Dr. Atl replica exercise

Two days ago I made a small replica exercise of one of my favorite Mexican painters, Dr. Atl. The original painting is called "sombra del Popo" which makes reference to a very iconic volcano in Mexico called Popocatépetl. There is a beautiful legend about it. I'll tell you about it later. I really admire the use of color of Dr. Atl. I think it was one of the most difficult things to replicate. I made this exercise because I personally love the painting and wanted to have a part of it in my room. It is made with oil paintings, it took me about two hours and a half. I'll try to make more paintings during the weekend and maybe upload some videos of their process. Today I registered for Mexico's national arts School from INBA (Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes) I'll do the exam soon, so I'll be telling you about how things are going! Hopefully I'll get accepted. Hope you had a happy Wednesday, 

with love, Monica.

 PS. Here you can see the original painting.

DIY portable watercolors

 

Hi there! Well, this is the first DIY of the blog, so for this edition of DIYs I wanted to make things that are practical, simple, and easy to do. It's been a while since I have wanted to buy some portable Koi watercolors, but I would have to buy them from amazon, and sometimes here in Mexico they charge us a lot of taxes. So, for the moment, i decided to do a little box that could help me out a bit with making my watercolors more portable, so that I could take them to school. I saw many boxes like this in Instagram, where they already sold the box with many pretty square watercolors, but sadly I only have tubes. So, this is a little walkthrough of what I did. Hope you like it!

First, you'll need: 
1. A mint box, or tin box.
2. Chewing gum package (enjoy emptying it first)
3. Watercolor, in tubes.
4. White nail polish.
5. A small sponge (I used paper, cause that was all I had for the moment)
6. Silicone or glue

These are the steps:
1. Cut your gum package so that it fits inside the tin.
2. Paste with silicone your gum package "spaces" and let them dry.

 3. Fill your gum package with the desired colors (you can make many different pallets, and exchange them) I used primary colors for this one.

 

4. Add some water to the watercolors and flatten the surface.
5. Grab your white nail polish and paint the lid of the tin. (This will give us a surface to mix colors)

6. Add your piece of sponge or paper to the remaining space inside the box. (This will help you clean your brush) And you are done!

I really hope you try this at home, and it ends up being as useful and practical as it has been for me. Remember you can always change your color palette for different purposes and occasions, with this little box you'll always be prepared for making a watercolor painting!

Happy Monday! Love, Monica.

Ps. For those who live in US, you can also buy some beautiful handmade watercolors I found on Instagram from Red Wood Willow.

Fishbowl man

I made a small illustration for an animation, it is just a frame from many others that other people will make of a walking sequence. I thought it would be really nice to be a person and have tiny fish and algae inside you, so I ended up making Mr. Fishbowl. School has been really busy, I am in exams and everything is getting crazy. Hope you like it! Happy Monday.

A fresh new start.

Hi there. Maybe there's no one reading this at the moment, but I know that in some time they'll be. But either way, it doesn't matter that much. Don't mean to offend you, but I have realized that in the end the only thing that really matters is how much you believe in yourself. And now, I do believe in myself very much. So, here's the story of how I ended up here, writting this in a new blog with a funny name. When I was about 11 years old (now I am 19) I decided I wanted to start a blog. A happy blog, with cute little DIY that where similar to all those beautifully made tutorials  I used to read on blogs like Oh Happy Day, or A Beautiful Mess. I saw how the blogging community worked and how amazing it was, you could discover such great things, amazing people with amazing lives, great artists, photographers, crafters. And by seeing all that, I stopped feling so alone in my little crafty/artsy mind. 

My family is filled with engineers. Which, don't get me wrong, are amazing, the problem is that I am not much of an structured mind. I am driven mostly by emotions and have loved arts since birth. I always new I wanted to study something related to humanities. Art, painting, philosophy, literature, music. And as I started my blog as a former 10 year old girls I saw all those dreams so achievable and real. So I saw the blog as a way to start telling people my story. I made mostly posts to help people do crafts/photography/art stuff. And the fact is that I didn´t know many things before trying to show people how to do them. I have to admit that I learned a huge bunch of things just because I wanted to show people how to do them. I guess I am much of a practical lerner. But that's not the point. 

The point is that for 9 years I kept that blog and filled it with all the things that I liked, projects that exited me, and some of my paintings and drawings. I have to say I never really realized how long the blog had been part of my life until today when I checked on the domain reseller's ad the year of the creation of the blog. 2008. So yeah, this takes us here. On november last year, Google made a change on their system, they made something called Google Suite, I don't have any idea of how to use it, the problem is that when I was trying to pay the yearly fee for my blog's domain the system wouldn't let me do so. So I sent like 10 emails to Google, desperate for the deadline. They never answered with something that actually helped me, all the emails had links to their help pages. The due date passed, and I lost my domain. That was a quick change, suddenly only two people saw my blog per day, when it was ussually a group of 200. I don't mean that the only thing that matters is traffic, but it was something I had worked on, and it wasn't nice to lose it like that. 

Yes, I got a bit depressed, (a lot) But then again, today I saw the date. If I started a great blog when I was only 11, then I'd better do an amazing one at 19. Because no, I am not going to quit. And yes, I still want to be an artist, philosopher, and writter. 

So here's my story. Stick around if you want to see how things turn out. Trying to study art for people I know is like jumping to the void, so yes, I practically invite you to see me fall. 

Thanks for reading. Hope to see you again soon. (jumps into the void screaming JERONIMO)