Category: Art

If you can believe it, we’ve only got two more April Ducks posts (this piece included) left! I’ve been making a good deal of art lately, but it’s mainly been in my bullet journal (I try to keep it cute so that I will keep using it!). Is any of that art something you’d be interested in seeing? Let me know!

Without further ado, here are the April Ducks from the 17th to the 19th!

I’ve been preparing for my PhD program as well, which starts next month. It’s been really exciting to uncover all of the skills I will need to develop in order to get this project off the ground.

While a large portion of my time has been spent on education and work, I do still hope that I manage to keep this blog full of silly side projects.

I guess we’ll have to see!

Thanks for visiting!

Gosh friends, I have been SO busy! A good number of the projects I’ve been up to have been so long-term that I seem to have very little to share of my recent work. Lucky for us, I have a few ducks in the *wings*.

I’m sorry. Anyway, here they are.

Also, I celebrated my 10-year wedding anniversary this last week. I’ve been feeling very positive and lucky lately.

The last of this set might be my favourite. Isn’t she sweet?

Thanks for visiting, and for your patience while I fill space with latent ducks!

Did you miss them? Wait – don’t answer that. In the month of April, I challenged myself to draw as many ducks as I could. I ended up drawing a total of 22, and this is part of the slow duck rollout. I’m not sure when I’ll be out of ducks, but if it helps, we’ve now crossed the halfway point.

Even though they’re goofy, and not terribly well-crafted, they still make me happy.

Sometimes artists put a lot of pressure on ourselves to make marketable work. When you make a living off of your creations, it can feel like an act of defiance to create something for the sole purpose of entertainment. And while of course I am just as much a fan of money as the next duck enthusiast, making these ducks felt.. important somehow.

I’ve been working on a few projects lately that have been important.. Learning challenging songs outside of my comfort zone for students, fulfilling commissions, completing a proposal for a PhD program that I may or may not be accepted into..

It makes me happy that I have the privilege to dedicate a little time to creating something silly for myself, something that I know has no possibility for failure.

Thanks so much for visiting!

Gosh, we sure are getting a lot of these ducks out of the way. Sort of. Now, I should give you a disclaimer: these are probably the worst ducks I’ve drawn in the series. It’s a shame that they’re all clumped together like this, but the other option was to present them non-chronologically, and I don’t think I could handle that.

Now that you’ve been warned, enjoy!

I feel like there were more creative ways that I could have handled these prompts, but hey. It was a busy week.

This next one I drew using my mouse, and I fear as though my mousepad may have interfered with the line quality. But I’ll let you be the judge…

Reminds me of when I’d go into office supply shops and draw silly animals on MSPaint. Did any of you do that?

By the time I had finished this last… piece… I had a smidge more time, and had worked out a relatively navigable system.

A fair warning, the final duck in this series is.. a bit peculiar, and perhaps a bit inappropriate for those with sensitive stomachs. I had to have lost you by this point, though! The final prompt in this set was “Duck With Arms”, and I think I may have budgeted all my creativity for this one.

You can’t say I didn’t warn you.

I know I promised 4 ducks in this post, but I believe I have proven that there are 5.

Because I’m one odd duck.

Thanks for visiting! Quack quack!

Here are the next 3 fulfilments of the silly Duck Challenge that I undertook with my friends in the month of April. Prepare yourself for the aforementioned wildly varying degrees of quality!

For those of you who are generally a fan of me and generally not fans of ducks (I wouldn’t mind seeing a venn diagram of that overlap), you may be relieved to know that next week’s post will be a musical one.

Actually while I have you here, folks within the venn diagram, I have to ask – what do I have that ducks don’t? Don’t get me wrong; I’m quite flattered by your preference, but if you are under the conception that I am in any way superior to a duck, I believe you may be missing some crucial pieces of information.

That being said, if you rightfully prefer the drawing of ducks to my usual content, you’ll be delighted to hear that my next duck post, due to poor quality, will be compensated for in quantity. 4 ducks in a fortnight, folks. Get it down in your calendars.

Yes, I know I’m ridiculous.

Thank you for being here anyway. Quack Quack!

With May finally being upon us, I am happy to share that I have now completed a very, very silly challenge that a few buddies and I made for ourselves for the month of April. The challenge was to illustrate as many ducks (of varying degrees of quality) as reasonably possible between April 1st and April 30th.

Wouldn’t you believe it, I made it all the way to 22! That’s one for every weekday this April, so I’m quite pleased with myself. Some are certainly of higher quality than others, but all in all, 22 ducks in one month is nothing to sneeze at.

Deciding on a plan on how to release these duck depictions (duckpictions?) has been a bit of a challenge. Releasing 22 ducks one at a time puts this space at a high risk of being “that blog with all the ducks”, but considering that each one of these illustrations took between 2-3 hours to make, I couldn’t justify spending upwards of 50 hours on a single blog post.

Here’s my solution: I’m going to release them in sets of 3 over the next few months, staggered with music and other current projects.

I quite enjoyed this project, and I hope you enjoy the ducks as they unfurl.

Thanks for visiting! Quack quack!