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natmikaelian.ca was launched on 16 March 2022 after months of messing around with html/css on Notepad++ on my computer (I’ve never been very good at any kind of coding, so this was a pretty big endeavour for me.) I took a lot of inspiration from the websites of bill wurtz and Chris Jones, and the idea of indexing all my creative processes by date, on my own terms, really spoke to me. It took a long, long while to make the pages, source all the things, photograph them if necessary, properly name and date the files, upload them, realize I have to reupload them all in a different way for them to order properly on the site... Let's just say I have had a lot of issues along the way. Read on to learn all about that!

Before natmikaelian.ca

My “screen name” was originally mikkalien, (hence some of the signatures in my old artwork) which was just a strange misspelling of my last name with a little alien icon. I designed an alien with a background in a different colour for each social media site, way back before my website was even fathomed. I didn’t particularly love the idea of an alien as a representation of me, but I didn’t want to leave my icon blank or put a picture of my face.

Before that it was banquodoodlez, inspired by when I played Banquo in a spin-off Macbeth inspired play. Then, before that, it was “justakidwhodraws” when I REALLY didn’t know what I was doing. I think most, decent works from this site are after that time period.

Starting somewhere in late 2021, I started making a detailed(ish) journal on my hard drive of, just, happenings. These entries are helping greatly in the making of this chronology, which I am working on in May of 2024.

Visual arts wise, I was heavily inspired by the cute anime-style and cartoony illustrations that the Instagram algorithm suggested to me. Flat colours, linework and simple shading were my JAM, and I tried to replicate these styles. I mainly worked on an iPad Pro during this time, occasionally using my iPhone 5 to draw when out and about.

Left to right: August 3, 2019; September 24, 2019; January 27, 2020.

2020-2021 was a heavily experimental time for me art-wise. I had so many different avenues and styles I wanted to explore, from video game landscape concept art to cute anime characters to my weird trippy monster art phase heavily inspired by the art of Brandon Lepine. It was a headache when uploading all of this to instagram, a platform that values consistency and visual cohesivity. Alas, I have since learned my breadth of practice will make it fundamentally possible to achieve full consistency in style and medium. I do my best :)

Three very different styles all done at around the same time. Left to right: December 2, 2020; December 5, 2020; November 22, 2020.

Getting my footing (December 2021 -March 2022)

Initially, I had the idea that ALL of my work would be on one page, just stacked from newest-oldest, no matter what the file type/media. This idea dissipated quickly in favour of bigger and better things.

The above image was the first real prototype/layout of my website. It had a secret button that led to what is now the “extras” page. I eventually decided not to make it secret due to how many relatively important things I started to include on that page. By March I had a lot of time on my hands due to some medical issues plus online school, which enabled me to work on other parts of the website at a faster and more regular pace.

Hosting, tweaking things, file name hell (March - May 2022)

Fair warning, this part gets a bit nerdy and technical. Skip to the next heading for the more creative part of my process.

Once mikkalien.ca got hosted and launched to the web, my first task was to ensure all the webpages from my hard drive (and associated files to go on them) seamlessly operated on the hosting platform. Of course there were issues. My first big…perceived roadblock was PHP. For whatever reason, I thought that my PHP scripts for sorting my files by date/time weren't working, and I immediately chalked it up to "PHP not activating." However, after a good night's sleep, I realized my issue: the PHP scripts were working fine... the images weren't being sorted because their modified dates were all the same. When I uploaded them all to the server, the times reset to the date/time that I uploaded them. Sigh.

Thankfully, I had the copy of the originally dated files on my hard drive. But, in order to properly upload the files to the server, I had two choices: re-enter all the dates to the files already on the server (likely impossible?) or figure out what the hell an FTP is and how to use it. I chose the second option.

