visual art

my take on art

Art has never come naturally to me. When I try to draw a line on paper, it comes out swiggly, scraggled—every nook and bend a deviation from my original intention, made unintelligible by my poor motor skills. I tried in vain to learn art on physical surfaces a few years ago. I eventually accepted that failure, but the desire to give real shape to the mental representations in my mind never ceased.

On my laptop, I often used the markup tool to highlight, circle, make notes. These became what I used to create moving borders on climate maps, imagining them as nations fighting to subjugate the planet under one climate. Hitting ctrl+Z could reverse all of this, leading to the fall, the reverse conquest of an empire that had previously risen to continental or global dominance. Using the tool at such a zoomed-in level made the changes pixelated, blurring into existing colors in a matrix that seemed at once glitchy and beautiful.

On my Mac, I zoom all the way into a background image, then activate markup—this creates the pixelated style. You have to go through multiple edits of the same thing to get it right because you can't draw over previous markups. I find it fun, though, like crafting something piece by piece, working with the tiniest fragments of an image to assemble a whole.

The pixelation comes from being so zoomed in. Every stroke feels like carving a little chunk of reality from the digital ether, like a sculptor shaping a statue from a block of pixelated stone. Every layer overlaps, each step adding unique texture, leaving trails of jagged edges and blocky patterns that reveal their true nature only when you zoom out. It's like weaving pieces of something larger, giving it structure while knowing it's made from the smallest details.

Unlike traditional drawing where lines flow smoothly, this feels like stacking bits of chaos and order in tight, limited space—each edit building on the last, creating an abstract but beautiful mess. It reminds me of how nature itself seems pixelated up close, like zooming in on a flower petal or leaf and seeing individual cells, each part of a greater design.

In the end, it's all about the imperfections: the way pixels get slightly misaligned, the way one mark bleeds into another, and how the whole becomes something I never could have planned perfectly. I realize my "failure" with traditional art wasn't failure at all—it's just a different process, one that works through digital exploration rather than brushstrokes.