I tried fitting “Stargaze” into the frame I had in mind for it, but it didn’t work. The frame was too much of a light cool silver and did not look right with the tone of the graphite, which is a dark warm grey. So it’s back to the thrift stores. I’ll provide an update of what “Stargaze” looks like in its frame once… I find its frame, haha.

Before I start the luna moth fabric collage, I wanted to experiment with fabric by doing a small fabric collage for one of my 5 x 7 inch frames. I decided to do a portrait of a snowshoe hare since they are quick and simple to draw. I figured doing it wouldn’t take long, and that ended up being true – this collage only took 2 days to put together (3 if you count sketching time).

Here’s my process and the final result!

1. Sketched the rabbit, scanned it into Photoshop, mirrored it so it looked completely symmetrical (since the fabric print was a symmetrical pattern), and printed out two copies in the exact size of the frame opening. One copy I placed in my frame to test that the size of the rabbit looked right. The other copy became a part of my collage.

2. Translated the rabbit sketch to fabric. Since the fabric was somewhat translucent, I was able to glue it on top of my sketch and draw on the fabric while using the sketch underneath as a guide. I glued a second layer of fabric underneath the drawing. This gave the rabbit a nice weight and also made it solid (rather than translucent). I also added these eyes and for a minute this rabbit looked really freakin’ creepy, lol.

3. Started rendering the rabbit using pencil, colored pencils, and pastel pastels. It’s incredible how much drawing on a cotton fabric feels like drawing on a piece of paper. It helped I also had a piece of paper underneath, which kept the cotton fabric firmly in place. I found drawing like this very fun, and I want to do it again! I also experimented with using this sparkly gold tulle. I liked the soft and sparkly effect it created when placed on top of the fabrics.

4. Continued to render the rabbit, building up its values. On and off, I tested the rabbit and fabrics against the frame to ensure the colors were complementary to each other.

5. Experimented with the eyes. While I didn’t mind my rabbit looking creepy, the eyes I had were just a tad too much, lol. I tried these smaller eyes and almost considered using them instead.

6. Ultimately cut down the original eyes to be more proportional to the hare’s face. They looked better once I did that. I also cut out a nose with a more interesting pattern. I took out the frame’s glass and placed the frame over the collage to test how everything was looking. When I did, I noticed the lighting of my lamp against my frame made the edges of the collage look super dark and shadowy. I really liked that, so I decided I’d try to create that effect using a black pastel pencil.

7. Used a black pastel pencil to create a shadowy effect on the edges of the print, and I sewed a layer of the sparkly gold tulle on top of the print. This isn’t pictured, but I also cut out an additional circle of the sparkly gold tulle and placed it behind the rabbit face/ears, just to give that area more softness and sparkle.

8. The thing I enjoy most about how this collage turned out is its sparkle. Every time you change position or pick up the frame and move it, the tulle sparkles similar in the way water sparkles in the sunlight. It’s so satisfying to look at. This is me trying to get an adequate picture of it sparkling. (Still better to see it in person.)

9. All done!

This was a fun experiment. I especially enjoyed drawing on cotton and using sparkly tulle. I may try to do more of that when I do the luna moth.

Bye!

“Stargaze” (graphite, 6.5 x 4.5 inches)

Finishing this piece took a whole lot longer than I thought it would. I ended up reworking the entire background and foreground. The original background and foreground I was going for had a much more dynamic look, but it also looked messy, too messy, and it bothered me, haha. I decided to do a more pensive-like background instead to complement the lynx’s expression. It’s called “Stargaze.”

I’ll share what this piece looks like framed once I have it documented. I decided to go with a white mat in a bigger gray frame.

Next up? Probably a fabric collage of a luna moth. Hopefully I’ll have quicker results to show this time around!

Hello there! 

It’s almost the end of January, but I still have a couple weeks of work remaining on my little lynx drawing. This makes sense. I draw slow. I thought I’d still update, though, just to provide a visual of where I’m at. :)

This is the thrifted frame I’m THINKING of MAYBE going with…

I won’t be certain if this is the right frame until I have the drawing completed. Due to how detailed the drawing is, I am thinking a wider frame like this will better hold the details than a thinner one. However, this frame might still be too small, and I might need to go with a mat + a bigger frame to give the drawing enough room to “breathe.”

I’ll see! 

Well, I finished my skunk and got it fitted in its little thrifted frame. Here are some pictures of that process, as well as the final result!

With this one, I relied less on referencing my digital collage and more on rendering a background and skunk that I felt really complemented each other. In case you’re curious, this is the digital collage I made as my reference:

A bit shitty looking, but it did the job! 

