NDNJ's studio blog

  20 sketchbooks in...  that's too many eyes to count  I tend to always get incredibly picky and negative when it comes to looking at my work. I criticize it, pick on every detail, and mentally crib about how I am not good enough compared to artists online, usually forgetting that they’re college graduates in their mid-20s or older and have had years of experience with the skill.  So the other day, I was looking for Architecture Digest magazines, buried somewhere with school files, certificates, a bundle of old drawings and some 20 sketchbooks (most of them left incomplete) I started looking through them and came across one in particular that changed my perspective about the way I judge what I create. This sketchbook has always been special to me, it was the one I started when I had decided that I wanted to make art and design my future when I was in 5th-grade.  a recent eye I drew - 2021 I opened the first page and saw the first eye I ever...

'found' 3ft X 2ft canvas acrylic painting  Art block, profoundly known as a phase when an artist cannot access their creativity and cannot bring themselves to create a new piece of work. Never in a million years did I think I would look at something and not think to myself, "that would make a great illustration". It was as if my mind forced me to not think and start becoming like everybody else, a basic cool girl. Weirdly enough I think this obsession to become someone I was not, came from downloading social media, looking at the most famous and so-called perfect people started getting me to want to be like them. I started noticing that all my friends had this thing in them that made them ‘cool’. I stopped drawing for months trying to fit into what everybody else was into.  October 2020 was when I finished my last piece, the autumn chill passed as my urge to make every sketch at the corner of a newspaper perfectly, slowly died and ghosted to wanting to make myself per...