Hey there reader, thanks for dropping by. My name is Eli and this is my first blog post!

Here’s a bit about me and what you should expect to find here.

About Me: my name is Elisha but I go by Eli Shaw, a breakdown of my first name in homage of Stan Lee aka Stanley Leiber.

From: I’m a Canadian resident that’s lived all around the GTA from Sauga, to B-town, Toronto, and Oshawa.

Edu: I went to North York for years where I studied Visual Arts and Art History before dropping out. Since then I’ve worked at numerous different jobs where I’ve learned valuable lessons and met many different people.

Interests: I love many things; I grew up on comic books, cartoons and anime. In school I quickly became fascinated by animals, plants, dinosaurs and the natural world as a whole. As I grew up and became enthralled by storytelling and fantasy an obsession with the solar system and outer space was forming as well.

Artistic Process: My range of mediums of expression range as vastly as my interests. I began with drawing in pencil in notebooks and on my desk in school. Eventually middle and high school art class broadened my toolset and introduced me to a variety of art forms. After spending time in and out of university I’ve gravitated towards a familiar process that includes a combination of pencil, ink, watercolour, pencil crayon and markers.

I usually like to incorporate a written aspect either found and extracted from print or written myself and added directly to the image or act as an accompanying piece.

I work this way for 2 reasons: the first is that I have ADHD and this allows me to work on multiple different pieces for a single project preventing me from getting bored or stuck. The second reason is that I love the combination of words and images from reading speech and thought bubbles in comic books to studying the diagram of an animal or plant’s anatomy.

I also do digital art in illustrator, photoshop, some photography and dabble in writing and producing music.

That’s a pretty quick summary of who I am, my interests and my creative process. You’ll definitely get to know me better as I share more of this journey. Onto to the why aspect of this blog.

Why a blog? Why now? There’s a few reasons why I decided to create this blog but the main reason was the fact that Instagram went down the few weeks prior to me making this choice. I am most active on Instagram and it is the closest thing I have to an online portfolio, which got me thinking.

I also made a decision last year to be more active and be more authentic on social media, I didn’t like how I was hiding myself and observing with envy. I’ve since been updating my followers on my exercise journey, face and hair routine, dietary goals, my style choices, travels and more.

I’ve really enjoyed engaging with my followers more and being more present on Instagram as I’ve formed some very deep, meaningful, and fulfilling friendships despite being separated by COVID.

With that said I do feel the need for deeper connections yet, an opportunity to share more in depth? Perhaps I’m narcissistic but Instagram feels like a brief glimpse. I don’t necessarily care for anyone else to read this either, it’s more so for me I suppose? To document, to make sense and significance of my existence?

The best way to describe is that my Google photos drive is full of photos and files and memories but I never have time to go through them. When I go on Instagram I’m intrigued for a moment by others but when I scroll through my own feed I’m excited again and truly interested, again perhaps it’s self obsession.

Regardless, this is to help me organize my moments and memories intimately and honestly whilst also creating a portfolio, centralized feed, and online store hopefully.

In Summary: blogs will be written thought pieces that I’ll one day possibly regret but oh well, sneak peaks of works in progress, and occasional life updates. We’ll see how this goes! ✌🏾