“Winter Wonder” (graphite, 7 x 5 inches, 2024)

Here the skunk is completed and scanned into my computer. I had some trouble coming up with a title. At first, I decided I would simply call it “Skunk”, but, of course, that’s pretty boring. So now I have it titled “Winter Wonder.” I consider this a working title and so I may change it in the future, haha.

This is the thrifted frame I used. I almost didn’t buy this frame! The first time I found it, I put it in my hand for a while before ultimately deciding to put it back on the shelf. Then for about two days, I couldn’t stop thinking about it and started regretting not buying it, so I caved and went back to the thrift store to get it.

I’m really glad I did. It looks just right.

I’ll admit, I’m feeling weirdly attached to this skunk. It was a fun one to do and I hope my friend’s partner likes it! But yeah… now it’s on to other things. I’ve got so much I want to do, it literally tears me a part from the inside as gory as that might sound. So many boreal animals I would just love to draw. And so many boreal animals I would just love to draw again, and again, and again (looking at you, lynx).

Hopefully I’ll be back soon with more finished creations! 

Here are a couple progress shots of a graphite drawing of a lynx I started. This is based off a photograph I took of one of the lynx at the Minnesota Zoo. I decided to draw this one using a grid. Using a grid is how I do the Family Drawings. For the Taiga Series, though, I’ve been opting instead to roughly sketch in the composition of the digital collage with the help of a light box, and then build the drawing off that rough sketch. I’ve enjoyed the efficiency of doing this, though… I’ve been lately wondering… if starting off with a light box has been making it more difficult for me to blend realistic and illustrative elements together. 

Creating a drawing using a grid is a more gradual kind of experience. The drawing slowly emerges through shades rather than begins as a complete set of lines and outlined shapes. For this drawing, I want to find opportunities to make the background look more abstract, and working this way might help with that. 

I also started a graphite drawing of a skunk for a friend of mine’s partner. For this one, I decided to use a light box to roughly sketch in parts of the composition. To keep the drawing from looking too much like the digital collage, I avoided sketching in most of the background and will free hand it instead. I’m not sure if doing this is going to make any difference on how the final result looks, but I’ll find out! 

I should have these two drawings done around the end of the month, hopefully! 

Will do my best to keep everything up to date in here. 

I’ve been in a real mental knot as of late about my art. And I’ve been desperately wanting to start untangling this knot. I’ve tried, and I’ve tried, and then, suddenly, last night, I remembered I have an art blog. And I was like… Wait, this is what I use an art blog for, right? Not just for sharing art, but also for untangling mental knots I have about art? Yep, so here is the knot:

I’m in this place, artistically, where I want to change. And I’ve been in this place for quite a while. When I look at the work I created in my twenties, I feel vaguely disconnected from it, as if it belongs to a phantom version of myself. Which in a way, it does. My twenty-something-year-old self is something of a phantom now. 

I started to really notice this feeling of disconnection while at art fairs. People would come by, ask questions about my art, and I would answer somewhat robotically, as if someone else was speaking for me. To combat this feeling, I started working on the Taiga Series, which excites the hell out of me because it’s so wonderfully different and about a topic I’ve always been interested in. But, while working on the Taiga Series, I’ve run into a new predicament. I’ve found myself in a stage of transition. Like, say, my twenty-something-year-old self is a phantom, well, my thirty-something-year-old self is an awkward adolescent. I feel like a lot of the art I’ve made over the last 3 years has pimples. Is insecure. Gets nervous around people. Wants new clothes, lol. But yes, wants new clothes. 

I’ve always had this fantasy of closing the gap between my photorealistic and illustrative styles. I would love to make work that is “realistically illustrative”. I want my compositions to have their own illustrated language of patterns and connections, where when you look at one, you can literally feel it talking, as if it has a special coded message. At the same time, I want to incorporate more realistic-looking subject matter. In my twenties, I drew a lot of simplistic girls and animals, ones that, upon closer inspection, were actually just a bunch of circles, triangles, and rectangles. And that was fine. I loved, and still love, doing that. But now, I want to draw more girls and animals that look more like girls and animals. 

While working on my Taiga Series, I’ve attempted to fulfill this fantasy with mixed results. My main challenge has been successfully using personal and copyright free reference photographs. Since I am not a gnome, or a fairy, or a witch, I don’t live in the taiga forest and so do not have access to all their animals. This makes me dependent on the use of reference photographs when drawing them, especially when drawing them realistically. And I’ve been having a hard time with that. I run into this issue where the realistic appearance of the reference photograph I’m using sometimes conflicts with the illustrative appearance of the composition I’ve made. 

It’s like I’m banging pots and pans together. It’s like I can only operate at two extremes. I can’t seem to find my “middle.” At least, not yet.

