My Art Blog

Hello all, and I bear more glorious gifts from the fruits of my recent labor!

What you’re looking at here is a Digital Media assignment I completed yesterday evening. It was a surreal castle assignment, and the only few required images were the clouds in the background, the castle, the rock under/behind the castle, and the random guy standing there. Everything else was random stuff I threw in there.

For example, there’s a little Ender Dragon from Minecraft in the top-left, a print of a winged newborn deer from one of my favorite artists (Trashkittyart) in the top-right, and some other things I enjoy like butterflies, flowers, and weird eyes. I was feeling inspired by the weirdcore art style (not to be confused with surreal art), one of my favorite aesthetics of internet art. The statue in front of the castle is Undine Rising from the Water.

This here is the exercise we all did together in Drawing I. This time around, we imitated what our professor did on her own paper, that being a gesture drawing of a circle/sphere, and then we would draw the notans or hard lines of the shadow’s shape and shade it in. After we did that and got a nice even tone for the shadow, we went in with our compressed charcoal for a darker gray/black to enrich the shadow and begin practicing the major divisions of light and shadow.

I feel I did a pretty great job at incorporating each of the distinct levels of light and shadow, although there are still a couple things I would’ve done a little differently. And as I predicted before, we finally got to blend the shadows a bit! Huzzah!

After all of that great practice with notans and shadow mapping with vine and compressed charcoal, we will be moving on to a new material: PanPastel! It’s some kind of pastel in a little compact, almost like a bronzer or highlighter compact or something like that. We will only be using the black PanPastel, since this is Drawing I and we won’t be using any color. We were all instructed to play with the PanPastel and sponge applicators over the weekend to get familiar with it, so I may post what I put together to explore the PanPastel this weekend!

Hello again everyone~! I’m posting another update of sorts to go over what I’ve done so far and what I left to do going forward for this week.

Today is a fairly large deadline: one Drawing I project, two Design I projects, and a quiz for each class going over what we’ve done and learned and such. I completed the fantasy map project on Tuesday, but the first Design Study project is one I admittedly have yet to start despite it being due today, haha! I know I’ve got it in the bag, though, and I’ll be sure to post the final product here once I’m finished.

Speaking of finishing projects, I added the final lines and touches to the second still life drawing I’ve completed for my Drawing I class. I think it looks great! I put a hell of a lot of effort into it to make it look as neat and pristine as possible despite the nature of charcoal and my own preferred art style!

You may have noticed that I just said second still life drawing for Drawing I. That’s because the first still life we all drew together during Week 1 (week of September 8) is one I unfortunately neglected to post here earlier, but I can still put it here now for everyone’s viewing pleasure! I also hope to put up all the assignments and drawings I do here so I can closely monitor my progress.

Drawing I Week 1 Throwback

During Week 1 of Drawing I, our primary focus was creating a comprehensive and strong gesture drawing, or a loose and fluid sketch of the basic shapes and curves of each object in a still life (or other artistic subject). This is to establish a strong foundation for what each object is doing and where each object will fit in the drawing. Creating a gesture drawing is also a great way to ensure that your entire canvas is filled up when creating a drawing; it’s a common mistake of many artists to get lost in the details early on in their drawing and create a tiny, detailed drawing in one corner of the canvas without realizing and oftentimes waaaay after the artist feels like moving everything around or scaling everything up to fit the canvas!

That’s why creating a great gesture drawing sketch is so important. It’s definitely something I need to practice a lot, too, because I struggled with the same issue for a while! I have the particular habit of starting a figure drawing with sketching the head (don’t do this!) and then drawing the rest of the body after, but that very often leads to the figure being positioned more in the corner of my paper or even cut off at the bottom because I drew the head too low.

To demonstrate our understanding and practice what we learned for sketching a gesture drawing, we created three separate gesture drawings of the same subject: the still life that was assembled by a few students (I helped with the first one! I unfortunately neglected to photograph it, though). After we created each gesture drawing, we went in and added more detail on a couple of them and practiced different line exercises on each.

I will admit that I kind of messed up and misunderstood some of the instructions, so I accidentally practiced two exercises on the same gesture drawing (the one you’re seeing above). While the drawing above should only have featured the exercise I was practicing regarding creating shadows with line weight, I mistakenly also practiced the cross-contours exercise on the same paper. However, I still feel my understanding of each are adequately presented despite the mix-up!

This drawing is the third drawing in the series of gesture drawings we sketched together. This one was my favorite, so I selected it to work on the exercise of creating the illusion of light and shadow with lines. We will be doing actual shading—and most importantly, blending!—very soon, though! In fact, I’m quite sure we’ll be starting that this week (Week 3)! I’m so excited (mostly to strut my stuff and show off what I already know, to be honest!)!

The second exercise I did on this drawing was cross-contours. Cross-contours are basically lines that go in the x- and y-direction (or just horizontally and vertically; sorry, math brain!) to demonstrate that the forms in the subject of the drawing are three-dimensional and therefore have volume. One large challenge in drawing and painting is creating a convincing rendition of three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional plane, i.e. their canvas or medium of choice. Cross-contour lines can be used as a helpful guide to know how and where to add shadows to better sell the idea that the circle drawn on the canvas is not just a drawing of a circle, but a drawing of a sphere.

Here is the second gesture drawing we completed together. I was mostly happy with this sketch, but I still felt like there were some things I would’ve liked to correct (which I fixed in the third gesture sketch above). Another exercise we were assigned was expressionist lines, or a series of fluid hatchings, scribbles, or disorganized jumble of lines to provide the illusion of shape, volume, and movement. We were each encouraged to channel how we were feeling into our expressionist lines, as that is the purpose of the exercise and an expressionist style in general. I will admit that I struggled with this, though.

