How I Arted
My first painting for a gallery exhibit (ft. AI, mental struggles, and photos galore)
My art was exhibited for the first time on February 1, 2025 😮
“Heading South” is acrylic1 on 16×20in canvas. It is featuring for the next 11 months in Phoenix, Arizona before returning to me.
I’m self-taught and paint as a hobby, though I do sometimes sell my work. (Fun fact, the first time I made money as a teenager was through art commissions. Should’ve become a “make your first dollars online” influencer, but alas.)
This project happened when a local foundation partnered with an arts nonprofit to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its scholarship program. To honor its scholars, the foundation invited artists to create works inspired by the scholars’ journeys. I submitted a portfolio, was selected, and had three months to interview my assigned scholar and complete a piece for a celebration exhibit.
I’ve split this reflection into two sections, one about the background (and how I almost quit) and one about the actual painting process.
Please enjoy this photo essay!
Background (Prep Work and Psychological Blockers)
Early November: Start
I was paired with a scholar named JK. In the first two weeks, I reviewed the documents JK provided and scheduled an interview with him. The art nonprofit did an incredible job with the pairings. My submitted portfolio featured both dark (horror) and light (nature) pieces, and even before JK and I spoke, I felt an immediate connection to him through his self-introduction. We both carry a sense of loneliness and isolation—a mutual melancholy.
JK has a PhD in Neuroscience and works on AI applications in biology, but his path to tech was atypical. Raised by a single mother, he was the first in his family to attend college. Like me, he has a background in social justice activism and comes from a difficult upbringing. We’re both fish out of water in the tech world.
JK also brings a creative streak, having played the oboe for most of his life. He enjoys musicians such as Zach Bryan and Tyler Childers, who remind him of his American West and country roots. There’s layers to his taste in visual art too, from social commentary pieces by activist-artists like Banksy to the beautiful desertscapes of Andy Brown, Ed Mell, and Mark Maggiori.
When we met for an hour-long call, it felt less like an interview and more like a therapy session. No small talk, just deep conversation.
Afterwards, we communicated through email on ideas for the painting. While I made realistic portrait commissions before, I had yet to make a symbolic piece for anyone.
It was crucial that I properly represented JK.
Late November-Early December: AI ideation and getting stuck
Since the inception of AI, I haven’t gone a day without talking to one. This project was no exception.
I fed JK’s documents and interview notes into ChatGPT 4o, which I’ve named Olive.2
Olive shared an additional list of artists for inspiration. Some, like Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth, easily fit the theme of solitude. Renee Magritte’s lonely surrealism also resonated, especially given JK’s penchant towards reality-bending artists like Banksy.
Olive and I also chatted through ideas like a bunch of crisscrossed roads representing neurons, but in the end, an isolated desert scene seemed most apt.
Armed with a JK inspired Spotify playlist, I started dreaming of deserts.
In mid-December, the dream ended. I got stuck.
Multiple illnesses stacked up, taking me out energetically. But a large part of being stuck was psychological.
Here’s a sample of my negative self-talk:
There’s no way I can make a piece that represents JK
I’m not making an oil painting, which means it’s not a real painting
I don’t really know how to paint with acrylics, wtf was I thinking
Why didn’t I sign up to paint digitally? That’s my usual medium
But also, digital art isn’t real art either
If I use AI to help me with the piece, then it’s definitely not real art
Other chosen artists are professionals. And then there’s me…
They’re going to turn in Van Gogh masterpieces while I turn in slop
I should quit. It wouldn’t be the first time I lost out on a great opportunity
With the worrying lack of progress made through early-mid January, I was given the option to drop out.
Part of me was sorely tempted. But the determined part of me won.
Mid-January: Back on Track
Two strategies helped me: brainspotting and using AI again at a friend’s suggestion
Brainspotting was developed by a psychotherapist and performance coach Dr. David Grand to help athletes and performing artists resolve emotional blocks. It’s sort of like EMDR therapy3 where moving the eyes while recounting specific memories allows the brain to process and release negative emotions.
Just one session unearthed that my negative self-talk was voiced by teenage-me, who used to place her entire self-worth into being a good artist. I reminded her that I’m an adult now; art doesn’t define me the way it used to. It’s just something I do, not a measure of who I am.
A new AI tool also helped jumpstart the process again.
suggested Ideogram as an image generator. Since I pay for ChatGPT and used DALLE-2 in the past to collaborate on NFT art, I thought I’d just stick with it. For the record, OpenAI abandoned DALLE-2 long ago and it really, really shows. Its horrible results didn’t help with motivation at all.Ideogram was a total gamechanger. It makes gorgeous images.
I emailed JK with two ideas, both centered around a single cactus casting a shadow of a man.
The Ideogram scene was simple—a realistic, stoic cactus (shadow not yet included).
My rough sketch showed a cactus casting a man-shaped shadow against a landscape painted on a wall, with objects relating to JK in the foreground.
After discussing with JK, who loved the realism of the first, the shadow theme in both, and preferred the second for its “there, but not quite” vibe, I went with the second idea. JK also made the right call to exclude objects tied to him so that the piece would have more universal appeal.4
In combining the best parts of both ideas, Ideogram landed on these two images:
I loved the brightness and colors of the sky in the first reference5 and the framework and shape of the cactus in the second.6
Painting Process
Ok, onto the actual painting!
