While this page works on mobile, please view it on desktop for the best experience.
2017
I’ve always enjoyed art as far back as I can possibly remember, but it didn’t take over my life until 2017. I was stuck in the house during a snowstorm in January 6th grade. In between shoveling snow, my dad said he wanted to show me an old art show he grew up watching. We sat on the couch and he turned on Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting. I was instantly obsessed, all I wanted to do was paint. So after a few months of watching the show I started painting, The joy I got from painting made me realize how wonderful the whole art process is, not just the final product. While I don’t paint much more, it’s something I hope to get back into.
Me and my first attempt at a Bob Ross oil painting
While I loved painting, I still wanted to learn to sketch. In an attempt to see how much I would progress over the years I decided to draw one eye every year to see how much I had improved, this was my first one in 7th grade
2018
Unfortunately, I didn’t really do much art in 2018. I spent so much time doing oil paintings that I got stuck in this loop where I felt it was the only art I could do. Eventually painting landscapes made me very very burnt out and it wouldn’t be until high school that I would really get back into art. These are all the sketches I have photos of from that year.
My second eye drawing, almost exactly a year after the first one in 8th grade. I was getting better at shading, but I just wasn’t giving the drawing the time and patience it deserved.
A lot of my inspiration during this period came from the Dark Souls trilogy, my favorite video game at the time. The above and below sketches are based on the 2nd and 3rd games respectively.
2019 is also the year when I started listening to music, nonstop. I credit music for a lot of my creativity, I could be at a complete loss for inspiration and sit looking at a blank piece of paper for hours, then music comes on and my mind gets flooded with ideas. I also learned a very valuable lesson in 2019, patience. I started to really take my time with my art, and it changed everything. While I do believe that learning drawing fundamentals is important to a point, nothing at all is as important as giving art the time it deserves. Nearly any lack of skill in art can be made up for by just spending more time to get a piece to the point where you’re really happy with it.
2019
My third eye drawing, 2 years after the first, I was now in 9th grade. While I had definetly improved as an artist, the thing that really set this eye apart from the previous 2 was the time I spent on it. I spent about an hour each on the first 2, but for this one I spend nearly 3 hours on it.
(Left) My 8th grade yearbook which I did in the spring of 8th grade. For years this would be the longest I would ever spend on a single piece of art, it took me around 8 hours total.
2020
In the last few weeks of my ninth-grade photography class, we started learning Photoshop. I was absolutely blown away by the power of this program and it would lead me into becoming absolutely obsessed with it, and with the lockdown from COVID, I had lots and lots of time to learn it. This would lead me to become obsessed with digital art. At the start of COVID, I began reselling shoes, this would soon take over my life for the next year and a half. While I enjoyed this job it did lead to a gap in my art, as selling took up all my free time.
2021
My time selling shoes and cards would end up being the most crucial part of my art career, because by the end of the summer before my junior year of high school, I was able to purchase myself an Ipad Pro. I cannot express in words how amazing Ipads are for drawing. With the start of my junior year also came my first formal drawing class. Being graded and learning the fundamentals of art helped me improve so much. I had always thought that still lives were boring, but the amount it helped me improve my drawing was amazing.
The first of 2 still lifes that we were assigned. Two pieces of wood, wrapped in rope. We had weeks and weeks to work on this, enabling us to get as much detail crammed into the drawing as we could.
The second still life we did was much more difficult. We had to choose a vase, fill it with water, and place a metal gear inside of it. The way the water and the glass distorted the gear made it a challenge to draw. This piece was the hardest thing I had ever had to draw up to thing point, it was such a unique experience having drawing as a set challenge instead of something with the sole purpose just to be creative. When the piece finally clicked it was worth the struggle.
Our teacher, Kristen Street, also gave us weekly drawing prompts, which kept us creative. This prompt was: Migration.
This prompt was: Isolated.
This prompt was: Displaced.
I loved my new iPad, the potential for art on it was truly limitless. It would soon be my favorite way to create art.
