A Long Expected Art Dump ~ ft. lions, samurai, and my broken brain

Hello friends!

I just realized that it’s been almost a year since my last art dump… which explains how I have accumulated so much art. I was contemplating whether I should split this into two posts, or just dump it all on you at once, and since I’m too lazy to write two blog posts I decided on the latter.

You may want to get a drink, or a snack, or something. This may be a long ride.

I hope you enjoy.

I don’t know who was around for my first ever art dump, but you may remember my gigantic lion drawing. (I know you can’t really see how big it is here, but it’s pretty big. I have to clear off my entire desk every time I want to work on it… And if you’ve seen my desk you may understand why it’s taken me 4 years to get this far.)

But I recently got some new charcoals, and I decided to do a little work on it between projects.

And speaking of charcoals, I did one of my first ever charcoal portrait this year! (This one came shortly before my Luke Skywalker portrait.) I think I’ve actually done one charcoal portrait before, but never in this style, and I am just so in love.

I did this one a long time ago by request of a friend on Instagram. That armor almost broke my brain. I don’t know why I do this to myself.

After a while, though, I realized I didn’t like his face, and decided to redo it.

I also touched up the armor a bit, because even though it breaks my brain, it is very satisfying to draw armor.

Another oldie that I recently retouched. I took a photo of my little brother playing on the piano a while back, and even though it was a little blurry, I thought it’d make a fun drawing.

This was done for the writing group I’m in. I believe the prompt of the month was “Mythical Creatures,” so I decided to draw this white mermaid. She didn’t come out as white-looking as I wanted, but I’m still happy with it.

This is a wee bit of character art that I did for a dear friend of mine, and—

Ahhhhh… (I’m sorry, I cannot hold back my inner fangirl.) I love this character. I don’t usually get attached to characters I draw, but I’ve been hearing more about this character’s story lately, and I can’t help it okay. He’s a treasure.

I have to give credit for this one to another very dear friend of mine. 😏 It was National Crayon Day, and to celebrate, she came up with the idea that we should do crayon drawings for each other. (Because friends don’t let friends celebrate National Crayon Day alone.)

It was quite a learning curve, but I found all the exotic crayon colors—hello razzmatazz and tickle me pink!—forces you to be really creative with your color mixing. So that was a fun challenge.

Aaand this is what happens when you get a bunch of writers together over the weekend, and you’re sitting around the table discussing mimes, for some reason… and someone says, “Hey, what if there was a superhero mime? Like, a character who could mime things into being?”

So as our proof of concept, I sketched what it would look like as a movie poster, with our character miming bulletproof glass. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized how much I wanted this superhero story in my life. Someone please make it happen.

Okay, so, this was inspired by watching cardinals mate at our bird feeders. (And by the way, cardinals are SO CUTE when they mate. They do this thing where they feed each other, and it looks like they’re kissing—what?? Okay, yes, I’m a hopeless romantic at heart, alright. 🙄)

Anyway, I was watching this cardinal couple, and I began wondering, “what would they look like if they were humans?” And then somewhere along the way I decided to give it a fantasy flare, and they might have came out looking a little baby-faced, but I’m fairly happy with it other than that.

A commission for some friends of ours. Their little girl may burst into tears every time I try to hold her, but she is adorable.

My great aunt and uncle in front of their school house. I really enjoyed reconnecting with my great aunt after she commissioned me to do this one, and listening as she shared some of her memories. She is an amazing lady.

Now this was a preliminary sketch that I did for a piece of character art for my older sister. I will say, I’m not particularly fond of drawing beards… or just beards in general. 🙈 But if it’s in the character description, I will do it.

Granted, I may do the bare minimum to see what I can get away with…

This is the conversation I had with my sister about it.

Ahhh, my sister thinks she’s hilarious. 😏

My younger sister was actually helping out at my older sister’s house, and can confirm that she laughed at this for ten minutes straight.

That moment when your sister says she personally likes him with less beard, and you can totally do that thing.

I don’t know what happens to my brain when I’m working on digital art—I think it might be the fact that digital art is not tangible in any way—but I deal with a fair bit of mentally block along the way. Especially with character art, when I’m kind of making up an image rather than painting straight from a photograph.

