On Picking Up Art Again in Earnest at 28

because why not?

some flowers to practice mixing watercolors :)

Hello, and welcome to Under the Pine Tree! My name is Jess. I’m a Catholic wife and mother in my late twenties currently in the process of writing the second draft of my first book of a series of fantasy novels ever so dear to my heart that I hope you will be able to enjoy someday. Until that day comes, however, here on Substack, I primarily document the ups and downs of that journey, hopefully offering encouragement and in-the-trenches kinds of advice to anyone out there who may benefit from it it. Especially if they’re crazy enough to attempt writing novels with a young child in the house like me. Thanks for stopping by, subscribe if you like this post, and God bless you now and always!

On Writing and Art

While I have undoubtedly spent the greater part of my life focusing my creative attention on the written word, the visual arts are something that have accompanied me for almost as long. From the moment my characters began to enter my imagination back in 2012, my first instinct was to bring them to life with illustration, in many cases before I ever wrote a proper scene with them.

And this was not limited to my own stories.

I always wanted to draw what I had read. And where many a bookish teenage girl fell in love with fan fiction as their primary means of engaging with stories beyond their official pages, fan art was what always had my attention. I was more interested in seeing more of the world and characters I had fallen for visually than I was in seeing others write more stories in that world.

Then of course, I never grew out of loving animated movies and became, ahem, a bit of a weeb¹ during my college years, essentially guaranteeing that visual storytelling would remain close to my heart.² Animated Star Wars is also the best Star Wars.

Anyway.

Throughout all of these years, I casually but rather frequently tried my hand at drawing, mostly focusing in on the human face — semi-realistic portraits of my characters and characters from whatever story I happened to be especially fixated on at the time.³

And to cut to the chase, I entered into this wonderful year of 2024 with the hope of bettering my art skills. It’s a form of creativity I can practice away from the computer. It’s way easier to draw than to write with my little guy because he likes to color and paint too, especially in blue. I also have this pipe dream where I can illustrate my own work and that’s a big ask soooo…

I figured I’d better get started. Better late than never.

I was not working from nothing, as noted above, and so I have of course practiced within my comfort zone this year very often.

Meaning… simple character portraits.

yes, the one in the middle and the one on the top left are the same character, he's the MC soooo I doodle him a lot

Having done this for a while, I’ve definitely got a style at this point, one I’m overall pretty happy with. And having practiced a lot more this year, I have gotten a lot quicker at these⁴ AND much more consistent with facial proportions and translating my imagination to the page.

The trouble is… for the longest time, I haven’t known how to draw anything but this. You’ll notice every single piece is cropped in rather tightly, there isn’t too much variation in expression, and they are all of course black and white pencil sketches.

And after a while, you kind of want to draw your characters… interacting in a scene instead of just staring forward? You want to be able to let them emote, move, and have more life.

But how do you put a character into a background? How do you pose them? How does color even work? What are clothes???

You write scenes like the one I just finished up yesterday and laugh at how cruel you feel for putting your characters into the position they are in and you want to draw it to visualize it…

But you… can’t.

Not yet anyway.

Some Preliminary Experiments: Pose and Color

Now, of course, I would truly love to run headlong into just illustrating scenes from my story and other things I’ve read as of late. BUT there are a lot of basics to be learned before that point, and so this summer has been largely one of experimentation.

And honestly???

It’s been so much fun.

There’s been no pressure behind it all, because I know I’m just starting out. And there’s such a thrill in learning the basics of something, because every attempt brings with it some new lesson or discovery. Posing stick figures, making little swatches of watercolor paint, it’s all felt very child-like and I’ve truly loved it.

We’ll tackle some pose experiments first.

yes in the last one I did decide to go for my characters because I couldn't help myself and the concept was simple enough

Ok. So yeah. Total beginner, right?⁵

But I almost never draw a figure in its full body, let alone with its limbs anywhere but at its sides. These were big steps for me. And each time I was kind of just floored that it looked vaguely right, because I had never gotten even remotely close to that before!

I primarily relied on

Simone Grünewald

’s Easy Art Essentials to get started with them, and a lot clicked all at once for me through the posing guides that come with her newsletter’s welcome email.

I’ve got a long way to go in this regard, but we’re moving, we’re moving!

Next came color, and I took two different approaches here… watercolor and colored pencil.

and there was a lot of random mixing of colors in random blobs that came before these ones. i'm especially happy with the progression of the leaves from one week to the next

And wow is working with color a fundamentally different world.

In tackling watercolor from the ground up, I very quickly realized why color had utterly baffled me for so long. It was because⁶ I simply did not realize how differently I needed to think while painting as opposed to drawing. The way you mix and layer colors, how a brush moves as opposed to a pencil… there’s just a lot.

And I don’t claim to understand much of it yet. I’m just having fun.

Moving on…

a self portrait, my version of book Howl, and an owl (one of the few things in this post drawn with reference and BOY does that make a difference)

After playing around in the wildly foreign land of watercolor, working with colored pencil was a nice middle ground. I was able to take some of what I’d learned from painting (starting with lights and then layering in darks for example), combine it with the more familiar movement of a pencil, and turn my attention to coloring subjects a little more complex than leaves on a white background.

I don’t think I’ve worked with either long enough to claim preference toward one medium or another, but having not seriously attempted to tackle color before June 2024, I’m pretty happy with how I’m sitting this August 2, 2024!

So, yeah, that’s been my summer project.

We’re doing art now too — why not?

I hope you enjoyed this glimpse into some of my recent experiments. There are a lot more where these came from, but I’ve stuck to sharing the ones I was happiest with. I plan to continue on with these art updates in the future, taking you along on the journey as a means of encouragement and accountability, and as a way of first sharing my writing before it’s ready to face the world for real.

Thanks for reading as always! God bless you, I’ll be praying for you, and I’ll see you two weeks from now because I’m taking this upcoming week off for family and the beach.

Peace.

Jess.

one more for good measure. ‘tis a joy to leave so near the beach…

1. For the uninitiated, it means I was into anime. I still kind of am. I just have to choose between watching TV and writing during my son’s naps, and the writing’s got to win out right now.

2. It has also shaped the style of my prose, for while I have learned to enjoy playing to the strengths of the written medium, visual shot composition has a very large influence on my imagination whenever I conjure up one scene or another.

3. Ahhh, all the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and Doctor Who and Fate and Gintama fanart that will not see the light of day on this Substack.

4. Each one took me maybe 15-30 minutes?

5. I am aware that my standards for character art probably skew high because I see so much of it online??

6. Or well, one reason at least haha.