I cut construction paper with an Exacto knife to map out placements of the ground, cactus, and sky before penciling in the outlines. Peep that extra third arm on the cactus that I nixed ASAP.
For the sky, I leaned on Ohuhu markers to scribble out clouds based on the first AI reference.
Time to paint.
I was slow to even begin, intimidated as I was by the blank canvas.
So I took baby steps. I used neon chalk markers to lay out the brightest areas of the sky and clouds. Seeing even a little bit of good progress gave me courage to go in with the blue acrylic.
Notice in Step 3 how green the sky looks—that’s corrected later.
Step 4 is where things start going wrong: the shadows of the clouds are too muddy and cold. I’m distraught enough over ‘ruining the painting’ that I pause on the clouds for a breather. I needed something easy to do.
So I filled out the ground in Step 5 and used Ohuhu markers to lay out the cactus colors in Step 6.
After Step 6, I performed some research using search terms like “how to paint bright sunset clouds site:reddit.”7 Turns out that I was missing a bunch of important colors! No wonder I couldn’t paint the sky correctly.
I made a pit stop to Michaels for some tubes of paint.
In particular, Opera Pink was a lifesaver. Huge difference in the vibrancy of the clouds in Step 6/7 versus 8!
It was also way easier to mix sky-blue colors with the new paints. Phthalo and Primary Blue just weren’t cutting it.
After I rounded out the clouds and the desert shrubs to my liking, I painted the cactus in Step 9. The Ohuhu markers came in clutch again for adding tiny spikes to the cactus. I did NOT trust the steadiness of my hand with a paintbrush for those details.
A day before the due date, I had one last thing to add: the man shaped-shadow.
This is where I started panicking again.
I returned to the marker-on-paper-cutouts method to mock-up the shadow placements. All the AI images I referenced had very high cast shadows, high enough to obscure the sky and clouds.
The mockups sucked.
Not only did they cover up the bright sky, they were also too goofy looking and made no sense with the lighting. The AI reference picture had strong front-facing portrait lighting, which can cast tall shadows, but my painting had much softer lighting.
In despair, I started Googling shadow references.
Eureka. I found a low angled shadow example.
In the age of AI photography, turns out real photos still reign supreme.
With this reference, I was off to the races again. I mapped out a cutout, took a few photos of the painting sans shadow for good luck, and diluted a dark brown to place down the shadow.
Ta-da, finished!
Since I waited until the literal last minute to paint the shadow, I had just enough time to do a photoshoot of the piece before scurrying to drop off the painting.
Exhibit Opening Night
On the evening of February 1, the exhibit opened.
It was awesome. Probably 300+ people attended, way more than I thought. I invited two of my closest friends to come with me.
JK also attended, bringing his wife and kids. Since I kept the painting a secret, the exhibit was his first glimpse of it. He was thrilled with the result 😀
For the remainder of the evening, I wandered the gallery with my friends, taking in the incredible range of work—paintings, sculptures, poems, and musical pieces, all born from conversations between an artist and a scholar.
When I returned home, I began reflecting.
This project gave me some peak moments: I pushed myself to use new mediums, collaborated with a subject on a symbolic piece, experimented with AI as a creative partner, confronted psychological roadblocks, attended a communal showing with friends, and processed it all through the ultimate muse: writing.
Though I’m unlikely to pursue more gallery exhibitions, this fusion of artistic creativity, technical exploration, and shared experience is something I hope to find again and again, whether in work or in play.
May we all find such magical alchemy in everyday life.
Thanks for the feedback: , , , , , ,
Thanks to for Ideogram, and for the wordplay title, and for the support in Essay Club
And thank you to one of my WhatsApp groups for making this piece its group icon <3
A bit of marker as well, both chalk and alcohol based
ChatGPT gave me input on what name it should have. It likes gender neutral names. I called it Alex for awhile but felt it too pedestrian. Olive it is.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, see Cleveland Clinic
Olive/ChatGPT also suggested leaving out the objects. Olive is a smart cookie.
Prompt: A Mark Maggiori and Ed Mell style of painting of a lone cactus in a vast desert in Arizona. The cactus is surrounded by sand. The sky is filled with large, orange and purple clouds. The horizon line is low. The lighting is dramatic due to the sunset, with the cactus and sand being illuminated, while the sky is darkening
Prompt: A Banksy-style painting of a lone cactus in a bare room. The wall behind the cactus is painted with a vast Arizona desert landscape in the style of Mark Maggiori and Ed Mell, featuring large, orange and purple clouds and mountains in a low horizon. The lighting is dramatic due to the sunset depicted on the painted wall. The cactus casts a shadow which is in the shape of a man against the wall. The cactus itself is painted in a simpler style with fewer colors. The cactus is sprouting a single flower in bloom.
The Reddit part is crucial and why I sadly cannot seem to break my Reddit addiction
…appreciate the behind the scenes…congratulations on the show and experience…painting is really really really cool…
I should probably let you know Lily, This is one of my go-to rereads. Partially because of the title, but partially because I just love reading through the process.