My hobby during lockdown was doing art and I did this is two ways generally. I drew a lot of art in my sketchbooks and during quarantine I developed a set of original characters over the course of time, and developed them and made a backstory and continually improved and worked on their designs. I feel like I improved in my character designs skills and making them more unique and interesting looking, as well as not doing same face syndrome as much as I figured out different styles of drawing eyes and used shape theory to reflect my characters personalities. I had the previous experience of spending years of doing self taught art but over the quarantine I really got to focus and use my alcohol markers again and work on making more detailed illustrations with backgrounds. My art had been getting stagnant due to my lack of time to spend attention on it and my character designs were staying the same and I was having trouble creating new ones. So I’m happy I used quarantine to develop new ideas!
My other hobby was sewing as I created a pair of patch pants. I’ve never made patches or sewn them on pants before but I found some motivational punk posts online about how it’s easy to do and it inspired the good old DIY folk punk ethic in me. So I cut up a pair of old leggings I dont use and drew band names and song lyrics on them with paint markers. Then i arranged, pinned, and sewed them onto my pants. It took me a week to do the whole process as I was doing 10 patches all together going step by step instead of one patch at a time. Now that quarantine is over I wear these pants all the time and love them. I’ve developed my skills since then and learned to embroider in order to make my pants stand out more and bolden the lines and it’s been a difficult skill to learn but it was really exciting. I could see my improvement on my pants as my pants had different embroidery levels on different patches as I improved so I can see my learning journey on them.
