[Generative AI] doesn’t speed up the process, because there is NO process in AI-generated images!

To draw is to put what you see with your eyes (or your mind’s eye!) onto paper or any other surface.

On the last day of July this year, I attended the Art as Essential to Survival: Healing through the Arts Workshop, one of the dialogues at the first ever Modern and Contemporary Art Festival (MoCAF).

Last March 25 and 26, I joined the Summer Create run of BGC Art Mart at the BGC Arts Center. It was my first time again to join an in-person art fair after two years, so I was a little bit wary again of interacting with people. There’s the risk still always of getting infected. But safety protocols were placed as always for everybody’s safety!

We have a new ginger kitten brought in by Half Moon.

His name is Kyo, named after a favorite character of mine from the manga/anime Fruits Basket. (He would turn into a ginger cat when hugged by a person of the opposite sex!)

My Mom and I would feed Kyo in small portions of food that’s easy for a kitten to chew, swallow, and digest. One pack would be good for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

A writer spends most of the time in her head, with the characters she’s still getting to know and the world she’s trying to build. She stares at a blank screen or a blank page for a long while, thinking of how to construct a sentence or shifting through metaphorical file cards in her mind for another word for ‘said.’

“Bonnie! Bonnie!”

I kept calling Bonnie within our vicinity. I checked the usual places she’d be in—the bushes, under the car, in the trellis—but to no avail.

Cats arrive in our lives when it’s time for them to arrive, and we read books when it’s time for us to read them. A contract between fate and a series of our decisions lead us to meet.

Should you find yourself in a writing rut, dreams are brimming wells of bizarre and nonsensical material (some are sensible though and connected to reality) and inspiration for a story.

I’ve always thought that the word confidence wasn’t good. Being confident wasn’t something that I aspired to be, because I thought that if I were more confident, then it would make me arrogant and full of myself.

I wrote the text above from a writing prompt I did for myself last August 2020. I listed down words for each day of August, and then I would come up with something that should include those words.

During the last days of the year, in our living room with the warm light pouring in the from the window, I sat on a white chair before a small working table. I laid out a sheet of paper towel on it, brought out the air dry terracotta clay we bought months ago that I never got to use immediately, and began kneading it, molding it, trying to discover what creature was inside the clay, what it would become in my hands.

Eventually, I found out about Schoolism too when I was in college if my memory serves me right.

Think of Schoolism as an online art school where your mentors are award-winning, talented, and hard-working artists in the industry.

And when there’s school, there’s homework!

It all started when I messaged an online friend whom I met through Arriane Serafico’s Respark your Goal challenge. I knew her as Ate Joyce Melegrito a.k.a. Cloudybazookas. I think it was around December 2017 when I asked her if she was going to Komiket: The Filipino Art and Komiks Market in Febuary 2018 as an exhibitor.

And just this afternoon, I finished my annual report for my venture into becoming a full-time artist.

Because I wanted to be productive and answer the call of writing and illustrating a book this quarter of 2017, I decided to finally try my hand at self-publishing a book of short stories and prose.

For this week, I will be sharing a GIF on my step by step process on my artwork entitled Running.

Because I want my art to be centered on something good and true and for me to not get sidetracked doing things that God would not want me to do, I decided to write a Personal Mission as an Artist.

After I greeted her and encouraged her to chase her dreams, she told me to do so too, along with these words that helped me see the relationship between our life and our art:

“Your work tells a lot about your journey.”

As I typed the welcome message of the home page, I was wary at first when I put ‘artist.’ Well, I am always wary of having to use the word ‘artist’ associated with me.