Stardust-on-my-mind

My last assignment was a real killer, but I'm very proud of how it turned out. I think the thing that I am the thing I am the proudest of is that my professor saw a noticeable improvement in my overall style and technique. It's only going to get better moving forward. So I'm excited to see where my art goes next. I'll be posting some more of my art on here in the next upcoming months. I haven't been too active in my old deviantART (mostly because I have switched over to Tumblr), but I will make a conscious effort to post on here as well.

Spring Break Art

I will also post up some more of my concept work and sketches because I think that it is important for people to see my process work as well as the final sketches. My mini spring break project is to work on some cool concept art for one of my favorite poems written by Robert Browning. The poem is called, My Last Dutchess. Super creepy stuff, I was thinking of doing a few illustrations of it. With the limited break I don't think I will have anything fully fleshed out, but I think that I will at least have some cool basic sketches really

It's amazing. I have dreamed of this moment for so long. I have clear memories of me when I was seventeen years old regretting not going to SCAD Atlanta sooner. I already felt that it was a mistake to go to Georgia State University, but I ignored that feeling and just went along with it. Now, that I'm here doing what I love and going down the path that I have always wanted I have to say that it's pretty stressful, but still the best time of my life. The biggest difference that I have noticed is that everyone here is so nice and willing to help at any given moment. No one is cut throat or a dick for the no reason. However, above all else, I'm amazed at how diverse my department is. Other than myself and about four other people, the rest of the class are international students. One of my good friends in the department is a girl from Russia named Kate, and a boy from Korea named Li. Li is easily one of my favorite people in the department. He's hyper-obsessed with guinea pigs and draws them all the time. Kate is a huge mermaid fan. Then, there is my best friend in the department--Kat. She's a gem among men. She's extremely nice and goes totally out of her way to help me with questions and remind me about deadlines. We met last quarter in Professor Thomas Burns class and clicked ever since. She's new to photoshop and I'm new to traditional art so we have really helped one another out with improving on our weaknesses. 

That's perhaps the best thing about the school is the friendly environment and the support we all give one another. This was a total change from the medical department I was in. Humorless, and competitive. With the exception of the entry-level biology classes, everything was so competitive. I wish I had known sooner how amazing art school would have been, I would have an a totally different experience of undergrad. However, a part of me doesn't have any regrets for how anything turned out. 

I think I needed to go to Georgia State University and figure myself out. Grow as a person and figure out myself before I entered SCAD. There are so many great memories that I have from that school, even with the depression and the horrid transition, it was still worth it and I suppose looking back on it all I am happy that I had that rough patch of time before I got to experience this happiness. It makes the happy that much more powerful and precious to be able to be where I am, meet the people I have met and do the art that I wanted to do for so long. 

I found out about a month ago that I got into SCAD university. Honestly, this is a huge dream come true for me because of all the years that I have held myself back from doing what makes me feel totally fulfilled. In high school, I kept saying to myself that I'm not good enough to be an artist for a living, or that I won't make any money. So I essentially wasted my undergraduate degree in some random English degree that I frankly don't care about. The reality didn't sink in for all the years that I blew until I was sitting in at my graduation ceremony with an English degree. 
For the entire month of May after I graduated from college I worked double over time to get my portfolio ready for SCAD. I actually remembered I submitted it the night before I went to Momo-con 2017 at around midnight. For the rest of the convention, all I could think about was the possibility of not getting in. I am and never was an art student. The only other art class I have ever taken in my life was in high school and it was a basic introduction class, so my competition would be more established artists or people who in my mind are way superior to me in terms of skill level. 
When I got my letter in the mail it came as kind of a shock. I had just come home from a pretty shitty vacation to South Carolina for a doctor convention my father was invited to. I have never been a big fan of the beach, so I was mostly pretty bored (also, one of the downsides of being an only child), so when I was pretty relieved to get home. When we pulled up to our mailbox I got the mail from the mailbox I was so surprised to see the giant SCAD packet. I screamed and ran back to the car. I was freaking out and I didn't want to open it because I was terrified that the answer would be "No". It was actually my father who ended up opening it. He didn't say much to me when I walked in the house with my suitcase, he just kissed my forehead and said that I have nothing to worry about. 
At this point, I was more relieved, but I still wasn't fully possessing what was happening until I opened the letter to read it for myself. Immediately when I saw the word "Congratulations" I could already feel the tears forming and getting heavy around my eyes. I had to read a little bit further just to confirm that this was really happening. Then I practically dropped to the ground. This was my second chance at my dreams, this was a moment to fix the mistake I made of not pursuing my dreams from the beginning. 

This month and August are definitely going to be a ride for me. I'm excited to see what the future holds, and I'm definitely looking forward to posting some more art for you guys. 

Today was the first time is a while that I felt like myself again. To be honest, I haven't felt like "myself" since maybe I was 17. I don't know how to describe that feeling, but it's this amazing sensation of being present, and being content with the present and the sense of being just "here" if that makes any sense. I was in my school's newspapers office drawing a comic with one of the other illustrators. We started talking about how we didn't feel like ourselves for the longest time, but drawing and doing art made us both feel like ourselves again. Ever since I started working for the newspaper a few months ago, I've been feeling more and more like that artist kid from high school that took every chance she could to paint on the walls or doodle endlessly in class. High school itself wasn't so grand, but those moments in between was what made my teen years fun. 

For the past three or so years after high school I felt like I was living a bit of a lie. I knew the moment I entered college that I wanted to do something involving art, but even I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do yet. That dread made me switch my major a thousand different times until I defaulted to English. Don't get me wrong, I also love writing and reading almost as much as I love to draw--almost. It took me a while to figure out the difference between those two loves, because they grew very much together. 

My earliest memory of school was when I was in Kindergarten. I never really liked those early years of my life, but one memory that really stuck with me all these years later was afternoon story time. It was my favorite time of the day because we as a class weren't expected to really do anything other than sit and listen to the teacher read to us. We would all gather and sit on this rug with primary colored block pattern (basically everything during that time of my life was primary colored, because for some reason that was like the go-to theme for 90's kids). Because I was one of the well behaved children, the teacher didn't mind that I sat at the tables and drew quietly. This is also my favorite time of the day because I didn't have to fight any of the other kids for the "rare" crayons like the super sparkly sliver or the cool teal one. While the teacher was reading Half Magic to the class I would sit in the back and draw the scenes that I liked. Yes, that moment is when I discovered my love of illustrating books and stories. However, it was always hard for me to say which one I lived more than the other because my love for literature and my love for drawing grew together, like a pair of identical twins born in the one moment of reckoning. 

It became even harder to separate the two loves over the next decade-and-a-half because grew to love reading and drawing together. Actually, I take that back a bit. Not reading per say, but rather stories and making up stories. It didn't help that in my senior year of high school I took a creative writing class that conflicted my emotions even more.