The Mental Menagerie

★🕸️༓*⁺‧͙Melissa 18+ artist‧͙⁺˚༓🕸️★ ✧⁺˙⊹.⁺🕯𓍊𓋼⁺-art student- 𓍊𓋼🕯⁺⋆˙✧˙⋆⁺

[the-mental-menagerie]

hello! I'm Melissa, a multimedia art student, and I just wanted to give some time to welcome all my new followers and thank everyone who has been enjoying and sharing my work.

I'm still new to a lot of these skills but I'm grateful to see so many people appreciating the work I've done so far.

My photography is also best viewed if you turn your brightness up and feel free to zoom in.

I put together a short little animation video with a couple of alternate styled gifs as a welcome and also to make a brief announcement:

that I will be working over the summer to keep uploading more of my work from the last couple of semesters and I may also be working on a new sticker set soon that I will add to either my etsy or I will try to add a shop page to my portfolio website.

another quick note: I have been in the middle of rebranding currently since I am a student trying to refine my work. so my url and other aspects of my blog will likely be changing soon. I will make a post about that before it happens but wanted any new followers to be aware ahead of time, especially when I will likely change names. this url was mainly meant as a placeholder for my evolving style.

anyway, thank you again for viewing this blog!

[the-mental-menagerie]

wanted to give an update on how this is going, in case anyone was wondering basically all I've been doing for like the past day and a half is drawing tree branches. finally fixed Alucard with a few things. I did take some liberties with the lack of detail for his hair though.

[the-mental-menagerie]

stuck inside all day bc of the heat so I'm going to possibly try to finish up this drawing today so I can start on the pen work hopefully.

[the-mental-menagerie]

castlevania screencap redraw progress after 50000 redraws of those night creatures fucking hell. got some fixes to make for Alucard but for rn I'm just focusing on the background. probably going to finish this with pen and probably colored pencil. might go charcoal though since something about Alucard just seems like that medium would be fitting

[the-mental-menagerie]

so tried redoing that piece but my better paper is too tall lmao so back to the original I guess. the one thing that kinda sucks about doing a redraw of digital art as a traditional art piece is that you can't just alter the canvas size like they probably did for this. so I am cutting out at least one of the night creatures bc it's just gonna look too condensed otherwise. although I'm sure that probably not what people are going to interested in anyway lmao but that does explain why the grid method wasn't working so smaller night creatures it is.

[the-mental-menagerie]

realized the dimensions of the sketchbook I started that Alucard drawing on are not right for the scene so I can either condense it or I'm thinking I may start it over on my better paper and do a proper piece with it and use either my colored pencils or possibly pastels. ughhh fuck this blonde bastard I'm probably gonna start it over

[the-mental-menagerie]

𓍊𓋼 a lovely red rainy day mushroom from my walk 𓋼𓍊

[the-mental-menagerie]

rainy vines climbing a baby oak tree in the yard

[the-mental-menagerie]

progress on my castlevania screencap redraw WIP

[the-mental-menagerie]

I don't usually post wip but I was really excited about this castlevania one I just started that's still super rough. not very used to drawing people so I thought a screenshot redraw would be good practice and Alucard is very good inspiration

[the-mental-menagerie]

moodboard for my trifold project, the Tulgey Woods Tea Room

[the-mental-menagerie]

another from page design class for a trifold brochure. this one was meant to be for an Alice in Wonderland themed tea room called Tulgey Woods Tea Room, images from adobe stock

[the-mental-menagerie]

mockuo for my menu design

[the-mental-menagerie]

Bitte menu design moodboard, we had to create these for everything. all images from adobe stock

[the-mental-menagerie]

more from my page design class, my menu design project. for this one I wanted to do a vampire/dracula inspired restaurant since this project was due I think on halloween. the logo, name, and embellishments were all hand drawn bc I could not find ones that matches what I was going for here. the logo is meant to be a fang cocktail glass and personally I thought the name was rather clever. all the pictures were from adobe stock

[the-mental-menagerie]

dreamy view from underneath my favorite tree, the massive oak in our yard

[the-mental-menagerie]

moodboard requests can be anything btw, as long as it's SFW, since this blog is part of my class portfolio