Hello SG,

I hope you are all having a great summer. There are always so many great seats coming out it is sometimes hard to keep up. The variety, imagination, and creativity on display are captivating.

I am hanging in there and trying to be creative with the time and tools that I have at this time. Last year around Christmas, my friend sent me a button designed for the chamber of commerce in her city. It was a beautifully derpy cartoon tiger. The button was getting me back from a set of pins I sent her from a comic book convention a few years back.

I sent her an email and asked if there was anything that she should want me to explore to draw. She has excellent taste in art, and I wanted to see what she recommended. She gave me no direction, but I had dug up my watercolor sets that Christmas and explored what I could do with it.

After searching for ideas on Youtube, I watched videos about creating art in traditional Japanese themes using watercolors.

Dagget Designs Youtube channel, following along and trying to create simple illustrations of traditional Japanese Tattoos. Exploring something that is not just superhero comics and cartoons has been super fun and challenging.

So here are some of the stuff I have drawn and colored. I am now using acrylic inks to learn a new medium and try to achieve the same look as Dagget in some of his videos.

I am by no means great, but it has been rewarding to explore something new with so much history and beauty associated with it. If you like any of it, please go check out Dagget. His stuff is way better. When I uploaded the photographs, it flipped the order, so the first image is the most recent piece I worked on. You will see the different elements and pieces that helped inform the technique and use of ink in the last piece.

I hope you all have a great summer and that things get better if you are having a rough time.