The Dog Days of Summer

August is winding to a close, and wow was that a busy month! Between my work schedule, tattoo appointments, and hangouts with friends, there was truly never a dull moment. And yet, I weirdly managed to squeeze in all sorts of creative projects this month.

Traditional Drawings + Art Goals

I think maybe the most important thing I did was make a pact with my roommate Molly where we're holding each other accountable for our art goals. Hers was that she wants to paint more often, and mine was that I want to make time for stuff that I do just for fun. Both of us made good on our promises this month!

I decided to mess around with oil pastels for the most part, since they're a really loose medium that kind of allow for you to just embrace the chaos. Which was definitely something I needed. I started with a teeny tiny jellyfish, then did the sandhill crane to practice drawing over watercolor. The flowers are a recreation of Three Potted Tulips by Claude Monet (one of my personal favorite artists), and then finally I made a nice colorful peach.

Digital Drawing and Letting My Dumb Ideas Win

On the subject of fun, I also did this redraw of Beaker from the Muppets as David Byrne in Stop Making Sense, because the thought refused to leave my brain. I worked on this over the course of a few nights after coming home from school/work and would seriously just mess with it until it was past bedtime. It was such a blast to make!

It was also a great excuse to play around with a new set of brushes from an online digital drawing course I'm taking. I absolutely love the texture they provided, especially for all the fuzzy details.

I also added a noise filter over the background to match the original photo's film grain, which is one of those dumb subtle things that tickled my brain but no one else will notice, lol.

I feel like I need to print this out and frame it.

The Golf Game and Expanding Horizons

I'll always be the first to say that I'm not much of a digital artist. I basically only ever learned what I know about digital design through the stickers I've made. And it was starting to come to a head for me with this golf game, because it's the first game where I've truly been in charge of all of the art components and needed to really push myself into new frontiers digitally.

Looking at what I was making started to become a little distressing to me. It felt flat and kind of ugly, and even though I knew it was just temp art I needed to fix it.

This brings me back to the digital course. The main thing I think my digital art lacks is depth and dimension. It's a real struggle for me! So I went ahead and took a course on Domestika called Atmospheric Scenes in Procreate: Paint with Color and Light by Ramona Wultschner.

I haven't even finished my final project for the course yet (hopefully I'll have that to show for next month!) but even her first few lessons made me see so much room for quick improvement in my work.

Now I feel like I've kept the spirit of the style I was going for alive, but in a way that actually looks good. Which is a lot more fun for me to look at.

Also, the game is coming along well! A lot of the summer months have been chaotic as hell but our programmer made a bunch of big strides in making this game actually function as, y'know, a fun game to play. Which in turn makes it more exciting for me to keep plugging away at my various assets, and all of that inspires Victor with his sound and music. It really is a team effort.

Last But Not Least... Tattoos

I've been on a pretty steady tattoo schedule this month! I had to move a few appointments around for various reasons, but this was probably my most consistent month yet.

This is probably just going to be something I say every day for the rest of my life now, but this journey is humbling beyond belief and I'm so, so thankful to everyone who has let me learn on their skin. And specifically make mistakes on their skin. I feel embarrassed to point it out when I make mistakes because this is such a permanent medium, but unfortunately when you're learning that's just part of the game.

But I take each mistake to heart and use it as fuel to try to do better next time. Each appointment presents its own unique challenges and each of those are an opportunity to problem solve and learn. I also (thankfully) don't think I've made any mistakes yet that I can't fix later. That doesn't make it fun, though!!

All of this to say.... god, what a turbulent ride.

Thanks for reading this far! I don't have a featured creative person for this month, but if you want to send something my way for September (writing, drawings, songs, photos, whatever you got!) hit me up at heyladycelery@gmail.com.