I don’t typically struggle so much with channeling my emotions into my artwork, so it’s a bit ironic that I had such a hard time doing so in a classroom setting. I thought it would come naturally to me just like expressionism in art always has for me. Although, I attribute the uncharacteristic struggle to a series of recent difficult talks and realizations about myself and my past that made me feel like I was bound and locked in a cage or other claustrophobic prison, and I sense that feeling is uncomfortably present in my somewhat stilted and reserved line hatches.

I felt like I couldn’t pick an emotion I wanted to emulate in the drawing, so I ultimately made the choice of not choosing. As a result of that indecision, how I was naturally feeling—whether I wanted that or not—bled out into my drawing. My professor said she liked my expressionist lines and that this gesture drawing was her favorite, but I am personally a bit dissatisfied with it because of how much better I know I do with my other emotional and expressionist drawings.

Finally, this is the first gesture drawing of the series of sketches we all made. Since I misunderstood the exercise instructions, this gesture drawing is not adorned with any enriching features like expressionist lines or cross-contours; it’s simply the gesture sketch alone without any additional flair. Since this was the first gesture drawing of the bunch, it’s definitely the messiest and least cohesive, but with the repeated drawing of the same subject, I was able to smooth out those rough edges I disliked in my later drawings.

This was a bit of a longer post, but I hope it was helpful or informative or just enjoyable somehow!

Afternoon Update

My drawing for my first Design Study project for Design I is now complete! It took quite a bit of effort to map out where the lines were going to go without crossing (or at least with minimal crossing), and I’m pretty happy with how it came out! It’s a drawing for my two precious cats, Basil and Laszlo. Laszlo is a bit smaller than Basil here because he’s still a baby; he’s 4-5 months old now! We found him behind our house in late April. They’re my sweet babies <3.

Although I haven’t been as up-to-date with my blog as I might’ve initially hoped, I’ve been quite busy behind the scenes with new assignments and projects!

Namely, some projects I’ve been working on are a fantasy map for Design I, and a still life with vine and compressed charcoal for Drawing I. I completed the fantasy map yesterday, but I still have a ways to go with the charcoal still life.

For my fantasy map, I illustrated a map that I made up in my head some time ago for some of my characters that I fortunately made a sketch for some months ago on my iPad.

As we started the still life, we began with a gesture drawing using vine charcoal and refined the lines and angles with a technique called sighting. I think I did a pretty good job for the most part! I’m not very confident with any kind of charcoal because I’ve never used it before this class.

To further refine the lines in the drawing and add the illusion of shadow, we are using compressed charcoal and implied lines/playing with line weight. Compressed charcoal is a bit more challenging for me than vine charcoal, so I’m still not done with it yet. I’ve got time to finish it, though; it’s due this Sunday.

Also, I photographed the still life that was assembled in class for reference. I realized much later on that I didn’t accurately capture the angle at which I was working at for my drawing, but I think it’s fine at this point and you guys get the gist.

Finally, I’ve been working hard to adjust and add on to this website. I plan on updating the theme per season or holiday! Please keep in mind though that I am a Celtic Pagan, so my site will feature some Pagan holidays I celebrate rather than more commonly celebrated Abrahamic (or other) holidays such as Christmas or Thanksgiving.

Hello all again! Before anything else, it’s now September, which means SPOOKY SEASON! I’m super excited for Halloween this year.

Aside from that, I (technically) completed my second art assignment! Huzzah! It is an assignment in my fully distanced Design I class where students are to photograph any 2D art they have made to demonstrate understanding of how artwork should be properly photographed. It took some adjustments and problem-solving, but I think I did a magnificent job! I opted to photograph my personal sketchbook’s front page/cover with my digital camera.

I photographed this work with my Nikon Coolpix L330 (2014) digital camera! I absolutely adore older digital cameras, even if the quality isn’t always as crisp or striking as a 4K film camera or something, I dunno.

Thankfully there hasn’t been too much going on just yet, but with my in-person Drawing I class starting this Monday, I’m feeling fired up and excited for my classes to really take off! I’m looking forward to the next post here!

Welcome to the beginning of my art blog! Since this is my first blog post, it’ll be a bit lengthy. I’m creating this post the week of Fall 2025 classes beginning, that being August 25, 2025. I am currently enrolled in three online classes—Art History I, Design I, and Digital Media—and one in-person class—Drawing I.

Since I’m wrapping up my first week, there isn’t much going on at the moment. The most I’ve done so far is print out and highlight syllabi and document due dates for assignments and modules and such in my personal Trello board for schoolwork.

However, I have gotten around to completing my first ever art assignment! Yaaaaay! It’s a small Photoshop assignment for Digital Media to get familiar with some basic shortcuts and selection tools. I had so much fun doing it!

As I’m certain I will continue to do with my art assignments, I went a little overboard and went full throttle! The parameters for satisfying the rubric requirements were quite relaxed, so I put some extra effort in to make it look great with my own artistic flair!

Every morning I wake up ready and excited for new content to read and new projects to start planning. I don’t even need coffee or an energy drink in the morning anymore! I honestly have never felt so excited for anything in my life, so I just can’t wait to see and do more as the semester progresses!

Some more amazing news: the final upgrade for my desktop PC arrived—my new GPU! Now that I have a $800 graphics card in my computer (AMD Radeon 9070XT), Adobe Photoshop can now run like a hot knife through butter! Massive thanks to my lovely boyfriend, Jack, for installing it for me <3. With that monstrous beefy GPU in my PC, I can seamlessly run any art software I want! I think that’s a great note to end my first entry here on.

P.S., unrelated to my art, I updated my website skin so it’s a bit more festive! I’m very excited for Halloween this year (like I am every year, really)!