Hello

I've been making art for many many years, portraits & murals being my main focus. I'm an artist in my 40's going on 14. I learned to make art from my mom and grandma in my early days, mom is a painter and muralist and my grandma as well. Drawing was always my thing, doodling faces and swirls and annoying my teachers with art in the columns of all my homework. Art was the first thing I was good at independently. I tagged along on mural jobs with my mom helping where I could, learning how to project a design, draw with a paintbrush, shade, work on random not so ideal surfaces, freehand paint, and eventually, she passed the ladder and dropcloth to me.

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My high school art teacher was an amazing woman who encouraged, inspired, and taught us to think out of the box. It was a motley crew of random kids, much more talented than me, which was a challenge. Community college art class was educational, figure drawing class was my favorite. After creating a portfolio, interviews, and visits I was accepted into the Art Institute o Chicago (oh how my life would've been different had I went there) but instead transferred to Bradley University's art program, which was closer to home and more affordable. Sadly I became an Art school dropout, after 9/11, a few traumatic events, falling in love, and getting distracted. Enter baby #1. 

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Becoming a mother is a life-changing experience. Put most of my stuff on the back burner to tend to the love of my life. I started doing portraits to make a little extra cash, I had commissions from family and friends at first then it strangers. Baby #2 came and I continued to do art in little my free time, commissions mostly. Baby #3 came much later and she rocked my world. At this point, I was doing the mama thing and had a few years where I made no art at all. Those were not fun times, for a creative person you need that outlet to be happy. Many years passed and I started getting back into portraits, murals, and daily drawings as the kids got older and needed me less. Went back to work full-time, changed my eating habits, started a weekly yoga routine, started to rediscover me and reclaim my own happiness. Enter covid. Life has been hard but we are all getting through it in whatever ways we can. I am so thankful I have art as an outlet for my life has definitely gotten a bit shaken up.

Switching from paper to pixels in 2021 has been a really cool experience. Relearning how to create art via procreate and I feel like my brain kind of exploded. Making art on an iPad is a brand new process for a 2d artist and the possibilities are kind of endless. I am now obsessed with making digital paintings and drawings (is there any real difference)? I still love my paintbrushes and pencils but I find myself reaching for them less and less these days.