I am MK and Welcome to Draw Daily!
Hi ~ I’m MK
Hello Fellow Arters!
If you are new and don’t know me, first, hi, how are you? And second, I am MK of Draw Daily.
If you have seen me around the internet, you’re probably from Pencil Kings, but my name is Michaela, and my middle name is Katrina. I decided to use “Michaela Katrina” as my identity on the internet/as an artist and I’ve come to abbreviate my name down to MK, so that my signature is a lot easier to write and read.
A LITTLE BACKGROUND INFO
I guess I should start with the fact that I have been an artist my whole life. I have documented drawings that go as far back as when I was two years old. I’ve been drawing and painting for as long as I can remember, but my true journey started in 2014. I had been done with college for a few years at this point - and, no, I did not go to school for art. My education was in business management - something I use everyday - and audio engineering; a field that I never ended up in, despite my love for it. Anyway, I was done with school, and I suddenly found that I had time to really dedicate myself to my art for the first time.
This brought me to Pencil Kings, an art education website and I fell in love with it. It was some time in 2015 that I actually started to work for Pencil Kings and it was this choice that started my journey towards being an art educator. I was just a Community Manager where my obligations were basically to just moderate and communicate. But over the years, I was able to use my free time to really learn art fundamentals both through the website I worked for, and supplementing my education with various books and other things. Due to this, I was able to slowly start giving feedback to the students, which grew into me creating some educational content for the community, and now my job has evolved so I am now the onsite instructor and mentor along side my managerial obligations.
At the tail end of 2017 I decided that I wanted to start my own website but I only had a few very fragmented ideas as to what I wanted to do with it. But in a nutshell that’s how I got here, to Draw Daily. So I started the process of documenting my knowledge as well as continuing to dig deeper to better understand the subjects I wanted to teach. Although it’s been a few years - I mean it’s been a very slow process of getting all my thoughts together and here is why…
MY DISABILITY
In the interest of being completely transparent, my slow progress is largely due to my disability. Mine isn’t one that you will often see, and most people with my condition don’t experience it the same way I do; I have sever insomnia, and this can only be managed through medication. The subject of insomnia hasn’t been greatly researched, so the exact reasons why my body doesn’t function like most people’s is unknown. This is very frustrating because even I can’t explain my own disability, or even begin to understand how it works.
All that I know is that I don’t function at the same level as most because, along with insomnia, I suffer from chronic fatigue - which is something else we don’t know much about. The chronic fatigue is what really gets me. It’s hard to explain, but due to my extreme weariness I am very tired all the time and my brain can’t always function too well. This really translates into… my productiveness from day to day can vary dramatically depending on how well I was able to sleep, and how bad my fatigue is.
Some days I’m able to have a totally typical day. I am able to get my work done, I’m super productive, I can think clearly and articulate my thoughts. But I’m more likely to have days where I’m very foggy. I may have a hard time carrying a conversation, I might not be able to explain or articulate my thoughts, like… at all, and what ends up happening is that most of the day goes by without me even noticing. I get to the end of the day and I can’t explain what I did. Some days I’m the living embodiment of paint drying.
This means that it takes me much longer to perform mentally taxing tasks, which is basically anything I have to think through to complete. A great example of this would be writing. Writing makes up most of what I need to do in order to teach, putting my thoughts together, writing out information, writing blogs, writing up scripts for videos or classes, putting it all together and documenting the whole process. All of this takes me much longer to do than it would for most people - thus my agonizingly slow process.
DRAW DAILY
I have more than a few reasons as to why I started Draw Daily. I wanted one place where all of my work could be collected, where I would be able to refer back to my own discoveries, thoughts, and other information, but I also wanted a place where I could send my students instead of relying on other websites to provide the educational information I wanted them to have access to.
With that being said, my current goal for Draw Daily is to eventually put together two primary resources. One is a series which will focus on how to draw, and the other is a class that teaches Color Theory based on the exploration of watercolor.
TACKLING HOW TO DRAW
Drawing has been a passion of mine, and a skill that I’ve been trying to improve upon for a very long time. To set up what I’m about to explain, it might be useful to know that I’m just old enough to remember what life was like before the the internet. When we finally did have the internet in my house, it was not the treasure trove it is today - so as a young teenager there weren’t many resources that could help me learn to draw. High school and college were complicated and it wasn’t until a few years after I graduated that the world of online education really opened up to me.
This is a big reason as to why I started Draw Daily. I wanted to bridge the gap between all the information the internet has to offer and the beginner artist who is just as confused today as I was when I started this journey as a kid. What took me decades to learn, doesn’t need to be as complicated as it ended up being for me.
TACKLING WATERCOLOR
Watercolor was a medium that just made sense to me, but as a kid in the 90’s I wasn’t exposed to much information and there were a few facts that would take me years to learn on my own. As I got older, I started to fight watercolor because I was growing as an artist, but my practical watercolor knowledge was holding me back. Now that I’ve figured some of the basics and because I see a lot of people struggling with the same problems I had, I have been inspired to try and help.
But I’ve found my true calling in the exploration of color, and when I’d sat down with some people who had been using watercolors their whole lives, they admitted that they had never explored their watercolor palettes to their fullest extent. They didn’t know what their paints were capable of doing and so, when they sat down to paint they would spend most of their time trying to correct their color mixes and only a fraction of that time was actually spent painting.
MOVING FORWARD
As you can see, no matter how slow the progress has been, I have been able to start sorting through everything I know, figuring out the bits and pieces, putting them all together, and can now see where it is I want to go. I’m starting to move forward which is why I’m at the point that I can write this in anticipation of starting my journey of providing an art education for others.
FIN
I think this is where I am going to end it for now, as I don’t have much more to say about myself and I’m ready to start diving into some of the subjects I anticipate helping my current and future students with.
Thanks for reading this blog post all the way to the end, if you did. To anyone still reading, please share with me your experiences, either what it you would like to learn, what topics you’ve been struggling with, or anything else you might want to share or elaborate on. I would love to hear from you in the comments below.
That’s it for today, thanks for reading!
I’m MK and this is Draw Daily!