Back in October or so, I got it into my mind that I wanted to do a little updating of the decor in my bedroom. Now, the room is tiny and I had a rather small budget so it wasn’t a major overhaul so mostly the changes were new set of awesome gray sheets and some hand made, super fancy-ish gray and white chevron stripe pillow shams, but since it had been quite some time since I’d hung anything new on the walls, I decided I’d go a head and rearrange/refresh all the pictures that I have framed and hanging. In the end it turned out that I didn’t have quite enough photographs to fill all the space that I had, so I decided that I would draw something to fit in the empty space. Yay custom artwork!

Since the color scheme in the room leans heavily towards blue, and the majority of my pictures were either quite literally on or directly adjacent to the ocean I thought fish would be a mighty appropriate, fun thing for me to draw. I had three empty frames, so I drew three fish drawings:

Fast forward to slightly closer to Christmas– I was struggling to think of something really cool that I could give to my sister this year because frankly I haven’t been the best gift giver in the past (mostly due to my endless penchant for procrastination) and I wanted to try and make up for my previous failings. Now, we grew up near the ocean but since my sister has moved away. Now she lives quite a long ways away from anywhere where she might smell the salty air and hear the waves, so when I ask what she wants the most common answer has been “something that reminds me of the ocean”. And for that, I wondered, what would be better than a fish!? So, I set out to make her a set of fish drawings similar to the ones I’d done for myself earlier in the year.

I started out by sketching some fish poses in pencil and pen:

of those, I chose my most favorite and drew them individually:

Then I bought some mats and pretty gold frames and framed them myself. Unfortunately I didn’t think at the time to take pictures of them framed, but oh well.

All in all I think this as one of my more successful presents. It felt really good to not procrastinate for once and get something done! I even managed to finish everything and still have time to ship it early enough that it arrived before Christmas!