Calendars
July 2024: 100 Characters
I used this month's calendar as part of a challenge where people draw each other's designs. I chose one simple-shaped character a day, and then several others squished into the margins. I wanted it to look like one big seamless page, using the calendar as a template.
It includes over 100 unique characters!
It includes over 100 unique characters!
March 2023: Pokémon
For this calendar, I chose one Pokémon a day, at semi-random, from all the games (not just the original 150). Each day, I scrolled through the database of Pokémon sprites, and chose the ones I liked best from where my cursor landed. Which ones do you recognize?
January 2023: Disney-inspired
I could draw Disney-inspired art all day, all month, all year, my whole LIFE. One month isn't enough, so I do want to bring this challenge back in 2025! I love my coloring and shading here, but I do think I had a long way to go with my lineart, stylization, and anatomy. But it was so fun to draw things I've been passionate about from a young age, and it really kept me motivated all month.
December 2022: Aesthetic "Blobs"
This month I wanted to play with some character design, but without the constricts of anatomy. So, I took a list of popular and niche internet aesthetics and blobbified them! That is, I simplified them down to just a couple shapes, with minimal color schemes. I decided each element of their designs myself, inspired by moodboards and wiki pages.
Which one do you vibe with most?
Which one do you vibe with most?
September 2022: Original Characters
Following the previous month, where I drew art of other peoples' characters as gifts or trades, I decided to give my own characters the same treatment! Most of these are from my two projects You're on the Air and Monsters in Real Life. I tried a lot of new things with this calendar, and experimented with some design elements that have stayed with me! I really like these calendars for experimentation; it feels low-pressure.
July 2022: Character Art Trades
This month of "warmup" "sketches" (that turned into so much more) was the first time I finished one of the calendars I had started doing in my planners, and the first time I decided to color my calendar instead of just doing ink sketches. This is when I started seeing them as works of art in their own rite, and not just warmup exercises.
Each character was designed by a different person, and I got to choose their designs from a database of hundreds of thousands of characters. I like that I was able to get a good mix of humans, monsters, and animals!
Each character was designed by a different person, and I got to choose their designs from a database of hundreds of thousands of characters. I like that I was able to get a good mix of humans, monsters, and animals!
Inkingtober 2018
For a month in October, I tried to do a drawing in black ink pen every day. Not affiliated with any official challenges. I made it almost halfway through, and it's so interesting how having them each on their own page made it harder to keep up with than my planner calendars, and less visually consistent! It's nice to have everything in one place.
The beagle with star glasses was featured in a monthly art newsletter that same month, receiving thousands of views.
The beagle with star glasses was featured in a monthly art newsletter that same month, receiving thousands of views.
Dragon Eats 2017
Bamboo leaf wraps with rose petals, orange lotus, and prickly pear
Salmon with a smoky sauce, calimari, and tomato-berry compote
Grass salad with orchids and mushroom caps
Escargot with butterfly wings, dragonfly wings, moss, and lillies
Poke with raw tuna and escolar, clovers, peppers, and spring onions
black raspberry sorbet with a ube drizzle and a blue rose garnish
Have you ever wondered what a dragon would like to eat?
Inspired by festivals held on the forum boards of a dragon designing website called Flight Rising, these imaginary foods combine natural ingredients like butterflies, fish, flowers, clovers, berries, and grasses to create culinary masterpieces that don't exist in this world, but would really please a dragon's picky palate.
Inspired by festivals held on the forum boards of a dragon designing website called Flight Rising, these imaginary foods combine natural ingredients like butterflies, fish, flowers, clovers, berries, and grasses to create culinary masterpieces that don't exist in this world, but would really please a dragon's picky palate.
This timeline tracks my artistic journey over the past quarter of a century. I started reading art tutorial books when I was 8 years old in 2001, and from there my progress has been unstoppable. I've always used art as a release, and I think you can see over the years how now only did my art change, but how my art changed me.
When you see this, you really understand where my art comes from. I was raised on late 90s/early 2000s pop culture, and the kinds of art I gravitated towards really show themselves in my current art. I probably forgot so much, but these give an overall feel of what was influencing me as I grew up, and even now. How lucky I am that I got to grow up in a time of such amazing creators! And how lucky I am to see other artists who were influenced in the same way getting published now!