Sketch Diary: Posture warmup ladies

Another midnight sketch when I couldn't get to sleep and needed some creative activity to settle my mind. Slowly getting more comfortable with the new Wacom settings. I think I'll need to search from some good brushes though, something like oil and watercolor and such. I'm a blender. I like soft pastels and watercolor and copic markers because of the blending ability.

with love - M

Sketch Diary: Star girl digital

So along with traveling a bunch this summer, I ended up totally cutting myself off from my desktop computer without really noticing. It was pretty weird. I think I was just really burned out digitally. I ended up spending a ton of time cleaning out my material stuffs, cleaning in general, gardening, and trying to spend time each day on myself (meditation type stuffs).

Can you see that in the sketch? I'm tired of being stiff and uncomfortable both physically and emotionally. Feels like all this time spent on myself is paying off. Unfortunately, all that meditation did NOT include drawing of any kind so I barely drew anything this summer. But I'm excited to get back into being creative everyday. Or at least creative in a drawing kind of way. I still think downsizing and reorganizing my kitchen cabinets requires its own creativity haha.

So to the universe I say - take time for yourself. It may seem like a lot of work to slow down and calm your mind but trust me it will pay off.

with love - M

Sketch Diary: Fred's Voice portrait

Second quicky sketch with the Krita paint program. Tis glorious. The paint program, not the sketch haha. The sketch is fine. I was trying to do something.... else with that chin angle, didn't quite work out so I just went with it. Sometimes I find myself having conversations with my drawings. 'Oh, I'm sorry, you wanted to be facing forward, not tilted to the left? My bad. I didn't realize you felt so strongly about it.' Hence his shady side eye. So much shade.

This was sketched while listening/watching to a Fred's Voice ASMR video on the youtubes. Specifically the 'rude English gentleman' bits. Cracks me up.  But of course, it also relaxes me. If you've never tried ASMR, I highly recommend it. For me, it's a cross been meditation and a brain massage. I have a strong response to it, though. I get all tingly. Not everyone does. And not everyone responds well to intimate personal attention either, I recently found out. And that's ok. There's always cute cat videos. Bless the internet and all it's glory.

Fred, if you're seeing this, thanks for the great videos. Keep up the great work for as long as it is fulfilling for you.

with love - M

Sketch Diary: Big hair, big lips, and first go with Krita

OH YEAH. Now we're talking. Finally found a painting program that actually works with my super old Wacom tablet, Intuous 2. I had just about given up and was looking to buy a new drawing tablet this year because I miss painting digitally. Thankfully, another artsy friend (Nathalie) introduced me to Krita, a wonderful FREE paint program.

Krita appears to be open source and already, for me, has far surpassed Gimp. I never got the hang of Gimp, too many things were different from Photoshop and I had grown up on photoshop, I even use it in my career so it's a daily thing for me. But I don't really like Photoshop for painting. I like things like Open Canvas and Sai much more. So when I upgraded to Windows 7 and the sensitivity stopped working for my Wacom pen, I thought all was lost.

For some crazy reason, Krita works and works really well. To do the sketch above, all I did was install the program, open a new document, didn't change any settings or preferences, and sat down for 15 minutes. This is just the basic brushes setting so I CAN NOT WAIT to try the specialty brushes. After my 15 minute doodle, I immediately went back to the download page for Krita and made a donation because hot damn, this program is nice.

After I spend some more time with it, I'll do a more in depth review of Krita. I have high hopes. Have you tried it yet? What were your thoughts on it? What's your fav paint program?

Nathalie and I are hoping to figure out how to do co-op painting via Krita but if that's not a thing, I hope the developers can figure that out because this will be the perfect program for that. Also, live stream painting? I think it already has a record feature but not sure how good it is yet.

with love - M