Sep/Oct 2025: Acrylics and cut outs

From the ToyBox, a blog post from Suzana about recent real media work!

Hello! The last year has been wild, between the release of the first book and helping family take care of a new baby (another beautiful niece!), I've been grinding out comic pages as soon as I have time to sit down at a computer. A lot of time away means I don't sketch as much on the computer lately...

But, the nice thing about that is I've been expanding into real media again! I always find it makes coming back to drawing on the computer so much faster and helps me improve some things I hadn't thought of before (noticing differences in the backgrounds lately?).

I'll share the cool things I've made over the last year, though unfortunately it requires me to depend on my phone taking pictures, so pardon the quality!

This was a quick card I made for my mom of her three cats at one of the windows in her house, my first time playing with acrylic markers and it was a fun experiment ♥

As I was warming up trying to get used to acrylic painting again, I was taking some requests from family. This was a little Christmas tree on a cutting board (as part of a gift to another family member), it was a good warm up! I was limited on the brushes I had since this was my first acrylic painting in a long time, but I bought a new set for my birthday so I can expand that more. ♥

This was a gift for one of my sisters-in-law, she requested the terrapins from a Grateful Dead song. I know nothing about them, but I do love painting turtles!

This one I just finished a few days ago, another gift for a family member. Wood is such a new medium for me to paint on, but I liked the texture it added. I might try some more birds in the future, last time I drew them was for Atwater's wall art.

I whipped out the acrylics because I was drawing with cheap crayola pencils before, which were really fun but definitely made me want to upgrade (mostly because the pencils were hurting my hands haha). This was a request for our two-year-old niece of her favorite Frozen characters together. I wish I had a better picture of it without shadows, but it's now up on her wall♥

I never shared these anywhere, but last year I did some cut out large paper dolls of the Sesame street characters for her birthday, too. I had a lot of fun making them, all of her friends were taking pictures in front of their favorites. I had so much fun making them that I made one more...

A large Grinch cut out with a tree and presents for the local hospital to put up on their wall. It was a lot of fun, too! And enormous. You can see a little peek of my shoe trying to stand on a bench to get a good overhead shot of it on the left, and a work in progress shot of the face and neck on the right. I left it able to be attached with velcro on the joints so it would be repositioned around every time they went to hang it up, so hopefully it'll last them a few years!

I'll hopefully have some more computer drawn works soon to share! We have a visit to New York this weekend for NYCC, which I'll post about on the main feed soon as well.♥ Much love to you all!