So I think what I need to do is step back from selling my work at art fairs and galleries and spend my thirties building a new body of work. In addition to using graphite, I want to use colored pencil, textiles, and writing in my work. I also want to focus more on how I present my work, such as by expanding what kind of frames I use and working in book and polyptych formats. I want to do all this because I want to figure out what my “middle” is. So far, I haven’t completely found it via the work I’ve done. It’s time to branch out. Maybe, my middle exists in an entirely different art form. Or, maybe, it doesn’t. But it appears to be something I have to figure out through experimentation. So I’m gonna get experimenting. 

With all that said, bear with me, blog, as things might get messy in here. It’ll be some years before I’m out of this awkward adolescence and blossom into a 40-something-year-old butterfly. At least – I hope so. If I end up as a 40-something-year-old cocoon, so be it, that’s cool, but… I’m gonna do my best to blossom. 

See ya. 

Hello, I’m back. As I mentioned in my last entry, I’ve been picking up frames from the local thrift stores and using them as inspiration for pieces of art. One of the frames I picked up was a small black and gold frame. This frame has a shiny, polished appearance, so I wanted to do a moth for it, particularly the White Spring Moth, which has these white translucent wings that almost look like they’re sparkling. In particular, I wanted to do a fabric collage, making the moth out of a translucent white fabric and laying it atop a background of gold-glittered black fabric. Almost like it’s floating in space. 

I ran into a bunch of hurdles with this one and almost gave up at one point. Drawing on fabric, much less on partially translucent fabric, isn’t something I am used to doing! First, I tried to draw the moth using just graphite, but I found I couldn’t get my shades dark enough. I ended up using a combination of gray, black, and yellow colored pencils and pastel pencils to get a fuller range of value. Also, to keep the moth from looking too translucent, I glued it on top of a second blank white fabric. Then I made some shadows on the black background using a black pastel pencil, to help make the wings pop a bit more.

This is the result:

“Space Moth”
Fabric, graphite, colored pencils, pastel pencils
6 x 4 inches

And this is a more casual shot of it just sitting on my table:

I definitely want to do more fabric collages. I’d especially love to do one in a bigger size. Maybe I can find a large, ornate-looking gold or silver frame and do a whole fabric scene or a large fabric portrait of an animal. Who knows! 

That’s all I’ve got for now. 

Hello, it’s been a really, really long time. Again. It’s been so long I don’t even know how to start, what to say. What all has happened since June 4th? So many things. And now it’s going to be 2024 in a couple weeks. What the heck. It’s been over half a year! 

Summer and autumn went by in a flash. But it was a flash I seemed to have enjoyed taking part in because the majority of my memories from those times are warm and happy. Winter has been going by in a flash, too, and has inexplicably been filled with feelings of inspiration. I say inexplicably because most winters I don’t feel very inspired. I don’t usually have many new ideas. Usually, I focus on only one or two drawings or projects that take months to complete. Like last year, when I focused primarily on Family Drawings. 

As of today, I have five different sketches prepared for five different drawings, and more sketches brewing in my mind that I have yet to bring to paper. These sketches vary in their nature, with some being simple and others being complex. But one thing they all have in common is they bring up feelings of excitement for me. Even the simplest ones do. And I think it’s because they feel so… “new.” For a couple years, I’d been working on the Taiga Series, and, while I have no intentions of moving on from this project, I realize a part of me had been needing a break from it, if anything so, when I return to it, I’ll have some new ways to depict taiga animals. I partially got that break by doing Family Drawings last year. But now I really feel like I’m getting that break, ’cause what I’m creating belongs to no project, is just something in and of itself. 

Hopefully, this means I’ll be sharing these new drawings on this blog soon! But until then, I’ll just share some drawings I’ve completed in the last 4 months…

“Dad with Pekingnese”
Graphite, 10 x 10 inches

This is the drawing of my dad I’d been working on, which I completed in early September. 

“Birthday”
Colored pencil, 8 x 8 inches

This is a drawing I completed for my partner in November, for his birthday. 🙂

“Sun Fox” and “Baby UniFox”
Colored pencil, 3 x 4.25 inches and 4.25 x 3 inches

I went to a thrift store a few weeks ago and bought some cheap frames that I wanted to serve as inspirations for drawings. These little red frames are two of the five I bought. Since they’re red and gold, I thought a fox might be a good subject matter, and I prepared the drawings in a way where they would complement the frame. (In other words, the drawing can’t exist on its own, only with the frame.) I feel lukewarm on the result of these two, but it’s a start! I think this size frame may be a bit too small for me. Thankfully, the other frames I bought are larger and so will allow for more detail.