I got it to work! The FTP was awesome and is very very useful. I had some gripes for awhile that I couldn’t get it to work on my phone, but restricting it to my computer has allowed me to organize my process a bit easier. However, I failed to realize that some of my uploaded files STILL had incorrect dates, even on my hard drive, because I'm silly and didn't export/photograph them till way later. I remember staying up very late for multiple nights, going through photos and modifying each date manually. Tedious and terrible. (Perhaps if I already wasn't drowning in php code and the dates were all in one place, I would have made a script to do the task for me. But alas, it got done this way, and I live to tell the tale.) The file date/time modifier I used for this task is Attribute Changer, and it is very very useful.

At this time, I also knew I wanted to have some kind of question-answer page, heavily inspired by Bill Wurtz here. I was eyeing a website called CuriousCat for this task, however I was feeling an intense anger within myself for considering a 3rd party because I wanted to make everything from scratch. Long story short, I had a CuriousCat page up for a while, but CuriousCat went down and I decided to drop the q/a idea altogether.

Another big challenge of mine was getting my art page to load fast enough. When I’d originally made my art page, the Lightbox and the php gallery maker I’d made didn’t use thumbnails--just the high quality image for each “thumbnail”. This made loading the site incredibly slow and unsightly. I realized quickly that was not the way to go, so I spent about ten million hours figuring out how to make thumbnails out of my images. My best option was to make a copy of each image but resize it using the Resize Pictures tool included with Microsoft PowerToys. Even though I planned to automate this task someday (...) it was good for the present, and I was okay with how things were going.

I’ll also mention around this time (mid-April 2022) I got the music and photography pages going, and I automated them to display each item in my specific folder without me having to ask it to. This took surprisingly long, because I was still new to the workings of php, and I copied the script from my art page. I also got the script to extract the date and name from each file, and display it! The music and photography pages have not changed since then. By the way, the reason the photography page does not have thumbnails like the art page…It’s because that’s a lot. I want to do that only when I can figure out how to automate thumbnails, which has not been achieved yet, as of 2024.05.11.

Another (I know…) thing I was doing was tweaking the visuals of the website. I didn’t really have an aesthetic in mind, I didn’t know how to do branding or anything like that--but I knew I wanted my website to be “dark mode” and I liked that kind of…typewriter-esque text. Here are the iterations from 2022.02.01, 2022.04.20, and 2022.05.11. I’m not sure what happened in May, but I did spend a lot of time rearranging buttons. Unfortunately I don’t have many versions after this one.

Also, I was still working out my name and formatting conventions. Lots of back and forth between different date formats (think 2000.04.04 vs 2000-04-04 vs 20000404, etc), “should I use emojis in my file names??”, “do i include any info of the contents of the document in the file name???” and more. Eventually I settled upon a yyyy-mm-dd style, and depending on the file’s contents, the files would either have a title, some explaining info, or nothing at all except for the date. Some of the old-style date formats I renamed quickly using PowerRename, part of the Microsoft PowerToys tool set, which was incredibly helpful!! Saved many hours.

Developing content for the site, and figuring out how to work it. (March - July 2022)

Around this time I spent a lot of my free time writing poems, songs, and just…random garbage. Anything to get ideas flowing and on paper…and I mean anything.

Some random text dumps turned into songs, most of which will never see the light of day, but here are some titles.

The act of actually producing a whole song was still quite daunting for me, so I resorted to very short “songs” that included all the requirements of a normal length song, but shorter and more digestible for a first-time song-maker (another Bill Wurtz-inspired strategy).

Way back when I was eleven or so, I made a couple of songs in a program called Sunvox,without really understanding what a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) was, which was a giant learning curve and a big mistake. However I soon smartened up and tried something easier--GarageBand on my iPad. It was nice, however it lacked one important feature for me--MIDI compatibility. My keyboard at the time was…less than stellar--a Casio LK-100, essentially a toy keyboard. Around this time I upgraded to a Casio CT-S500, which had touch-dynamic keys, 600 sounds, and was generally suitable for both my age and calibre. Technically, both were MIDI-compatible, but my new CT-S500 did not require a special MIDI cord that cost extra money and allowed me to use a micro USB cable I had laying around. Yay!

Armed with this new keyboard, I installed Cakewalk, an at the time free-with-no-strings-attached DAW, onto my computer. This is where all of my songs were developed and produced from ~April 2022 until July of 2025, when it regrettably shifted to a subscription-based model.

