Years ago, a friend was working on their first novel, and I was helping out with editing and spot illustrations. Unfortunately, it did not get very far, but it was fun while it lasted. This illustration was the first instance where I realized that illustration might be an option for me. I enjoyed the textured inking style I used here, and would definitely like to experiment with it more.

I'm a sucker for unnatural/unique markings on animal characters. It's just fun.

One of my favorite things to do is create animal designs of characters, often cats. This one is my design for Seto and Mokuba Kaiba as cats, and it was my first time using a sketchbook with mixed media paper. Markers work so well on it!

This was my first commission that did not come from someone in my network, and was definitely out of my comfort zone! They asked that I draw their boyfriend's Mandalorian OC and allowed them to get the image printed on a notebook for him. I got excellent feedback, and got to try out drawing some Star Wars fanart, and a gun. Things I do not typically do.

They paid for simple shading and I threw in a simple background, so no super detailed rendering. I ended up having a friend that plays an online game for the series get me some references of the gun so that I could make sense of drawing it, since none of the references I found online were detailed enough.

I'm still proud of this one, Tugger is a cat that seems to change every time I draw him, but this is the model I would like to use (with some improvements now that my skills have advanced) in future drawings. I always pictured the characters as cats that can choose whether to stand up on two legs or walk on four, and over the years have experimented with my approach. I had a TON of fun rentering the fur and markings on this curious cat!

Speedpaint [here.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp3en62civ0)

A request for a friend's niece who is having it rough after a personal loss in the family. I drew her an angel kitten to be her guardian angel.

I learned about gouache through the YouTube art community and picked up a cheap set to try out. I fell in LOVE with it. This painting was in my mixed media sketchbook and was unplanned beyond a simple sketch with a colored pencil. It's not perfect, since it was my first time and spontaneous, but I am in love with how I could get the colors to blend, and leave the painting but come back later to reactivate the other layers and keep working.

I knew that the water-soluble part was a downside going in, so I leaned into it and got some really cool effects that make it almost look digital! Every time I see this one I keep kicking myself for not doing more gouache paintings.

I chose Biyomon because she was not only one of my favorite Digimon as a kid, but also because I still have the toy figure of her on my desk. I didn't know what to paint so I painted what I saw.

Possibly my favorite manga of all is Pandora Hearts and I sadly have lost most of the fanart I did during its hey day. I plan to do more now that my skills have improved, but here we have Alice's beloved cat, Cheshire. I like how the red lighting played against his black fur on this one, as simple as it is. I mainly wanted him to stick out from the black background--he was made for a friend's RP blog.

I saw this really cool urban sketching tutorial where you splatter watercolor onto the paper and then go in after it dries to paint on top of it, so I tried it out. I was inside at work though, so I did not have an urban setting to draw and instead used my imagination. I decided to do a painting of my favorite game of all time, Okami! I basically glazed everything with the colors and then the black lines are watercolor pencil that I activated with my brush to darken. It turned out really cute!

This is one of my first OCs I made for CATS the musical, Pascal. I did not put time into this background at all at the time I colored it, bear with me. He was broken out of a shelter as a juvenile and taken under the wing of Macavity. Over time he rose through the henchcat ranks to become the Mystery Cat's right paw, and one of his most trusted agents. He is determined to beat his boss at cards one day, even though he is well aware that he cheats.

A Cheshire Cat OC for a friend that I designed some time back. He's based on a Maine Coon cat. I believe he was used as a fursona for a time, and the cat boy version was used on Second Life as an avatar.

I have a lot of characters, and I used to make references for them constantly. This is one of my favorites, her name is Phi and she is a munchkin Cheshire cat. Alice in Wonderland implies that the Cheshire Cat is not the only one of his kind, so that's what has spawned this idea! I have several of these characters from over the years, and I certainly need to give them more love. This one is dated 2011.

At Anime Central, I saw a banner of Unico hanging up in the vendor hall and decided to check out the film when I got home, since I had never heard of it. I LOVED it. It was adorable, well animated, and I wanted more. It made my unicorn-loving heart happy! I decided to draw some fanart of him, except looking more horse-like. This was well before I studied horse anatomy and was doing tons of MLP fanart, but I think it holds up! This was done with Copic markers on a little sheet of scrap paper from my college's library.