qu(art)antine

sitting in my cold bedroom beneath a cold window displaying the lovely view of a cold brick wall naturally led me to go back and scroll through the light-soaked photos of this past winter vacation in the sunshine state.

one particular photo caught my attention – it was of my sister’s face laced with the unique shadowing of a nearby tree’s leaves.

being already smitten with shadowing across a face, my sister’s gorgeous blue eyes with an unusual green tint to them in this photo brought me to the steely and irreversible decision “I’m gonna draw it.”

so for the night, all schoolwork was pushed aside (which led to one very late bedtime, i assure you), and after about 2 hours, this sketch/eye study was produced.

i’m in love with the results … they surpassed my expectations and my sister’s eye is actually recognizable. the only downside is that when i tried to use white acrylic paint for the highlights, it turned out that the bottle cap had burst open and the paint was half-dried. thus the clumpy highlights.

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as per usual, my art looking 10x better upside down

finding myself with some extra time on my hands during this quarantine (apparently the life of an introvert is actually called “quarantine?” i had no idea until now), i’ve decided to recap a few other art projects of mine in the past couple of months.

firstly, i saw this incredible painting a little while back, and it blew my mind.

i researched and could not find the artist, so credit to whoever painted this!

the symbolism behind it was just astounding to me – and so real in our world today when churches are deemed as “non-essential” and religion is under attack from all sides – that i decided to draw my own version of the Touch of God.

the hand on the right i tried to shadow in a different way than I usually would, and although it looks a little metallic to me, I decided to keep it that way. if you look closely you can see the lyrics from one of my favorite songs, trees, scribbled between the fingers. they sum up the innate longing of every human for connection with his Creator so well.

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lastly, i’ve been experimenting a little bit with different art mediums that i haven’t used in a couple of years. one of these was watercolor, and although i haven’t advanced past a couple of little lyric polaroid doodles (below) and a few messy faces and eyes, hopefully i will be able to practice a little more in the future.

there’s been another art venture of mine that deserves its own post, which will hopefully happen soon :))

a lot of these drawings were made before we almost ran out of toilet paper and were screamed and cursed at for trying to play basketball outside. before all of my classes were online, and the world held its breath as the case count surpassed 400 000.

while it’s now a wild, dangerous world out there, it’s a peaceful, joyful world inside the walls of our house. the fire is warm at night and the sunlight is beautiful in the morning, and God is everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. my family is closer than ever, and wonderful opportunities are everywhere – to finally read that book, draw that portrait, write that post, practice that instrument, say that prayer, finish that song.

take them.

drawn by jul ❤