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An illustration of Ellie's profile. She has light skin, long black hair and is wearing a blue hoodie with white fluff on the inside.

made some art about the iberian peninsula by Ellie F. '28

featuring a long winded unedited rundown of the month of january +/- a week

Over break, Iberia Airlines (pretty planes, kinda giving Shell gas station chic) lost my family’s luggage. We ended up spending hours in the Madrid airport (beautiful delicious architecture) trying to figure out what to do, and eventually we got to our hotel. It was Christmas Eve, and we each owned one set of clothes, much like my Oregon Trail family. I play on farmer mode, btw. Not to brag.

Turns out everything is closed on Christmas Day, but we managed to find one Chinese-owned store open to get warmer jackets. On Boxing Day, I got an extra shirt and pair of pants. I had few material belongings, but I was rich in life. Spain and Portugal were beautiful, the Catholics cooked with their cathedrals, and I highly enjoyed traipsing about very small streets and staring out train windows.

Two weeks later, I came back to Boston, still without luggage. I immediately hunkered down to working on web.lab, and then I quickly unhunkered down a week later to spend a long long weekend extending my hospitality to the MIT Mystery Hunt team I run and orchestrating a series of meetups with Mathcampers in town for hunt. Then I locked in on web.lab again. For like two days and then I strayed down the lovely path of Bad Ideas. But after that I went back to web.lab. This inescapable cycle ended about five days before the start of classes, which coincidentally aligned with the end of web.lab.

To make my stance clear, I adored web.lab and learned an astonishing amount from it. This message has been approved by Ellie F. ’28.

Anyway, we are now at the actual point of this blog. I feel like a recipe writer going through my life story before telling you to preheat the oven.

In those last five days, I made all the art I planned for the entirety of IAP. Here it is.

digital painting of the alhambra

yummy yummy underpainting

This is a painting of the Alhambra in Granada. Basically I watched this guy make a landscape study with a bright red underpainting and I was unable to think about anything else until I sat down blacked out for two hours and found this on my iPad.

digital portrait sketches

sketchies!!!

These were made during IAP, but before I got to campus. Basically I have this strat on long plane flights where I make sure to only sleep in my destination time zone. So I drew these sketches of art pieces I saw in Barcelona to bribe my brain awake.

rainbow stained glass

glass 😋

The reason I’m writing this blog is because Ceri mentioned stained glass at our blogger meeting lol. This piece was inspired by the Sagrada Familia windows which completely ruined me for all other cathedrals.

sketch of a narrow street

i LOVe narrow streets and I LOVE HATCHING

Ok confessional: I made and finished this one in December. I worked on this Toledo street drawing mostly while waiting for trains to be ready to depart and sometimes while waiting for my parents to be ready to depart.

rainbow color pencil drawing of a parc guell house

i would also eat this pencil too

I used a Gaudi branded souvenir rainbow pencil for this one. The whole experience was kinda scary because I couldn’t erase.

gouache painting of lisbon

primary colors? also delicious

This is a gouache painting of Praça do Comércio in Lisbon. I lost my gouache kit in the baggage so I had to buy another one. I’m still pretty uncomfortable with this medium because I don’t actually know color theory. It’s fun though and I get paint on my desk :)

The ending of this tale is to reassure you readers that I did actually get my luggage back, about a week after I arrived in Boston.