Art was a whole other beast. This was also the time I decided to really hone in on my skills and draw from references. This was huge for me, as someone who really does not like to follow any sort of instructions in my creative space. But, I did it, as seen in the chronology of my art page, notably between February and June of 2022. Pinterest was a huge help in my yearning to do studies, and I dabbled in landscapes, statues, shoes, you name it. I also found clothing websites to be helpful in figure studies. At this time, my major art inspirations started to transition from anime-esque cartoony styles to the more painterly styles of popular artists on Instagram like WLOP and Sam Does Arts. I still had a heavy appreciation for the usage of neon, dynamic lighting and unique texturing and hatching as seen in works from Kuunasai on instagram (unfortunately account does not exist anymore), animator Baggiboi, and illustrator Kinjiro (Brandon Lepine).

I ALSO started to focus in on 3D work in Blender. I tried the ever-famous donut tutorial but forgot how much I hate following instructions, so after the first 30 minutes I strayed off and started to learn the program on my own. I did watch some demos of making little rooms and other figurines, just to get a grasp on what the program can do.

My first completely original Blender project titled “HOUSE”. April 3, 2022.

Once I started getting an understanding of basic functions, modifiers, and materials, I started designing a few rooms and buildings. I went totally ALL IN into blender stuff for the month of April, recreating Elliot’s house from Stardew Valley and the Terran Refinery structure in Starcraft.

As the months went on, I spent more and more time experimenting with textures, materials, and geometries. In June of 2022, I produced a render based on a series of personal illustrations that I still love as a conceptual idea--the space greenhouse. Inspired by the sci-fi elements of Starcraft, I had originally made a digital painting back in August of 2019 on my iPad to show my art teacher in middle school. Later, in January of 2020, I recreated the painting with my more developed skills in linework, shadow and texture. I then recreated it once more in January of 2021, this time for an online art contest that I unfortunately cannot find the record for now. In any case, I did not win.

Late 2022

By this point, while I was still keeping regular practice by doing studies, I developed more of a painterly style, dabbling in some surrealism inspired by Cal Kearns and Chris (Simpsons Artist). I had migrated to a pen display attached to my computer, which I highly preferred. Procreate on my iPad had a lot of limitations in terms of how brushes could blend into pre-existing colours on the canvas, and I was having none of it. I believe it was around this time that I started really getting interested in oil painting or using more painterly styles in general, though I cannot recall exactly what spurred this change.

I was also going through the mental transition that was… changing my screen name from an alias to my real, actual name. There was all sorts of privacy concerns that made me hesitate to do this, but despite many many hours of soul-searching, no username alias felt fitting enough for me other than my own name.

I continued to spend ample time experimenting with text arrangements, etc on text files. By this point, I was getting it down to a science. I had a very basic txt file editor on my phone and I saved all files to a specific folder, to which I connected a folder on my computer via Syncthing. Every time both devices were active and connected to the internet, it would scan for any new text files on my phone and upload them exactly where I needed them on my computer, directly. It was wicked convenient and REALLY helped me keep things organized, but I sadly had to retire it for a few years when I switched to an iPhone and Syncthing would not work there. (As of October 14, 2025, I finally migrated back to an Android-based phone, which means I can continue the Syncthing protocol again!!!!! However I’m handwriting a lot of journal entries now.)

Late 2024 to 2025

The majority of this time was dedicated to adjusting to university life, and most of my creative energy went to class projects. Other responsibilities such as a relationship and health matters seriously put a damper on what I was creating and when.

However, just after my first year of university ended, I attended an artist residency for two weeks in Patton, Pennsylvania, where I put my all into photography, dressmaking, painting, and got to learn some new techniques in 3D printing and stained glass art from some other visiting artists. It was a seriously interesting artistic experience, trying to hone in on intense creative ambitions while also simultaneously dealing with the end of a long term relationship. It was not a regrettable time though; it lent itself to many new thoughts and creative ideas, and I got to meet some amazingly talented people.