As a little kid, I loved to draw; I loved to paint watercolors. Quite frankly, I loved to just color…colored pencils, pastels, and the flow of the watercolor paint. When I was in college, I discover something called vellum paper. I loved using markers on the vellum paper. Some of my most creative work, which I just fell in love with, was using markers in such a way that the ink moved and floated on the paper, it kind of just mixed together which was magical for me.

But, as an artist’s journey would have it, I started to explore different avenues and mediums. I held on to my love of drawing with a short stint as a clipart illustrator, and then I gravitated toward photography.

Quite frankly, and not saying photography is easy, in many ways, photography was me being a little creatively lazy. It was instant gratification. Which is what I was looking for at the time. I take a picture. I take 50 pictures. I bring them home, upload them to my computer, and then one-by-one in post-processing, it was sort of just boom boom push a couple of buttons add a few filters, and then some techniques, and it didn’t take very long to get the results that I wanted.

Diving deeper, I think what I enjoyed more about photography was actually just going out for a nice walk on a beautiful day in a stunning garden. The beautiful photos I took, which everyone loves, were a pleasant result.

And now I have decided to come full circle. I still like photography, but it does take a certain amount of time and I don’t necessarily have the luxury of having that right now.

So, my artist’s journey continues.

It’s not so much that photography got boring, but I also do not want to be pigeonholed or only known for just taking pretty pictures of flowers. I want to keep moving forward. I want to keep pushing the window. I want to keep challenging myself creatively.

I started off my art journey as a kid drawing with pencils because drawing is the basics of everything and I quickly moved onto crayons, yes crayons. You may be thinking, that’s kid’s play (although I’m sure if you looked hard enough, you could find some beautiful images that were completely created in crayon). I attended an art class from a woman who was very old-school, an older woman who taught group classes on Saturday mornings in a space she created above her barn. She had an approach to teaching which was first, you start off using crayons. We had big sketchbooks and every day we sat and there was a topic or a theme and we drew and colored in with crayons, and I loved it! And then when you graduated from that, you moved on to still-life drawing…using crayons, because it’s the basics. We learned the fundamentals of color theory, and shading techniques and honed in on seeing your subject. From there I graduated to painting still-life with watercolor, learning the concept of layering, shading, of working from light to dark. I also learned to be patient, to take my time, and look at lights, look at shadows.

Those are some of my fondest memories of my art career. After I decided to go to college and even during college, I started taking additional art classes where I was able to expand a little bit on the types of mediums that I used. This is where I started to use pastels; chalk pastels, and oil pastels. And there was always a variety of ideas and subject matter to draw from.

I’m now ready to put out to the universe; I just want to get back down to the basics. I want to go back to being excited about my work. Photography did excite me, and I loved it when something came together and I loved the way it looked. But, it started to feel like everything was looking the same.

About a year ago, maybe even a little more, I discovered the world of digital illustration. It’s taking me a while, but, one of my 2023 goals was to focus on learning and going back to the basics. The basics of drawing, the basics of coloring and the basics of learning new techniques. The beauty of digital illustration is that it feeds my desire to color and it is easier to just start and stop (unless I am on a roll).

So, I am back to the basics; the basics of drawing, the basics of coloring, the basics of looking at light and shadow and color theory and how colors go together and having a little bit of fun. And if you say the digital illustration isn’t really art, I beg to differ.

I present to you, my fruit series. All of these were hand-drawn, using reference, and photos, but hand-drawn and colored, using various digital brushes and techniques to get the colors. I am quite pleased with the way they came out.

I think it’s the start of something new.

Jessica