Sickbed Artistry

I have been down and out with a serious urinary tract infection the last two weeks. That overlapped the flu-like virus that had me down for the weeks prior. There is not a lot you can accomplish when you are too sick to even get out of bed. I watched a lot of streaming-service television and used my computer to do a lot of drawing. I really like the first final version I posted above. It is a picture of my posable plastic doll Ariel. I have two other similar-sized dolls, Nicole and Tom Sawyer, who are not posable and made out of porcelain. So, Ariel is my artist’s model more often than the other two.

I never had a fever while I was ill, but some of my medication caused dizziness and the inability to avoid passing out for five to ten minutes at a time. But initially, I created the outline directly above by putting the photo of Ariel on my drawing pad app and tracing features in the layer I placed on top.

This is, of course, the actual photograph used. I did draw over it leaving out Pluto and Mickey due to copyrighted character concerns.

I used colored paints in the drawing app to fill in the outline with color, but my arthritis in fingers and wrists makes it look crude and childish compared to what you see above. So, I use the anime-style overlay in the AI Mirror App to make it come out properly shaded and blended. The colors may appear a little off to you. But that would be because I am somewhat colorblind (red-and-green-scale colorblind) and can’t accurately judge between orange and carmine red, or rust brown and siena brown. I am doing a lot of guessing. You can also see that I change the background with Picsart AI Photo Editor.

Drawing in this way got me through a few difficult days.