Hello stranger! It's so nice of you to stumble upon my blog here.
It would mean so much to me if you took the opportunity to watch my latest art video.

In the video I talk about this drawing but you are free to ready my blog if you aren't able to watch the video right now or listen to it while you watch it.

I hope you enjoy this piece of work I created.




 

I am a very awkward person, so I hope reading this will be less awkward than listening to me talk in the video, haha.

So let's get right into it!

As you may know, I am an active partner and creator on youtube.
I am by no means famous or well known at all but fame isn't my goal.
I have always made videos for the sheer fun of it and perhaps some mild vanity?
My main channel that I've had for eons has a plethora of random videos ranging from vlogs, guides, video games, art, rants, side projects, you name it.
Lately I've been throwing around the idea of making separate channels for the various categories of content I release.
I recognize that many youtubers out there use one channel for all of their videos but because my content varies SO much, I think it's much more appropriate to separate the content onto their individual channels.
I noticed that my subscribers on my main channel enjoy my video game videos and music related videos.
My art videos and unboxing videos pretty much go unnoticed.
I want to continue making those videos so I've created separate channels for realsies.

The video I've shared above is my first video on the new art channel.
I will now go into detail about the video.

As I've mentioned in previous blogs I have been devoting my life to art since I was a wee wee little girl. There's been ups and downs in my art career and right now it's looking up. I've been really inspired to create again and so I want to document what I'm doing. This channel is dedicated to show my art abilities and how I change and progress over time. I really appreciate any feedback on my work. Constructive criticism is always welcome in my world.

The creature that I'm coloring is a drawing I made a few days ago. It's a faerie dragon sprite type creature inspired by the lovely faerie sprite darter dragon in World of Warcraft. It's an adorable creature found throughout Azeroth and is also a pet and mount that you can collect in game. They're very vibrant and colorful creatures and so when I was drawing this, I drew so much inspiration from the creature but I wanted to change a lot of things to make this being my own.

To give you a bit of a back story of the creature, it typically dwells in magical forests. They're peaceful and non violent beings who fly around and enjoy the atmosphere. They can communicate with the other creatures and are very intuitive. They can heal injured beings and plant life to a small extent. When danger approaches they can give off signals to nearby life to seek shelter. 

This particular one has a sweet tooth. I drew this right before Christmas and my original aim was to create a creature dressed up in a santa hat, eating some candy. Well my slow-poke self took so much time to draw this that by the time it was finally complete after many many changes, Christmas was over. So I scratched the santa hat portion but I really loved the lollipop it has so I kept that. 

After I drew it, I waited a few days and came back to it to see if there was anything I wanted to change. Naturally, I am my own worst critic and I'm never 100% satisfied with anything that I do. I adjusted some minor details and I proceeded to ink the drawing. After I inked the drawing, I spent a few days away from it again. I didn't want to rush into the creative process and overwhelm myself by jumping into the coloring and losing interest in finishing it. It's not that I didn't want to color it. Trust me, each day I was dying to color it but between working full time, working on other side projects and just feeling tired all the time, I just wasn't in a proper state of being to dive into it full throttle. So after the handful of days passed, today I was ready to take on the dragon and color it. 

As I mention in the video, I had no specific direction of what kind of color scheme I wanted to use. This is partially due to not really planning anything out and just being really eager to color it and film the process for you. The other reason is that I'm really new to using copic markers. I have very little experience with alcohol based markers and markers in  general. The only markers I've ever really used in my life were crayola washable markers that we all used in school. When you color with those you're very limited on colors and shading etc.... you literally color in one pass and that's it. The worst part of the markers is that they streak and everyone hates those lines right?

In the art world if I laid out all of my skills, painting and anatomy would be on the bottom of the totem pole. For some reason these two things are just my kryptonite. I mention in the video that I could probably dedicate myself to taking painting classes but because I have no heart or drive to paint things, even if I learned the skills and techniques, because my heart and emotion isn't being poured into it, the investment would be worthless and the outcome would probably look terrible anyways. 

In my opinion, using copic markers is very similar to painting. You lay color down and the alcohol evaporates and the color lightens slightly. You have to keep laying the color down in layers to create darker effects and additionally you can other shades of colors to create smooth gradients and blends. 

I have a copic color chart that shows me all of the colors along with their color family, saturation, etc... but it just confuses me so I just pick the colors out by hand. I can't follow fancy formulas and rules like that. I never really got into color theory that much. I know what warm and cool colors are, but when I'm creating stuff...those things just don't enter my mind. All I see are colors and I play around with what looks cool and what doesn't. If something is memorable to me, I'll recycle it in future pieces.

Overall, I'm pretty satisfied with this piece. It's not my best piece of work but it's certainly not my worse. I would like to hang it on my wall and frame it possibly. I think it would be awesome to get it printed into stickers or post cards or something. What do you think? Would you buy this as an art print? 

If you've watched the video or read this blog, thank you so much.
I really appreciate it. If you are into the whole youtube thing I would really apreciate it if you subscribed to my channels that interest you.

And you can follow me on social media as well.
Twitter: @kyraejenkins
Instagram @kyraejenkins
Facebook /kyraejenkins
www.kyraejenkins.com