Alright, that’s all the art updates I’ve got for now! So I’m going to go ahead and end this blog entry, with the understanding that it may potentially be 6 more months until I update it again. And I’m going to end it with some colorful photographs of jellyfish I took in August.

Enjoy, and goodbye! 

Hello there! I’ve been feeling a lot better since I last wrote. I feel like I’ve woken up in some way, like there is this newfound electricity running through me. It’s a relief. I’d gotten tired of feeling tired.

My Finnish class ended, which was a bummer because I really appreciated it, and I think was a big part of what helped me wake up. I absolutely love the Finnish language, and I don’t say that lightly! Whenever I practice or listen to it, I get all those happy butterflies in my stomach. This class was quite helpful as it provided me some understanding of Finnish’s grammar, which intimidates me. It also provided me with resources I did not have before – I now have my own workbook to practice in, a multitude of websites to explore, and a second Finnish class to look forward to in the fall. Until I start that next class? Well, I’m just designing my own kind of Finnish course. Every day, I practice in some way.

I started the drawing of my dad as well, which is coming along. I ended up going with my original plan to have it as a black and white pencil drawing. Here is a snap shot of where I am at:

I feel like I’ve put a lot of work into this, so it was funny after I took this snapshot, as it looks like I haven’t gotten too far! It’s taken a minute to get the proportions sorted out, especially with the car.

Other than these two things, I haven’t been doing all that much. I’ve just been thinking ahead for what I would like to focus on after I finish this current drawing. I’ve also tinkered around a bit with a little used Sony Cyber-shot camera I bought sometime last March. Turns out the quality of it isn’t half bad! Here are a few pictures I’ve taken with it (and cropped and edited using Photoshop):

Marcel, my cat. 🙂

I was trying to get a clear picture of the flower and its reflection, but while doing so, these two people came by and photobombed. Because of this, I thought this was just gonna go to the trash, but then I noticed it sort of became its own kind of picture.

I just love the way this camera captures lighting.

Okay, well that’s all I’ve got!

Bye!

Hello! Well it’s been awhile. I’ve had some trouble keeping up with this blog, as must be obvious. Truth to be told? I’m… TIRED. My job has taken a lot of out of me these last couple months, particularly on the emotional front. I am learning how to be a manager, which has inevitably led to learning how to lay down boundaries with people. This is something I have never been all that confident in, but if I want to achieve a sensible work-life balance, it’s something I need to be confident in. Otherwise, consider my life over, done. Consider my life similar to these last few months: myself too tired to update my poor blog.

Thankfully, things have taken a turn for the better these last two weeks as I’ve become more intentional about taking care of myself. I’ve treated myself to long walks, delicious meals, draw-a-thons. I’ve napped on my lunch breaks, cuddled with my cat, practiced my Finnish. I’ve devised plans on how I can get back to how I used to feel, when I wasn’t so tired, when I felt a “spark” about life. Lately, I haven’t felt any “spark” I’ve just felt a bit weighed down, at least most the time.

“Flowers and Florence” (graphite, 9 x 12 inches)

I’ve been doing my best to draw every single night, no matter what my energy level, and I’ve been able to complete this Family Drawing as a result. The last drawing I completed was of one of my maternal great-grandmothers, Evelyn Kozirok. This drawing above is of my other maternal great-grandmother, Florence Rassat. 🙂

I never met Florence. I’ve been told she was quite ornery in her old age and so was a bit unpleasant to be around. She lived to be 103, which I find insane. Also, she married at a very young age. For this drawing, I referenced a photograph of her from her wedding day. She was only 18 or 19 years of age.

Also, on the subject of Florence, I find it absolutely necessary I share this extremely adorable picture of her and her sister when they were little. Florence is on the left, and her sister on the right.

This is the only picture I have of Florence when she was little, and it makes me smile every time I look at it. It’s ridiculously wholesome, she almost looks like a doll.

Now I am looking ahead to what I am going to draw next. I’ve really wanted to do more drawings of family members from my dad’s side, but I unfortunately have very few pictures to choose from. I have one picture of my paternal grandmother, Edna, in her older age during Christmas, and I have a scrapbook of many pictures of my dad, but that’s about it… Either way, I do feel it’s time I do a drawing of my dad, especially when at this point I have already drawn my mom 8 times! Here is the photograph I am thinking of using as my reference:

He is about 26 years old here and has a little Pekingese pup in his hands. In Photoshop, I manipulated this photograph so it is black and white, cropped into a square, and much more moody and shadowy. However, as I look at this photograph, I find myself loving the color scheme so much that I am wondering if I should try to do a more expressive colored pencil drawing instead. I guess I haven’t quite decided yet…

Anyway, yeah. I’m gonna go now!

Feel free to enjoy this lovely music below while I am gone 🙂