Thank you all who have been praying for my eye. It has been a really challenging time for me but I have been committed to reducing my stress to help my eye heal. I went back to the eye doctor six weeks after my first visit and the fluid was completely gone, but I have some permanent retina damage now. A few weeks later, I had another flare up after a stressful couple of days at work, but it has mostly returned back to baseline now.

I still have been drawing this whole time, but it has been slow going. I’ve been doing a lot on Procreate, partly because it is easy to zoom in and I was having an incredibly hard time focusing right after I came down with this condition. I had to buy 2.5 diopter readers just to read normal text in a book and I had to enlarge the text on my phone to the maximum size. Now, I am back to 20/20 vision with my glasses on, although there is still some distortion all the time now.

One of the new purchases I got which I love is the Sketchboard Pro 2. It is like a sort of drawing board/easel that you place your iPad into. It makes you feel like the drawing surface is so much bigger and you don’t have to rest your hand on the iPad itself as there is a wide border. There are feet so you can draw on an angle, or you can remove them and lay it flat if you want. Since I have gotten it, drawing on my iPad has been much more enjoyable. It was expensive, but I really love it and would recommend it to others looking to elevate their iPad drawing experience.

Since my eye has healed, I have been consistent with drawing most days after work in the evenings, although it has been slow going. I have been mainly working on small botanical digital watercolor pieces, but on a whim I made the illustration above inspired by a real Greek amphora. I changed things up, of course, by adding the sunflowers. It was a fun little project to work on that is different than my normal subject matter.

Again, I would like to say thank you to everyone who has messaged me with caring words and have been praying for my eye. Losing vision for an artist is a worst fear scenario and I am glad that it is mostly behind me, although I will have to keep my stress low on an ongoing basis to keep it from returning. I would like to make a Youtube video on the subject to share my experiences more in depth. I will post a link once I make it.