Author: Mia Lambert

Mia Lambert (aka miabiapia) is an art student at the University of Michigan. Coming from the wondrous art communities of Minneapolis, Minnesota, she's hoping to share her work focused on identity, dreams, and the beauty of humankind. Her blog, Witness the Small Life, encourages herself and viewers to pay attention to the moments in our days that make our lives rich with stories and connections. In her (little) free time, Mia also deejays on Umich's student radio station WCBN and writes and draws for the Gargoyle on campus. An avid CD collector, crappy chickflick aficionado, and lover of everything kitschy. Instagram: @miabiapia Email: mialamb@umich.edu

Witness the Small Life – A World of Our Own

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We have reached the final days. Or should I say finals days. We have yet to see the light of a true break (thanks Thanksgiving but you were only a mirage of rest) and the gauntlet of overbearing projects and tests await us. May every sip of caffeine and permanent headache treat us not as harshly this finals season. (Can you tell I’ve been watching Game of Thrones?)

I’ve started to spend more and more time in airports recently since starting at college. Before, I had only ever flown a few times and I can only remember passing snippets of my experiences in airports. The first time I flew alone last Thanksgiving was so nerve-racking and I remember trying to read everything I could about how to navigate everything in the airport from security to bathroom lines. The worst part about it all, too, was that my gate wasn’t displayed until the very last second and nobody knew where it was so I was running frantically up and down DTW with tears streaming down and my mom on the phone with me and the airport’s customer service. It wasn’t until I saw the shining gold and maroon of Goldy Gopher on someone’s shirt and his son in a matching University of Minnesota hat that I knew I was in the right place. With red eyes and a runny nose I went up to them and asked if this was the flight back to Minneapolis and they said “well I sure hope so I’ve got a Thanksgiving to have.” (or at least that’s what they would’ve said if I didn’t look so distraught). I think about this moment a lot and the other random and various encounters with people I’ve had at the airport and on my flights since then. Traveling alone is somewhat freeing but also lonely. I have no family to nag me or herd me somewhere but then I also have no one to share an overpriced breakfast with as I wait for my 5am flight. It’s the moments I share with other travelers in our cocoon of the airport that take me away from the loneliness of traveling and remind me that it doesn’t have to be so isolating being in a sea of people. From talkative kids who show me their coloring pages on their mom’s phones to tired comrades making small talk and waiting 20 minutes in line for a cup of coffee, the airport becomes a world of its own. There’s something about an entire building of people coming from separate places to journey together to another one just to split off and continue separately again that is so magical to me in a way. We make this huge monetary and time commitment to get to various places for various reasons, whether its for family or vacation or work, and exist in this space together lost in our own little worlds. Yet there are those moments that spark connection in the mundane, like a cup of coffee or a coloring page of a pumpkin, that pull us out of ourselves and into the wider world of the airport. We exist together yet separate but that separation is what brings us together in the end. I’ve started to enjoy airports as a solo traveler since my first incident with the mystery of the gate, and I think in large part it’s because of this acceptance of loneliness and togetherness that is inherent to the place. Maybe I think too much into these things but hey, would I be me if I didn’t?

To take into our next week:

Ins: Facebook Marketplace (always), on-the-go Advil containers, potatoes (always), the smell of a great perfume in passing, the song “Wide Open Spaces”, the AC vent right above my bed that keeps me warm and toasty.

Outs: Not sleeping on the plane, cashmere scented things (is that a real scent?), thin socks, even thinner gloves, nuts, fever dreams.

I salute you all in future endeavors of passing classes, getting home safely, and spending time for some real rest and relaxation. See you all next year! (hahahahahahahaha ;P)

Witness the Small Life – I-I-Icon

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“Patience is a virtue” -Me (probably)

Is it just time going fast or do I not have my glasses on, cuz everything sure is a blur right now. Hour after hour I go to class, I do work; I get out of class, I do work; I go to sleep, I dream of work. Everything flashes by in a haze and I continue to work. Call me Sisyphus because this boulder just keeps rolling down!

Although everything happens so fast around me, my spare time has been filled with doodling on Photoshop with my laptop trackpad (my new best friend!). Lulls in lectures and commutes on buses have regained a sense of whimsy and color when I’m able to fill it with goofy little stars and apples. It’s been almost meditative this week: pulling up a blank canvas and going with what my heart tells me. Recently, I’ve dedicated these doodles to becoming new icons for my desktop (shout out to the Gargoyle for being my first muse). The doodles on the page are my shiny new folders that live amongst the picture of a double rainbow over my camp’s shimmering Half Moon lake. Through drawing these doodles, and drawing with my trackpad in general, I’ve found myself to grow a new form of patience and mindfulness with art-making. It brings me back to my early days of digital art when I could only use my trackpad to make various drawings of colorful My Little Pony characters. Nowadays I have a plethora of resources that would make my 11 year old brain pop! Trackpad drawing has brought me back to my roots, while also forcing me to learn how to draw again in a kind of way. There’s a certain kind of method and resilience needed to constantly press undo and redraw the same line over and over again until it reaches its best potential. There’s also a kind of acceptance that is required to come to terms with when something doesn’t come out exactly how you envisioned but it still doesn’t look bad. It’s similar to printmaking in that way, the apple of my eye lately, to where you learn to roll with the punches and how to take something both simple and meticulous to new heights through experimentation in tandem with trial and error. I feel more connected to my creative process in my trackpad doodling and more aware of what I’m making, how I’m doing it, and how I can play with ideas of shape and form. These doodles are simple, yes, but they bring out a joy in doodling that I’ve been missing lately. I encourage everyone to pull up their drawing program of choice, stretch your fingers, and play around with making fun little characters and creatures. Even if it looks like a hot mess of lines and color, keep playing around with it! Find what works, find what absolutely doesn’t work, and enjoy the process as you do so. Exploration, experimentation, and process are so important to art making, and also life living, so try it out and see what joy it sparks in you.

To take into our next week:

Ins: Simple syrup, my bright orange hoodie, copper and brass, little dogs, limes, tomatoes, bunny slippers, reaching out.

Outs: Timezones, cracked heels, freezing rain, the crust on a milk jug, the smell of room temp coffee, hit snooze a little tooooo long, sleeping with only one pillow.

Enjoy the last full week until break (as much as one is physically able) and appreciate that trackpad!

Witness the Small Life – Bedtime Story

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‘Tis the season for illness and sickness rampant throughout all of campus, and I unfortunately have fallen victim to it yet again. Although being sick has stopped me in my tracks, it’s allowed myself to catch up on the TV and chores I’ve been meaning to do.

In my time bedridden and sniffling, I wanted to return to a sort of form for myself and focus on drawing from observation. In all of my whirlwind of projects and material explorations for my studio classes, I often forget the joy I feel when I get the chance to just draw. Although this isn’t the typical style for this blog, I wanted to spend time doing something I find to be healing. There’s something very special to me in trying to find the most captivating and exciting ways to capture what I can see onto a flat piece of paper, whether that being what’s right in front of me or a scene conjured in my head. In this sketch, I wanted to focus on the place I’ve been spending the most time recently and also a place I find to be just as healing as drawing: my bed. Throughout all of my life, my bed has been my own sovereign island of tranquility away from the craziness of my sisters (whom I shared a room with growing up). It was my rock and my safe place after exhausting days at school. Its where I dreamed, created my art, wrote stories, immersed myself in my favorite movies and books. My bed has always been my haven and this became especially apparent to me when I moved for college last year. This was the first time my bed had become a new place outside of my childhood bed I’ve known my whole life. My bed still remained my sanctuary in my shared dorm room and cradled most of my belongings both on top and below it. It held my body when I felt sick from missing home and when I quite literally was sick during outbreaks of frat flus and mystery colds throughout my first semester. Although this bed was not the same as the bed I knew before, it existed as the same safe place it always had been. The idea of constantly moving has always been a pit in my stomach since starting college, and it continues to be in some ways, but I began to grapple with this fear through the changing existence of what my bed was when I worked my first year as a camp counselor this past summer. Every session us counselors would pack up and move cabins according to the groups we would be working with every few weeks. Nothing was exactly permanent as we constantly moved around but because of this all of camp grew to be my home. The insecure feeling I felt from temporary living started to fade as I began to embrace being in a new place with new people and new stories to create. My bed was a new space almost every week, and sometimes it was a hammock or a tent or wherever I could take a break to rest, but nevertheless it was my bed. I started to disconnect my love for my bed from the actual physicality of what the bed is and more of the mental space I existed in while being in it. I focused less on where it is and what it had and more of what it could offer me which was rest and comfort and the ability to become my best self to support my campers throughout their days. This new concept of what my bed is has carried through to my move to this new apartment, first apartment to boot, and has given me much more security in living in this transient time of my life. No matter where I am, who I’ll become, or what situation I’ll be in I will always be able to have a space I can feel comfortable in because it is a space that only I can create. Whether it’s my bed, or my room, or a mental escape for my ravaging emotions, I can put trust in myself to create the place I need to be to rest and heal myself.

To take into our next week:

Ins: Pedialyte and other electrolyte drinks, heating blankets, fuzzy socks, my leather jacket that still faintly smells like campfire, cucumbers, 2B pencils.

Outs: Forgetting to take your nightly cold medicine, the smell of the new Dawn dish soap, forgetting to label my leftovers, damp towels, too tight hats, dirty glasses.

