High School Art (Patreon)

A selection of my art from the high school years, 1999 - 2002. Actually, I think these may have all been around 2001, when I was 17-18?

The featured image above was an image map I drew for one of my hand-coded-in-Notepad-with-HTML websites. Each word bubble was a clickable link, with Peachy Keen the title of my small kingdom of sites.

 This most likely was for the bio page of the afore-mentioned website.

"I'm going to slap you with a fish" was a phrase that got thrown around in the animation forums I haunted as a teenager. This was also an outfit I wore back in the day: My dad's ski shirt from the '70s, a black pleated skirt, fishnets, and a choker of some sort- typically a length of ribbon tied around my neck.

 Drawing a photo from a magazine.

The girl on the left was a character I made originally as a 14-year-old to role play in the Batman: The Animated Series fandom. Her name was "Marionette" , and her green hair and purple eyes obviously announced her the daughter of the Joker and Harley Quinn. She was a thinly-veiled alter-ego of the gregarious, confident, flirty, fearless, loud kind of person I wanted to be in real life, when I was very much the opposite. By drawing her in the loud, clashing outfits that I was too shy to wear at first, I warmed myself up to dressing more and more like her style. I wrote stories and drew pictures of her being outgoing and silly as practice and to help me build up the courage to try out similar behaviors in person. I have grown up to posses a good number of those traits I wanted in high school and I do attribute some of that to the play-acting I did through my ridiculous little wish-fulfillment character. Marionette (Mari) was my teenage id, sassing her way across my sketchbook pages.

 My best friend, snuggled into a bean bag chair.

Ok, well, there you go! Teenage art, over 20 years old. It's interesting (to me) to see the quirks of my drawing style that existed back then and that have stuck around to this day. And it's also super gratifying to see my improvement! My art has gotten better and it's also stayed distinctly mine.

I used to fill up sketchbook after sketchbook, I couldn't stop drawing. It was such a pleasure back then. Haha, I rarely draw now, except for when I have to do paid work. My creative impulse has been redirected into more tactile projects, like embroidery and gardening. Stuff that I can build up with my hands so that it has texture and dimension, as opposed to flat paper with flat lines.

While I was in Space Camp, the urge to draw did return and I compulsively filled up all of the free spaces on my worksheets and lined notebook paper with sketches of pretty, fantastical girls (Although my focus was on Lady LovelyLocks that time around) and surreptitious life drawings of my classmates and instructors.

Hm, I don't really have a conclusion to end this on, so here are two portable CD players I found in the same box as this sketchbook, complete with mixtape burned CDs, one of which I decorated as a gift for a friend but, obviously, never delivered: