art

Into the Digital Age?

June 7, 2018 By nicole

I’ve recently been taking some of my traditional pieces of art and trying to enhance them with digital editing. This includes a computer application that lets me draw on top of images of the original art digitally, and I’ve also been using photo filters to fix aspects such as brightness and color. I’m not sure how I feel about it so far. It is still completely my art since I’m the one who is editing the images, but it just feels like I’m cheating somehow. I love many digital artists though, such as Adamtots and Marsoid, and I don’t feel like they are ‘cheating’. I’m not sure why it feels different for me. I’ve done a good amount of digital art in the past so this isn’t new. Maybe it’s because these images only exist online and the actual physical art still looks unfinished.

Art in the Office

May 9, 2018 By nicole

5 Ways That I Incorporate Art into My Desk Job

Post-it Notes– Post-it notes are a great way to write down phone numbers, to-do lists, instructions, etc. and they can also be a great way to add some fun to a cubical space. I alternate between the color of post-it notes that I use, and stick them into fun shapes and patterns in order to add some color and creativity to my cubical.
Designing Layouts– Even a task as simple as designing a word document or flyer can be a great way to incorporate a little bit of art into your job. I recently had to design flyers for bulletin boards around my office, and I took that as an opportunity to have some fun with deciding what I wanted the layout to be and what photos to use.
Patience– The patience that I have acquired through years of making drawings and paintings that can sometimes take hours to complete, has helped me to be able to complete long and tedious assignments without feeling the need to slack-off or take a break.
Desk Space- I have a poster of one of my favorite paintings, Café Terrace at Night by Vincent Van Gogh, thumbtacked up in my cubical. It’s a great way to brighten up my dull cubical walls, but I have to be sure to not have up too much art or my space will become cluttered and unprofessional.
Doodles- If I am on phone duty, I usually take advantage of that time to make a few simple doodles while I’m waiting between calls.

Digital Art Update

March 20, 2018 By nicole

This is an update to this post

On my last post about my digital art, I said that a website I had used called RateMyDrawings.com looked like it was no longer running, but I recently tried to log on again and it looks like it is at least partially working.

If I tried to click on the link of my old art to see it full size, it would just give me a blank image and say:

The thumbnails of the art are still available though, but the quality is not the best because the images are so small. Let’s start with some of my earliest digital art. Because of how Ratemydrawings is set up, the more recent art is at the top left and the earliest ones are towards the bottom right. The first art featured here was created on Jun 06, 2009 and the last was created on Mar 31, 2007:

Okay, so there is A LOT happening here. I shouldn’t be to hard on myself since I was only 7-9 years old at the time when I made these, but wow. First off, some of the drawing thumbnails won’t load, which is a blessing. I’m sure my Icarly fan art wasn’t something anyone wants to see. Also it’s pretty obvious that I got a lot of my drawing inspiration from an online game called Poptropica that was popular at the time:

Oval heads and giant eyes were my aesthetic at the time I guess. Although I’m being a bit hard on myself, I do have to admit that two of these drawings are actually pretty impressive for my age at the time:

I definitely wasn’t a child prodigy, but that first image definitely looks like a flower and the second one looks like Kirby, so I guess I wasn’t doing too bad. Apparently other people thought so too. Here are a few comments from the flower drawing:

Genericusername really has a way with words.

This next set of drawings are all from 2010, when I was 10 years old:

So I went from Poptroica inspired art to weird anime characters. In case you were wondering, in “PLease Help!” I was asking for help in raising my rank on the site because I thought I deserved better than #5,000. Nope, I still kinda sucked. Again, two drawings stand out to me as not being completely terrible:

I like the first one because it obviously looks like a witch, and in all it isn’t a bad drawing. The second one isn’t that great as a whole, but there are some good shading techniques in the tree and the fire that show that I was improving a bit as an artist. All of these drawings have been from my first account, Lovemonkey714.

These next drawings were from my account called Flyinggiraffes. Okay, so I was in elementary school when I made those last few drawings so there isn’t a lot I can be critical about. Let’s look at some drawings that were created when I was a bit older. Here is some of my old digital art from 2012:

Adventure Time fan art, Minecraft fan art, and an anime girl. I obviously was in middle school. All of these are pretty decent drawings. There is some good shading, the outlines don’t look bad, and they all are the basic shape of what they are supposed to be.

Next we have some art from 2012-2013:

More Minecraft, a pokemon, a drawing of a girl for a contest I entered (that I did not win), and an octopus. These are only slightly less cringey. At least I only have one Minecraft related drawing this time. Hopefully I won’t make any more of those…

… And we are back to more Minecraft with these drawings that I made in 2014.

I guess my old digital art is not nearly as good as I thought it was. That makes me a little less upset that most of it has been deleted forever. Ratemydrawings was only a side drawing website for me. I mainly used a website called Sketchfu, but that site sadly no longer exists so I don’t believe there is any way to see most of my old art. That being said, it was nice to look back at my beginnings and see how I’ve improved. (I might not be the best but at least I don’t draw Minecraft art anymore.)

RIP My Digital Art

January 16, 2018 By nicole

I was going to look for some of my digital art from when I was younger, but it seems that it has all been deleted. When I was 7 to when I was about 14, I used two online drawing websites called Sketchfu and Ratemydrawings. Sketchfu was more basic while Ratemydrawings had more advanced tools. Sketchfu was more like a social media for artists, so I ended up using that one more so I could talk and interact with my friends.

I couldn’t tell you how many drawings I created on Sketchfu, thousands probably. Most of them were really bad fanart drawings from a children’s book series called Warriors, but I remember that some were actually pretty good. I had created my own original characters. There was Princess Noodles, Hayley the girl with cat ears, a family of cute dragons, Naomi the girl with fire powers, and many more. I didn’t log on to Sketchfu for a couple of years, and when I went back it was gone. The site shut down some time around 2014. I’ve tried to see if there is an online archive or cache somewhere, but as far as I know all my art is dead. I remember printing out some of my digital art when I was younger, so I’m sure that a file of it exists somewhere, but unfortunately my childhood computer also died some time around 2013. That was before I understood how to back up a file. Maybe somewhere in the blackhole that is my email account I had when I was 10, or in a Facebook messaging chat from when I was 13, there is an image of some of my digital art, but for now I’m just going to assume that it’s lost forever, and I’m pissed

As for Ratemydrawings, I tried to log on today and all I got was a message saying that the site is down for maintenance. I looked up a cache of the site from two days ago, and it also said it was down for maintenance. I’m just going to assume that it is permanently down for maintenance. I only had around 40 drawings on that site, but they were all pretty quality. I’m also pissed about that.

So what is the moral of this story? People will tell you that the internet lasts forever, but it doesn’t. Pro Tip: Don’t trust any website to save your drawings. Back them up onto a flash drive or at least print them out and store them in a folder somewhere.

Graffiti

June 13, 2017 By nicole

There is a Giant supermarket near my house that I walk to from time to time. A couple of years ago I noticed a dirt path next to the parking lot, and I decided to walk down it. The path lead me to some sort of concrete structure. I’m not entirely sure what it was ever used for, but now it’s falling apart and covered in all different kinds of graffiti. Although I don’t support vandalism, graffiti is a unique type of art that I feel deserves to be showcased.

The graffiti on the walls of the structure has changed dramatically since I first discovered it. Notice in the two photos above that the eye in the left is the same, but almost everything else has been covered by new art.