So early 2026 is here, and I’ve been doing exactly what I said I was going to do late last year- start again.

But, to do that, I wanted to curate, but not delete, the digital footprint of my past. Because, well, that was the building blocks, no matter how small, to what made me who I am today.

I started this… monuments but all-too-necessary task last year, even before making my post about letting go. I had quietly removed almost all online traces of my adventures to a land a little too far away.

Most of the posts about it on here have been temporarily moved to the drafts while I made a photo book for a shelf in my hallway, and all instagram photos were saved to a folder on my MacBook, and then archived.

It was when, scrolling through the depths of my Instagram- with my over 400 posts and even more stories saved in dozens of highlights at the top of my page, that I sat back with a rather perplexed look and thought to myself “What value is any of this adding to anyone’s life? Mine included.”

I am not Kim Kardashian. I don’t have millions of followers simply wanting a photo with some half-attempt of a caption. I’m not some Tumblr girl from 2012 with a photo captioned “Might delete” or “I did a thing.”

A grand total of two people can see my Instagram. Two. And the thing is, I don’t want the world seeing me. That’s scary. But, I do want the world to see me. That’s different. I don’t want everyone to see a random selfie from Tuesday in June 2023, that’s not noteworthy. That adds nothing to anyone’s day.

But on the other hand, I couldn’t just leave these mismatched collections of my life rotting away on a social media I simply didn’t use. So, slowly but surely, as I’ve spoken of so many times before, I’m going to take something that’s practically nothing, and turn it into something. Not much, but more than it once was. And that, is everything.

This post, is my artwork. All of it, pretty much. The old, the new, the first, bar a few. I’ve never been much of an artist, but, as you’ll come to see as this post goes on, a lot of it contains so much meaning that it felt only right for them be rehoused here. To be spoken of here. So, they’re coming to live here now. Please make them feel at home.

Here, they shall not rot away into a meaningless void. I can talk about them. The ideas in which they sprouted from, the meaning behind even the saddest ones. And maybe… maybe one day, someone will see something, read something that they will relate to.

And if that gives at least one person inspiration to create, that’s fantastic, and if it gives someone meaning again, that’s even better.

Where My Art Began

I’m not like most people who draw or paint. I have indeed not been drawing since I was small. As a young child, I found drawing a little meaningless, if I’m being honest. Why would I want to ‘scribble on some paper’, when I could write? – that was the logic of younger me.

And even to this day, I see where younger Alex was coming from, in a way. I may not have had much going for me over the years, but I’ve always been a writer. Not too long ago, I curiously asked my mother how long I had been writing for, she smiled and went upstairs and brought downstairs a big blue box.

Inside was well, every single birthday card or memento I had ever gotten for her. And these cards, some over twenty years old- contained poems. Poems that actually rhymed. Poems I wrote before I could even write. Poems that the preschool staff had to transcribe as my handwriting was closer to some sort of abstract art piece, ironically.

But, actually drawing? I had no time for it.

Photography? Sure. Colouring? You bet. But, drawing? For some reason, I hated it.

Until college. Literally. I started an art course in college, at the age of sixteen, simply because I needed to do something. My original plan was to study Creative Writing and Psychology but, my ever deteriorating mental health has strongly taken over every aspect of my life at this point, and my estimated end of school A grades, became Ds and Fs. And I didn’t have the brains, at least on paper, to go on to follow my dreams.

The above two… creations… were not the first pieces of artwork I did in my short time at college. But, they were the first instance, in my entire life where I drew something, stepped back and thought “Oh, maybe I can draw, after all.”

We were all given a box- I think it was a shoe box, and we had to turn it into a bookcase looking thing with shelves or sections, and place all our favourite things in these little shelves. I chose the three things that I loved more than anything at the time

• A train ticket, because, well, trains.

• A KX energy drink

• And, a small octopus keychain that I had named after someone important. Since she couldn’t fit in the box, even if she wasn’t 9,000 miles away, that little keychain had to take her place.

Fun fact: I do still have that keychain! After everything, every decluttering session, every plane journey, every yard sale, every 700+ things I sold online, I never once even thought about getting rid of the octopus.

I placed them on my little shoebox shelf, and I drew to the best of my abilities. And for a first attempt, I don’t hate them.

I had to drop out of college shortly after this, it’s a long story, one left for another day, but I did go to a different college a few years later, again doing art, but that whole season of my life is going to be for another post, one day.

The Place-Inspired Paintings

These were the next paintings I made once I had left college, a few months to a year after making the previous paintings. I had some old books laying around and we had previously done a thing in college where we made collages out of old newspaper and i really liked the aesthetic so I tried to copy it.

The first one I ever made was Perth, obviously. This moved to many different houses with my parents and I, until it eventually got destroyed during one of the moves.

I made a few online friends over my late teens, and I would always make one of my signature paintings for them, from the capital of the country or state they were from, with the skyline of said city. This was Florida. No, I cannot remember who lived here.

This was for a good friend of mine that did live locally, until they didn’t. They moved to Halifax, Canada in about 2015. I wonder how they are these days, I hope they’re living the best life. That clock thingy was really finicky to draw and paint.

This was the last one I made, when I was nineteen. I had a friend called Kye, he lived in Oregon, actually in Salem I think. The many stars on those American painting were so tedious. Did you know the stars represent the states and the stripes represent the colonies!

The World Map

I hated this one the second I had finished it. I am wanting to remake it at some point this year (or next year, knowing me) as I didn’t keep this painting for very long. But as you can see, I used the rest of the left over books and painted so many it filled my entire tiny bedroom, back when I still lived with my parents in an apartment.

This is the main painting once it was complete. I did paint the map onto it- I cannot remember how I did it exactly. I am guessing I airdropped a picture of the world onto my TV and traced it. I hated how ‘blocky’ the background was. if i was to do it like this again I would do a different background.

The one part of this painting I did like, was the small wooden clips I put all the way around the outside, to clip polaroids of ‘all the places I would travel’– a little too optimistic there, Alex. This would be a part I would keep if I was to do this painting again.

Random Paintings

There’s a few drawings and paintings that I have made over the years that don’t neatly fit into the other categories, so they shall be filed under the random category.

This one, like a lot of my paintings, looked better in my head than in reality. This one was inspired by those really colourful Macs that Apple brought out a number of years ago. I cannot remember what year I made this, but it was the same year those Macs came out, so whenever that was.

This… creation is a self portrait, apparently. Gosh, it’s awful. why do I look so… robotic? Why am I dressed like a small boy in the 1980s? Why are my walls purple with a yellow stripe? There is something deeply unsettling about this picture.

Slime. Slime, indeed. As we can see, by now I had found a style of painting I really enjoyed. My autistic-brain basked in the repetition of drawing and painting many of the same things. And, at the time of making this painting, I played a lot of Stardew Valley.

Keeping on the Stardew Valley theme, I saw these drawings online and I copied them and coloured them. They are all the characters you’re able to marry in the game. If y’all guessed I married that character all in black and grey clothes at the bottom, you’d be right. That’s Sebastian.

I was very lazy with the background of this one- I had a lot of left over blue and green paper. But, why didn’t I at least do something creative with them? I’ll never know.

This is so… patriotic. I’m not even a patriotic person. I painted this when I was, roughly, in my late teens. I don’t know why I didn’t do the Australian flag, who knows. I didn’t keep this one around for very long before I painted over it- I made the red and white parts of the flag too thin and it always irritated me.

Keeping with the flag theme, this was a random Spanish flag I painted around the same time. I used to love Spain when I was very young. I used to think it was the ‘sunniest place in the world’… Before I realised Australia existed.

Less of a painting and more of a collage of mandalas I coloured, but I worked too hard on this back in the day to not included it somewhere on this post. I made this during a really scarily low point in my life, during my late teens & early twenties and being able to create something so beautiful out of it was rather poetic in my opinion.

The Australia Fact Board

Again, not really a painting, but… Still an absolute work of art lol. I don’t know what compelled me to make this, around the pandemic time. I think I was just really, really wanting to go to Australia.

I must have had a lot of left over yellow paper from my college days (I did a lot of my coursework in this same style, you’ll see that in a future post). And yellow seemed like the perfect colour, because, well, sand… yellow? I don’t know.

It’s weird because I remember making this like it was yesterday. I even remember what I was watching while I was sticking all the little pictures onto the board. Crazy how fast time flies.

