Do Not Feed OCD

I made this as a reminder to not feed OCD by giving into compulsions, whether that's asking for reassurance, giving it to someone else, or a whole host of other compulsions. Response prevention is how you starve OCD and break the cycle! The animal I chose to represent OCD is a mouse, because a friend calls their OCD "little mouse" as in "If you give a mouse a cookie..." Anyone who wants to put this somewhere as a reminder for themselves or others is welcome to. Feel free to contact me to ask for specific aspect ratios.

Pill Tracker

This Notion template is designed for people who take many pills at a single time, multiple times a day, and want to keep track of all that. It includes the ability to see when you'll need refills. Just for fun, it includes calculation of how much of a med is in your system based on the half life you enter in. It's free to download, and it's received three reviews, all 5 stars. In my humble opinion, it's the best medication tracker on Notion, at least last I checked.

thalamus

Certainty

I call this one certainty because of the way the eye interacts with it. Try it: how long can your eye stay in the calm and light of the center before it's drawn into the chaos all around? In my experience, a temporary feeling of certainty is achievable through compulsions, but it's always temporary. There's always chaos again, until one stops seeking certainty at all.

ADHD Energy

This piece emerged organically and energetically using the blending modes in Adobe Illustrator. I feel it captures the energy and excitement that's centered in my chest and flies all around when I'm pursuing a new project, spurred on by my ADHD. It connects to my value of Magic, where I am the fulcrum by which things become more than they are. It is one of my favorite ways to be.

Autistic Monthly

This fictional magazine cover was made in Adobe Photoshop for a class assignment, at a time when I was becoming more firm in my Autistic identity. I would love it if such a magazine existed! Photo credit to fidget circle on Flickr.

Poppy and Bee

For this digital painting, I started with a photo I took at a local garden of a bee in a poppy in the middle of the day. The harder light lent simpler colors, but still enough to be interesting, plus the lovely spectral highlights on the bee's wings. To make the painting, I zoomed in until I was seeing individual pixels and then began a process of retexturing the image on a new layer using a colored pencil brush.

Geometric Hummingbird

Before this assignment, I thought art was something I couldn't do. Much to my surprise, it received a lot of positive feedback from my class, and my life has been different ever since.

Protest at Pride

For this piece, I made a color stripe pattern based on the original Gilbert Baker pride flag, where each color had a meaning, before the colors were changed and cheapened for commercial appeal. A single woman holds these colors against a backdrop of the time I marched with Google for Pride.

Cumulus

Office Meltdown

I believe this captures the feeling of a meltdown, when the demands of conformity in an office setting and the buzzing bright overhead lights become too much to bear and it feels like you're on fire.

Desert Aurora

This piece was made using basic selection tools and adjustment layers, which was what I knew how to do at the beginning of my class on Photoshop. I tried a few variations of what this should be, and ended up with this one.

Eye Me

This postcard was created for my page layout class, informed by a trip I took to SFMOMA. It's based on the exhibit "Eye Me" by Zanele Muholi.

NeuroQueer Website

This project is in progress. I'm redesigning the website for NeuroQueer.org, an online community of neurodivergent adults that I'm a part of. Take a look at what I've got so far!

Hard Light

Courtney Pen & Ink

This digital painting uses a pen & ink technique to portray my cat Courtney when she was feeling photogenic. To make it, I zoomed in and made the strokes where the fur was in my reference image of her. For the record, she is a lovely cat who will purr just from looking at you.

Contemplative Quill

My sweetest cat, Quill, was a wonderful and cooperative model for the photo shoot for this one. This was the first piece I made consciously using Bezier curves, with the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator.

Towel

This piece was made in Photoshop based on a picture I took of a towel that was hanging on my bedroom door. To make it, I zoomed in and made strokes where the fibers of the towel were, with longer and more concentrated strokes where there is more shade.

Concentric

This piece was made during an OCD support group based on the poem by Rumi, "Zero Circle."

Dysregulated

Fibonacci & You

In this assignment for a page layout class, we were tasked with creating a postcard based on a template by Adobe in Adobe InDesign. I chose the text, the colors, and the images, and came up with what I think is a cohesive whole that guides the eye of the viewer in a pleasing way.

Color of Life

The assignment here, for my page layout class, was to create magazine pages for the California Academy of Sciences. They had a lot of great content on their website, which I used here. I'm pleased with how this page turned out.

I Felt a Funeral

In this project, I chose to illustrate the last stanza of Emily Dickinson's "I Felt a Funeral" by giving the words visual actions. I chose "I Felt a Funeral" because of how the poem conveys my experience of OCD. I once got stuck repeating it in my head, until I found the significance of the "then—" which places the funeral at a point in time and provides a bridge to the next thing.

Filoli Flyer

For a page layout class, I created a flyer for Filoli, a local historic estate. I lucked out and found a package of graphic design resources for Filoli specifically, which made my job easy here. Everything in this flyer was taken from there, except the basic template which is from Adobe.

Waterfront Watercolor

This piece has a photo I took at sunset in Foster City on one layer, and then uses a series of layer masks to create a watercolor effect.

Gentle