2022 - Spring
I need to split up 2022 because something clicked in 2022 and my time spent on art went up tenfold. I stopped reselling and put nearly 100% of my time into art. I gained a newfound love for it, times when I’d usually go watch TV or play video games I would just sit down and draw. The thing that started this off was the AP Art Exam. The AP art exam is a multiple-month-long exam where students have to create 15 of their best pieces all centered around one common theme, my theme was Dreams. The exam is the hardest I've ever worked in school and challenged me in every way, These are my favorite pieces, I used nearly all of the different mediums I had learned up to this point: Graphite, Charcoal, Ink, my Ipad, and Photoshop.
Below is my favorite piece of art I’ve ever done. Daydreaming is the most important part of my creative process, whether that’s in the car listening to music or lying in bed trying to fall asleep. When I daydream that’s where I find my ideas, I wanted to show how it feels when I daydream in a grand piece. This piece took so long that it ended up throwing me off track for the rest of the AP exam, from start to finish this piece took me 37 hours, multitudes longer than any time I had ever spent on a piece before.
This is also one of my favorite pieces from the exam. This piece, Infinite Road, is based on those impossible shape illusions. I wanted to create an “impossible” road like the shapes. This was done completely in Photoshop. This was a specifically challenging piece because instead of just editing photos and putting them together in an interesting way I had to use parts of images to create something entirely new.
2022 - Summer
Over the summer before my senior year a lot changed, my parents were both teachers, and got a new job opportunity at an international school in Grand Cayman, a tropical island very, very far away from Rhode Island. So, I’d be spending my senior year there, but before that change, I’d be doing a five-week pre-college summer course at Savannah College of Art and Design. I would take 2 college courses crammed into 5 weeks instead of the usual 10. The two courses I chose were Drawing 101 and Film 100, as I wanted to get better at drawing and I intended to go to SCAD for Film and Television. My time in the drawing class was genuinely life-changing in terms of the quality of my artwork. We spent those 5 weeks learning the real fundamentals of sketching and shape and proportion and it changed the way I drew and made me a much better artist overall.
(right) A Graphite still life. This was our introductory still life of the class. With this still, life we were taught how to capture the exact proportions and shape of each object using line measuring and boxing ellipses. However, the most important thing that we were taught was how little time we should spend looking at our papers. This is called gesture drawing and is maybe the bets thing that I learned during my time at SCAD over the summer. When I would spend 95% of my time looking at the subject instead of my drawing my still lives came out so much better.
(above) A charcoal still life, our professor had pinned various objects to a blackboard on the wall and we had to choose a section of it to draw. This was during our unit on chiaroscuro, which is a technique where you add high contrast to the lights and darks of your image. While working in charcoal is a very time-consuming and quite frustrating process, there are not many other mediums that give such dramatic results.
(left) An ink still life. We were instructed to get a piece of cardboard and go outside to collect various sticks and twigs, which we would then combine with sting and other things from the classroom to create an interesting composition. This by far was the most fun assignment from the class, there is something about working in ink that is just so much fun.
(left) I also gained a new love for drawing with colors in 2022, something I’m still trying to learn today.
2022 - Fall/Winter
This fall and winter didn’t quite seem like fall and winter, since I spent in Grand Cayman. The move didn’t last long and moving was definitely not the right choice for us as we would move back to the States in early 2023. The time I did spend in Grand Cayman was spent learning Blender, a 3d modeling program, which I am still improving at, and a lot of photoshop aswell.
(below) I found a new love in Photoshop, making posters. There is something so fun about making posters or fake magazines of your favorite movies or things or friends. Below are two posters of two of my best friends and also two of the kindest people I have ever met, Nick (left) and Jake (right). They are two of the most amazing people in the world who I love very much and I hope to stay best friends with them as I keep growing up and making more art.
(left) Blender is a free, open source 3d modeling program with endless possibilities. This is an isometric kitchen that I hand modeled in blender. More than any medium I’ve done before, Blender had by far the biggest learning curve and its something I’m still only scratching the surface of. I hope to improve my skills in blender over the next few years.
(left) A grizzly bear magazine I made for my english class.
2023 - Spring
I doubled up on my English classes and graduated my senior year in half a year and my family moved back from Grand Cayman. While I wish I had been able to finish my high-school career in Rhode Island, I’ve had a lot of free time to do art and get better at it before I go off to college for film.
