That being said, the flowers totally suck hahaha.