I’m Very Creative!

I’ve always been a creative person because both of my parents were creatively gifted and greatly encouraged it. I joke that my mom wouldn’t have allowed me to grow up to be anything else because she had me illustrating my own bedtime stories when I was 3, and encouraged me to marry a doctor or lawyer so I could be an artist or writer when I grew up. I also hung around the back of my mom’s wallpaper store a lot growing up, where she taught other women folk art painting at night, after the store was closed, like a secret coven of cackling witches. My mom never really taught me how to do anything, not on purpose anyway, and she NEVER shared her art supplies, but she gave me the freedom to use my imagination, and encourages creativity in all facets of life, to all people. Because of this, I’ve developed a healthy appreciation for most forms – or even attempts – of artistic expression. Even the bad ones.

I started making art and selling it on the internet sometime around 2001, starting with hand-painted, wooden boxes and assemblages, and finally moving onto mixed media paintings on canvasses a year later.

A lot of my early imagery was fetuses and bleeding uteri, as I had been dealing with endometriosis my whole adult female life and had just become a mother for the second time, which was a bigger life altering decision than having the 1st one somehow. I got some commissions, which paid for more art supplies, and being a camgirl, I had a “fan”/internet friend who would send me art supplies from Curries, a local art store that figured out online shopping pretty early on. This allowed for paint and canvasses to be less “precious” and for me to experiment more, for which I was grateful.

At the same time, I was also experimenting with digital photography in a multitude of ways from using my own 1st digital camera (a 1.3mp Sony CyberShot), to using many different webcams to explore instant digital photography via camming, to borrowing floor model cameras from my husband’s job at Black’s Photography and doing photo shoots in my grama’s mattress storage room after hours. I loved taking pictures and posting them on the internet just as much as I loved painting pictures, and painting just gave me more things to take photos of!

In 2007-ish, I took an online art class where the instructor taught us how to draw a face with eyes that weren’t googly. This was groundbreaking for me because I’d had all these ideas for girls that looked a specific way in my head for years, but until then, had no way of translating them into a tangible form.

My paintings always had sparkly, splattered, metallic backgrounds made from homemade glitter paints, and the girls themselves were watercolour paper dolls with hand-painted bodies, and dresses made of layers of scrapbook papers. Often they’d have embellishments such as Swarovski crystals for bindis or magic wands, or coloured tulle or metallic embroidery floss sewn into the canvas for skirts and bodices.

As the years went by, my girls evolved quite a bit. The eyes remained the same, but the distance between the eyes and the nose and mouth decreased little by little until their current iteration where there’s very little space at all because I realized a smaller “chin” and bigger forehead made for a cuter look. I also stopped painting white girls exclusively and tried to branch into different skin tones. What if that fairy was black and had poofs? What if that princess was brown and had a bindi? People were already buying my paintings for little girls’ rooms, so I figured I’d paint things for all girls. These non-white glitter girls never really found homes unfortunately, and most of them live in my storage room to this day.

The whole 13 years I painted my girls, I took the odd commission and sold them in my Etsy shop and on my website, but never really met with any commercial success. I was in a few art shows in Toronto for artists with bipolar disorder, called Touched By Fire, and a few more that I paid a fee to be in, plus one local studio tour, but I officially painted my last glitter girl paintings in 2020, during the pandemic and I’m currently in the process of gifting everything I have left to new friends and long time supporters.

In 2015, I started drawing my girls, rather than just painting them, and this allowed me the freedom to put them in actual scenarios. I realized that, while I got in trouble all the time for things I wrote, I’d never really gotten any grief for anything I’d ever drawn or painted, and I wanted to see how far I could push that. I started drawing my girls in all kinds of fucked up scenarios, like lighting caterpillars, men or orphanages on fire, or decapitating people and putting their heads on pikes.

The response to these black & white drawings was pretty positive, so for several years, I drew and uploaded them to Patreon for people to download as PDF colouring pages.

In 2017, I had a solo art show at a cannabis vapor lounge in Barrie, Ontario, where I displayed my colouring pages poster-size and in 2019, I published some of them as a colouring book, called “The SunnyGrrrl Colouring Book”, which is available on all the Amazons.

Just before the pandemic started, I bought a lower end Samsung tablet and cheap stylus pen, and tried to embrace digital art, but found the apps available at the time to be very rudimentary, and the pen not responsive enough to draw my girls. All I drew was animals and dumb little cartoons that entertained my Facebook friends, but I never really really connected with the medium, and I couldn’t draw my girls, so I just thought digital wasn’t for me.

However, in 2020 I inherited my (now former) husband’s iPad Mini, a patron sent me her 1st generation Apple Pencil, and I discovered the Procreate app, which changed the game for me completely because the Apple Pencil is just as responsive as a real pencil!

Suddenly I was able to draw my girls in a whole new, “perfect” way, which made me fall in love with them again! I would no longer have to worry about erasing too many times and leaving marks or indents on the page that I’d have to photoshop out later and I could draw in colour! No more black lines! Mistakes and experiments were much less costly with digital, and more was possible, so I began drawing this way exclusively and stopped drawing colouring pages altogether. Colouring pages had just been a byproduct of drawings I was doing anyway, so they made sense, but now that I could draw in colour, they weren’t a byproduct, and I didn’t enjoy drawing them as much, so I abandoned them for digital altogether.

Drawing digitally meant that I could make killer t-shirts and merch through Threadless, an old-as-me t-shirt website, so I drew all kinds of things and made products from duvets, to shower curtains, to throw pillows, to t-shirts and notebooks under the SunnyGrrrl brand. To date only a handful of people have actually purchased any of it, mostly because I’m terrible at actually telling people about it or doing the whole self-hype thing. It feels disingenuous and I feel like other people find it off-putting unless it’s something overwhelmingly amazing or the advertisement done really well. I went to college for advertising, and I can sell other people’s stuff really well, but if there’s something in it for me, I just can’t do it. So I moved on from just doing t-shirts and merch, and started making NFTs out of my digital work, and vintage webcam photos as well.

Digital allows me to play with things that just aren’t possible with analog art, like video and animation, which I’m just beginning to explore. I’ve always had a YouTube channel, and I’ve always made art videos, but they were of me making art, not of moving art. Making animated gifs of my art for Twitter has been rewarding with the little bit I’ve done so far and I hope to explore animation further because I find it hard af but gratifying! Hopefully one day, with a bit more practice, it’ll be easier and I’ll be better at it!