Although my major is graphic design here at Marywood University, I like to flex my creative muscles and try out traditional art sometimes. One thing about me is I am a perfectionist which makes me spend hours on projects moving little things around until they look right, which is fine when it comes to graphic design. However, when it comes to traditional art you kind of just need to accept whatever happens since there’s no Ctrl+Z Undo shortcut which scares me a little when I decide to try traditional for one of my assignments. On the other hand, I think that it can also be like therapy in a way because you just enjoy the process and every little line and mistake is what makes your piece yours.

In one of my classes the professor had asked us to create a scene that has two different environments in one piece. This assignment was a little scary for me because while I do draw pretty okay, environments and industrial structures is something that is really limited to my abilities. Considering this I decided I would do something simple for the assignment to not stress myself out, and thought it would be fun to draw a cute little flower guy getting a warm ray of sunshine in a dark room.

The sketch for this was going amazing and I was soo proud of the window and straight lines, but of course it began to go downhill from there since I thought it would be a great idea to use Crayola colored pencils for the coloring. The pencils were not super pigmented so I had to press harder to get that rich color on, which made the paper rip in various places and also left behind streaky lines engraved into the paper. Once I finished coloring I was thinking I can save it by throwing a picture of the drawing into Photoshop where I adjusted the colors, blurred the background to put the flower more in focus, and fixed up those little rips in the paper. I also used some blending modes to accentuate the contrast between the light and dark areas and think it made a huge difference. Overall, this piece is not my most favorite thing I ever made but nonetheless I made it and learned what not to do next time. There is also some things I really love about this like the texture of the paper from the colored pencils and the vibe of a childhood drawing!