So I took a break and did a digital sketch to try and loosen up and get past that mental block.

Part of the challenge, to keep myself from getting too detailed and perfectionist, was to do it with a limited color palette and only using one brush.

It actually worked very well to help break past my block.

The finished Bearded Violinist.

*Cackles* Some more preliminary sketches, which I did for my brother’s Space Opera spoof story. The story is as chaotic as you might be able to tell from the drawings, but it’s also quite fantastic and you need it in your life.

A couple of the main characters. (I drew that guy’s face about four times before I had something I liked. Don’t let his happy smirk fool you. It was a nightmare. 😂)

My brother later decided that he wanted the Main Character’s body in the picture, so that explains the decapitated man drinking tea.

The finished chaotic Space Opera Gang.

Heh heh, this one is a bit chaotic as well. I had a bit of an art block… (It always starts with art block, doesn’t it?) Anyway, I saw the colored highlighter sharpies that I usually use for my journaling and Scripture reading, and began to wonder if I could create a portrait with the multicolored markers.

Well, about half way through, I had a mess on my hands (no, I did not take a picture), so I decided to see if I could smooth things out with some colored pencils.

Aaand, about half and hour + one acrylic paint marker later, this is what I ended up with.

That be an illustration of a scene from my story.

I was still riding the mixed media wave here. I used my 8B graphite pencil, a ball point pen, several different sized sharpies, and the acrylic paint marker again for this one. Never tried that combination before, but I like how it turned out. 😄

Some graphic designs for my sister.

She wanted something kind of watercolor inspired, so I had fun experimenting in GIMP and coming up with a way to get that effect.

The colors in this one were probably my favorite.

They say that doing nothing often leads to the very best of something… but sometimes doing nothing leads to drawings of Willem Dafoe… and I’m not sure if I’m okay with that.

I actually did these for a friend who was supposed to be sending me a picture that I’m supposed to draw. (It’s a long story, but I kind of lost a bet, and now owe him a drawing.) Anyway, he was taking forever to send me a picture, so I thought I’d spam him with some quick sketches of Willem Dafoe.

Am I questioning my life choices right now? Maybe a little. Will I continue drawing Willem Dafoe until he sends me a reference? …no comment.

I didn’t really have a plan going into this one. But I had a cool reference photo, and it just kind of evolved into an aesthetic artist looking for inspiration in an aesthetic field.

This was a request from a Jewish friend. I traded him the art for a game of chess. He won.

Another commission from another friend. Bane and Batman grilling out together… it’s a long story.

I finally got up the courage and broke into the 200 Drawing Prompts sketchbook that my mom gave me a couple years ago. I kind of enjoy having prompts to work from, because you come up with art that you might not have created otherwise.

My brother and I may have recently had our Samurai obsession reawakened, which inspired this pastel drawing. The Japanese in the corner comes from the Samurai code of honor, and means “Heroic Courage.”

(Just try to look past the pained expression on his mask and see the Heroic Courage in his eyes. 😝)

An acrylic painting that I did for a friend’s mission trip fund raiser. I had a lot of fun playing around with the colors in this one, and dabbling in abstraction. 😊

I’ve been really enjoying getting into painting again. It’s been a while since I’ve done anything besides mural work. I may have a new found love in acrylics (after dissing them to the superiority of oils for a while).

*whispers* I’m so happy with this one. 🥲 I don’t always create art that I just really love, because I’m very much my own worst critic. But this is one of those rare pieces that just seemed to flow as I painted, and I love it.

So, there you go. That wraps up this rather long-winded art dump. If you stuck around for the whole thing, I appreciate you. And if you didn’t, well, I still appreciate you, you just don’t know it. 😏

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In other news, I think I will be able to finish the huge mural that I’ve been working on very soon! It’s been years in the making so I am very excited and ready to have it done. I hope to write a post about that adventure sometime in the near future. 😊

Until next time my dear friends, stay lionhearted, and go do that thing you’ve been procrastinating. I’m off to start a load of laundry.

Peace out.

~ Chalice