Starry Skies

I wrote a poem a long time ago called ‘Starry Skies’, it was a pretty sad poem but nevertheless I wanted to create a painting based on it. I used really cheap paint and the stars weren’t the best, so a few months later I completely repainted it.

For this one, I added the first line of the poem into the mountains of the painting. But… then I made the stupid mistake of adding a layer of sealer glue a week or so before I was moving out my parents house into my first apartment and I had my other artworks on top of it and needless to say, it got very destroyed. So, last year, I finally remade it. You can watch the YouTube video of it HERE.

Now the reason why there’s no stars, is because I hated it the second I finished painting the sky. Not only was this blue much darker, I had now a certain part in my apartment where I wanted to put it, and I needed it to be the other orientation. So, I turned it over and painted the back. I never put it on the wall in the end, but I still prefer the one below.

The Australia Paintings

I don’t have a picture of the original Australia flag that I painted, but one day I was looking at it and I had a big idea. I was going to combine my first ever paintings, with my love for Australia. So I made all the state capitals with the city silhouettes on 7 rather large identical Australian flags.

The only one that has survived this long was obviously the Perth one. They were just far too big and there was too many of them for my tiny little apartment.

On the back of each of them I drew the outline of the map of each city’s city-centre. I cannot remember how i did this, but I think I traced it from my TV, somehow. I made a video doing at least the second half of these. You can watch it HERE.

The Uno Paintings

A while ago I had this idea to create an Uno inspired painting in my signature style. And, the first one I made… I hate. I don’t know if the picture was just too big or the Wild Card I painted was too small, but, I hated it.

So, considering I made far, far too many little uno cards, I decided to make a smaller version, which I prefer by a landslide, it just looks… right. I don’t know its its the proportion, size or orientation, but the smaller one is so much better.

After making this one, I still had many of the little Uno cards I painted left, so I made a very similar, yet slightly different design and I really liked this one too. You can watch the making of the big painting HERE!

The Coke Bottle Collection

This is my favourite… collection of paintings. Again, in my usual style. I made the original one many years ago, in my tiny bedroom. I drew and painted so many pages of Coke bottles that it filled my entire room.

Then I drew the same bottle, but bigger. Six of them to be exact. Looking back at them now, they seem really plain (but that’s only because i remade it more… chaotic and colourful later on!)

Below is the first edition of this painting before it was… just like my Starry Skies painting, destroyed, accidentally.

The bigger Coke bottles were coloured with pens, as I needed a much brighter and bolder colour to go against the painted ones, they’re a little… wonky, but I really liked this one. Until, i folded it in half. It is very big and the cardboard i used had a fold in it, and just like my other paintings, it got destroyed during the time I moved out.

So, it sat under my bed for many months, until I thought of a way to recreate it to make it better.

It’s hard to describe, but I used the same colours, while different sections of each colour bottle were different colours. But, it wasn’t random, each colour has only been used in each section once. And all the red bits on one of the Coke bottles, will all be yellow on another, for an example.

It’s like an organised but alternating system, I guess. I should add, I came up with this idea, and bought this idea to life during a time my previous doctor put me on a very strong medication- something that interfered with my brain so much I was back living with my parents temporarily. I think I made a video recreating this, you can watch it HERE!

Recently, I made these. They are made with the same style Coke bottle, just drawn a little smaller. And the big Coke bottle is somewhat bigger than the original big bottles.

The colours again, look random but they line up with the same chaotic order of the original paintings- look specifically at the logo on the original. The colour of the words match the Coke bottle colour, the colour those words are on, is the colour card the same coloured coke bottle is backed on. Finally, the edge around the Coke label is the same coloured as the main background on the little Coke paintings.

I may explain it better in the youtube video I made about it. This video is not yet public, and won’t be for another week or so. You can watch it early, HERE.

Lastly, with the left over Coke bottles, as I made far, FAR too many, I made a mini version (A3 size) of the first and original Coke bottle painting. Which, I find very poetic.

Thank you for reading all about my paintings. I really enjoyed writing this and finally getting to talk about one of my many hobbies.

I make lots of things, a future post will be the board game that I made!

Happy New Year

Alex