Thank you so much! And sorry for the late feedback!

True, true. Lots of young people on here! Which is great because there are so many young, talented artists on here! And I would love it if you shared my art! Thank you!

Circles, squares, and triangles.

Sketch from Anatomy class. 40 minutes. Charcoal on paper.

Today I donated blood. I started hyperventilating when I saw the size of the needle but they were good with distracting me and gave me apple juice. :-D

Was able to scan this piece but a lot of the details were lost unfortunately.

Photo from last year’s Body Art Show. I was caught a little off guard. Anywho, a photo for those looking to put a face on the artist :-)

I still have some shading to do with this piece but it’s basically done. I feel that it’s a bit too plain though with only the two colors. My boyfriend asked if I could do something other than portraits to help me expand my horizons. I guess I can but I feel the most comfortable doing portraits. It’s what I enjoy doing. However if I don’t try drawing other things, I won’t know if I’ll enjoy it. Nothing to lose I guess in trying. Hopefully my next piece will have something other than a portrait; maybe something extra in the background and more color.

Also, good news! I finally started selling prints! You can find them here:

WIP. Still not sure what to do about color. I know I’d like to add just a wee bit of it almost as an accent. Definitely will be watercolor.

I had a few dreams last night and unfortunately I remember just about all of them. One of them had Channing Tatum in it. He was getting it on with a guy that he handcuffed. Hot right? Except it was in a room full of corpses with numbers and slashes across their bodies. I was in the room trying to protect him from the people that had done the killings and had to hide them by piling the other bodies on top of them. I could almost taste the scent of decay.

In another dream that night, I tore Lucy Liu’s top off. The bad part? She was as flat as a 12 year old boy. Oh, and I tore her top off because I was mugging her and it came off. She had exactly $400 on her. I was working for a ring of muggers and had to get the first person that was in the lot, which happened to be Lucy Liu. She started crying and I felt bad so I let her go and didn’t take her money because my plan was to destroy the underground mugging ring from the inside. And because the crying was getting to be too loud and noticeable.

The other three dreams I had that night aren’t worth writing about.

I saw fireflies last night for the first time in several years. I thought I imagined it at first and saw it flicker a few more times. It reminds me of when I was about 6 and fantasized about getting married at night with fireflies in little mason jars going down the aisle towards a tree that had even more firefly-filled jars hanging from the branches.

So this ‘piece’ (I’m using this term loosely because it’s probably my least favorite) was done around 2003 for an art project in high school. If I remember correctly, I was taking 3 separate art classes that year and this project was for one of the lower art classes (art 2 or something). My art classes were back to back so I finished a lot of my projects in class. The assignment was to create a mosaic of sorts with magazine cutouts. I thought the assignment was a joke to be honest. I spent the last 15 minutes of class starting and finishing this piece and handing it in for my next class. My art teacher wasn’t fond of a lot of my artwork in general as it wasn’t his style (I drew cartoons a lot) but he loved this piece. I was astonished because projects that I spent hours working on would get a B+, maybe an A. This one got an  A+ with notes on the back of the piece on how much he liked it. I started thinking that this man couldn’t be serious and if he was, how could I take him seriously? He put the piece behind the glass display case for the rest of the semester and then insisted that I include it in my portfolio when I apply for Pratt and FIT for illustration. I was horrified; what would they think of such a joke of a piece if I brought it with me? I begrudgingly asked my father for advice on what to include in my portfolio. He was against the idea of going to school for art because he thought it was a waste of time and money. He had experienced the true life of a starving artist living on the streets and did not want to see me in the same position. I showed him my pieces, and like my art teacher, he thought what I thought were my ‘strong’ pieces were terrible but stopped at this one magazine cut-out piece and told me that I should definitely include this in the portfolio. He seemed almost astonished that I produced it. I was beginning to really believe that I was seeing something different than what others saw. When I created the piece, I was hungry; so I thought of the most simple piece of food I could think of that I could do quickly with a pair of scissors: an apple. I thought it would be nice if I could have that apple. So I cut up a pair of flesh tones out of the magazines and made hands that were going towards the apple. There was nothing really creative going through my mind. I put it on a turquoise backdrop because it’s my favorite color. I didn’t think about what would be complimentary, contrasting, or clashing. It was a simple piece done with a simple mindset. I was hungry and I wanted to just get the piece done with.

Fast forward several months later and I’m sitting at a booth with someone from Pratt Institute. He’s going through my pieces, barely even looking at them, and then stops at this piece. He takes it out and smiles admiringly at it. He asks what went through my mind when I was creating this piece. I think I utter some pretentious bullshit about what the mind really craves or something or the other. He’s nodding and eating up my drivel. I’m convinced at this point that artists, in general, are full of shit. I was disappointed. I couldn’t see the value of this piece. I still can’t. I’m sure it’s because I made it that I can’t see the value or vision that others see in it.

Despite the fact that I’m not a fan of this piece, and the fact that my art mentors were…well, I don’t know. I guess all I can say is enjoy? Maybe you see something in this that I don’t? I do know that of all pieces, I’ve put the most emotion behind this one, maybe not when I was creating it, but certainly after.