bad art

Jul 26, 2025

i didn’t why i started art, originally. i just knew that by the time i was ten, i was filling up sketch-books. it was nothing extra ordinary, the shaky house and sun with its weird giggle and those pointy grass. wax crayons whose scent i can still summon if i try hard enough. stick figures with extra limbs. butter yellow sun and a brown house with sloped roofs. the too pink flower with rounded petals— i still don’t which flora its supposed to be based on. it was bad childish art. i was no prodigy, the proportions and colour and even the lines themselves done simply for the joy for having the tools. a paper and the eyes of the child. everything was sunny and the hills are lush and green. everything was a brighter version of itself, a child’s bad art.

i did fall in love— with anything that can distort the world. anything that can make it softer, even if sometimes it outlines were harsh and cruel. i had this phase, where i spent months perfecting Elsa. I’d also use a blanket as a cape and sing let it go. I drew Elsa in pencil, in watercolour and finally some combination of both. Then came roses, oh beautiful roses. it wasn’t that they were the most beautiful flowers to me, it was that it had almost no conceivable symmetry. every tutorial showed a different way to perfect it and that’s where i filled up pages and pages with just roses. imperfect and shitty but slowly they bloomed ( pun intended). you might notice i write under the pen name rose too. i use to start every new sketchbook with drawing roses. i can draw them in five strokes now, in pencil and water and graphite and oil— you get the point.

even then, none of this was in anyway original. i listened to music, opened pinterest and copied whatever caught my eye. those hyper-realistic lips. still oil pastels, where light and shadow seemed to play magic. portraits of all those beautiful models. it was simply fun, to learn lines and colours and make something come to life— sort of. we do love playing god, don’t we?. we love creation, even if it’s a second copy of something already existing. so, when did art actually start to mean something ? when did it become something i made my life, where i cannot look at a sky without drawing constellations not yet existing? big words to ask when did i truly began to create my art?

well, i tried self-portraits.

i think here’s time to show-not-tell. let’s look at the evolution of it, shall we?

tender age of eighteen.

still eighteen— i didn’t have tattoos and my hair was still black.

nineteen— i still didn’t have any tattoos but my frames were black and my hair short.

still nineteen. nose ring and a tattoo.

still nineteen lol

just shy of twenty.

made on my 20th birthday, at 12:50 am.

so— this time, art said something. it meant something. who i wanted to be, how i looked at myself like. embellishments i created in my own mind of myself. of course, this was a natural gateway to really really shitty experimental “original” art. the billionares money laundering through modern art would’ve been proud of me. to suddenly start drawing without any reference pictures, was not a transition i was ready for. i had all these ideas in my head, all these elegant metaphors and colour schemes and i put my pencil and it looked i was five again. bad childish art through tinted lenses.

it may have been bad art, but the point is— it meant something. the scribbles the colours the oddly proportioned object, it was a bad translation of my mind but at least it was an honest one. it didn’t require me out sourcing the effort it takes to think, to draw guidelines i will then ignore, to make outlines, to take a stab at colour theory and fail miserably. point is, bad art is still art. it exists so better art can exist, it exists to hold the thoughts, however rule defying it maybe. i’m not writing to put down ai generated images ( it’s not art, argue with a wall), but to understand and journal how far i’ve come with my art. it’s personal, it’s raw, it’s mine. art has always mine to make. art has always been mine to shape and colour and bring to life the way i want. i don’t think art has to be beautiful at all. i think it simply needs to have something of you in it.

i still use reference images— but the final outcome is mine. the strokes and colours and lines make it mine. sometimes i infuse it with what i feel. there’s nothing in my head but my heart takes over— the art becomes alive, syncing the brush with the beats. sometimes i just draw what i see. but nobody can see exactly what i see, can they? .

in short, i love what art means to me. i love how far i’ve come in its creation. i love that my emotion have a face, that my stories have visuals, that all my dreams can come to life with nothing but a pen.

allow me to share some pieces i made recently, to illustrate what i hope i was able to convey with words ( also just i like sharing my art)