Artwork
I am a no great artist by any stretch of the imagination but I do love to sketch and create. As a kid I was always drawing with a pencil, it was mainly to emulate the amazing artwork in the Fighting Fantasy books I used to read. I remember that between my best friend and I, we had the whole collection. I wasn't big on reading as a child but once I got my hands on these books, I was hooked.
A few years ago, about the time I was doing a certificate in Social Media Marketing, I created a 'geek' culture themed Facebook page and developed a network with other page owners with similar content. We would promote each others pages and share interesting artwork. This got me back into drawing and I wanted to find an outlet that I could share. This led me into 't-shirt' art. Posting artwork on social media is all well and good but I love the idea of having my artwork on t-shirts, stickers, etc. These days I have been playing with vector graphics, Inkscape is my go to. I usually scan my pencil sketches into the computer and then work on them in Inkscape but recently I have been trying to use digital applications such as Krita using a digital pen/tablet kind of setup. I struggle a bit with the disconnect between pen and screen. The integrated versions are crazy expensive (2025 me with an update - I got an XP Pen Artist 13 tablet on sale at the end of 2024, Its pretty awesome!) and I haven't been able to justify that kind of expense (2025 me - It was on sale and close to Christmas - expense justified!) - as I said, this is a hobby and I'm not looking to turn it into a profession. Especially with all the crazy developments around AI. That may be something I write about in the future but for now I will keep putting my art on t-shirts because it sparks joy!
I have uploaded my art on a couple of sites under the artist name 'Optimapress' - a nickname created by my friends a long time ago: