Witness the Small Life – Blue (Da Ba Dee) ’98

Blue! A color we know all so well. From skies to clues to moons, it’s everywhere around us. Did I deliberately make this entry blue or did I just decide on the spot and based the entire post around it? The world will never know…

I wanted to try out a new style for the graphic and I had a lot of fun messing around in Photoshop and finding random scans I took of items in my backpack. I also decided to bring back out the reason why I started digital art at my peak artistic era (middle school fan art), aka my first Wacom drawing tablet. Although the cord has wires sticking out of hack-jobbed tape (desperately needs to be replace) and I have no clue what bindings I have on the buttons, I had a really fun time relearning and using this first baby of mine. When I was a kid I got so very into My Little Pony speedpaints that I started to make my own with MS Paint, my laptop’s trackpad, and a dream. Eventually I got frustrated with the limitations of the curve tool and the tedious nature of the fidgety trackpad so one Christmas I asked for a simple Wacom tablet. When I got it, I immediately jumped on my grandparents’ old Dell computer and downloaded the first free and reputable drawing program I could find (shout out FireAlpaca). From there, I entered the world of digital art and its expansive realm headfirst and I got completely lost in the endless experimentation. I grew from my fan artistic roots and started creating my own worlds and my own characters, drenched in ultra saturated colors and terrible proportions. Digital art is what really launched my love of storytelling in my artwork and what pushed my idea of what art could be. During the pandemic, due to so much technology fatigue, I started to revert back to the traditional mediums I knew or wanted to become better at so then my Wacom got put on the shelf and forgotten. Over the years I got new tablets or laptops that replaced the use of my Wacom and I generally gravitated away from digital art as a whole. In the past year, for both this blog and for personal pieces, I’ve picked back up the practice of digital work but wanting to find a way to combine my deep love for physical media and mediums. Through bringing back my Wacom and exploring the use of digital collage of my real life objects I feel like I’ve been able to explore the ways in which I can try to find this balance I’m longing for. It’s also been encouraging to feel like I’m able to connect with my digital-passionate younger self again and feel the same kind of giddiness she felt when she got to use this tablet for the first time. I feel like we think of progress as a shedding of the past for a blank slate of a future. I think in some cases this is the truth, but I’ve come to recognize how so much of my own personal growth and artistic progress is rooted in building upon the work I made and person I was and recognizing the ways in which I still carry those things into my future. It’s exciting to me when I get to bring pieces of my past into my present actions, and my Wacom tablet has been a most recent example of this. I’d like to see the ways in which I can continue to experiment and explore these old and nostalgic pieces of my artistic life in my growing future, especially within my work as an art student.

To take into our next week:

Ins: Fluffy socks, ink stamp pads, linear burn blending mode, RPG maker games, blue jeans, obnoxious scarves, clothes hangers.

Outs: Dry skin and not doing anything about it, pretending you don’t know people you’re acquaintances with even though you both know you know each other, the word “belch”, sleeping an extra 10 minutes, unpainted nails.

Enjoy the sun while we still can and I hope you all can find the pieces of your childhood in your present and how they shift colors and take new shapes!