I hope to everyone else feeling congested, wheezy, and down-right bad that you heal swiftly! To everyone else, appreciate being able to breathe out of both nostrils when you can.

Witness the Small Life – Food for Thought

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“If food be the music of love, cook on!” -Me misquoting Shakespeare

If there’s one thing that gets me through my arduous days, it’s the thought of coming home to create some wacky elaborate meal made from ingredients collected on my way home and whatever we have left in the fridge. If there’s one way to my heart, its through food! Whenever I eat anything I turn into that one scene from Ratatouille when Remy gets his grubby little paws on some cheese and strawberries and shapes and colors burst from his head. The ability to create something so joyous that the only way to enjoy it is through pure tactile experience is just impeccable to me.

Recently, I’ve been going out of my way to learn new recipes and kitchen technique to elevate my love for not only eating but for cooking. As a kid I learned how to cook the ready to eat meals from our freezer and pantry because I wanted to learn how that kitchen magic happened. From then I started to experiment more in my cooking endeavors with adding a dash of a sauce here and there or testing out if I could replace milk with heavy cream to make a boxed mac and cheese better (from my experience the answer is yes). As a college student on a quite tight budget I’ve had to get even more crafty with my substitutions and additions in my meals. Although I spend much of my day creating pieces for my studio classes and stretching the limits of my mind, I find the creativity I exert in my cooking process to be a very freeing form of expression outside of my artistic practice. I love being able to make something that can not only nourish my body but also my mind and my creative spirit. Being able to share this creation, whether it be with my family or my roommates, also feeds my happiness just as much. I never really considered food and cooking to be an artistic form, or at least I never really thought too much into it, but reflecting on my relationship to cooking has made me realize that it’s just as much an artistic practice as the work I do in the studio. There’s so much skill, wisdom, problem-solving, and love that gets put into the act of cooking that I feel I often forget about but still experience every time I cook. I feel so lucky on the days I’m able to be in the kitchen making something that makes me happy. The kitchen truly is the heart of a home as I think back to all the memories created through cooking with or just standing around and talking amongst loved ones. Even if you’re not a fan of cooking, I hope you’re able to still find joy in this special act of creation and sharing.

To take into our next week:

Ins: POTATOES!!!!, fermentation, layering like an onion, a cheesy sense of humor, having an adventurous palette, flexibility and not being afraid of a little substitution.

Outs: Not dressing up for a halloween party (you know who you are), upturning your nose at unfamiliar things, stirring the pot a little too much, being a pot and calling the kettle black, having more than your fair share.

Compliments to the chefs in the audience and I hope you didn’t mind my corniness too much in this week’s entry ;P

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

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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!

Witness the Small Life: Electric Boogaloo

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A tale as old as time… a know-it-all girl who loves to just talk and talk but yet still is late to uploading her first blog of the semester to do just that…

Welcome back everyone to another fantastic year of arts, ink. and Witness the Small Life!! I am extremely happy to be back and creating artwork for this wonderful series again. For those who don’t know me, my name is Mia and I’m a sophomore here studying Art & Design alongside minoring in Education! I am a talkaholic who enjoys doing the most, consuming copious amounts of media, and taking in the world around me. My blog right here, Witness the Small Life, is an outlet for myself and also you all to remember to stop, smell the roses, and take note of all of their various scents. I’m someone who believes that life is made from the small memories that allow dreams and fantasy to weave their way into our daily rituals and through creating this blog I hope to spark that feeling in you as well. This semester I’m thinking of changing things up perhaps a tad: getting more creative and experimental with the artwork, having specific themes for entries, and maybe even talking oh-so-much more than I already do ;P

I’ll keep this one short and sweet as I already have to hurry off and tend to my ever-growing to-do list, but here’s a quick rundown on what I’ve been up to since the start of the school year: Just got back from visiting home on a 5am flight after having my last sip of Caribou coffee for the next 6 weeks, spending 5 hours in the studio to finish print pieces that I thought I hated but actually really love, and enjoying classic procrastination sessions with the numerous essays I have to do always.

If there are any comments, questions, or confessions you need the world to hear (or just little ol’ me) always feel free to share them on these posts! I love seeing the thoughts and ideas sparked from the weekly ramblings of these doodles and pseudo diary entires so please do let me know.

As always, to take into our next week:

Ins: Raspberry anything, bok choy, naps wherever, developing bargaining as a skill, puzzles, short legged dogs, appreciating paint stains.

Outs: Bad hair care, not checking the milk’s expiration date, setting hyper-specific alarms, Impact font, kicking rocks, sleeping without proper neck support.

I will see you all next Monday for more word salads, daily doodles, and whatever else life will throw our way!