Video summary
In today's video, the artist celebrates his 46th birthday by creating a self-portrait titled "Random Ink Drawing 013," which he filmed shortly after turning forty-six in July but plans to release later that August. Unlike his usual daily ink challenges where pressure is high, this project was designed as part of a backlog to allow him to work without the stress of deadlines. He deliberately chose sepia tones and specific lighting angles based on reference photos to capture an impressionistic feel rather than striving for perfect accuracy. The artist explains that while he often draws from mirrors, his current filming setup made it impractical to include one, so he opted for a looser approach using fan brushes and liquid watercolor mixed with ink to create open, fluid spaces that reflect the passage of time without rigid detail.
The creative process is deeply intertwined with significant personal revelations regarding his health and identity throughout 2026. The artist discusses receiving diagnoses on the autism spectrum and having his ADHD reinstated after a period of uncertainty, noting how these conditions help explain aspects of his life previously unaccounted for by his bipolar diagnosis alone. However, he reveals that the most critical turning point came when medical tests showed dangerously high blood pressure, leading doctors to warn him of severe health risks within ten years if not addressed immediately. This warning shifted his perspective from assuming all struggles were mental or related to willpower issues to recognizing the vital connection between physical body function and mental state.
Following this realization about his heart condition, he made drastic lifestyle changes including increased exercise, better sleep habits, and adjusting his medication regimen, which surprisingly restored a sense of energy that had been missing for years. He describes moving from a feeling of being in an "eternal sleep" to waking up fully again, realizing that the heaviness he felt was not solely due to family challenges or mental health diagnoses but largely because his heart was overworking itself. This physical recovery has led to what he considers one of the most optimistic feelings he has experienced on a birthday in recent years, allowing him to view his forty-sixth year with renewed purpose and hope rather than feeling weighed down by age or diagnosis.
The final artwork reflects this journey through its painterly style, blending ink lines with watercolor washes and subtle touches of peach gouache to add life back into the portrait. Although he acknowledges that the video feed makes the paper look wobbly due to movement during filming, he notes that the finished piece will settle beautifully once dry, hiding imperfections like slight warping in the medium itself. He concludes by expressing gratitude for his renewed vitality and frames this self-portrait not just as a milestone of aging but as a testament to resilience and the importance of listening to one's body over one's mind. With the project complete, he looks forward to continuing his online art course and creating future works that capture both the challenges and the hopeful spirit found in living authentically at forty-six years old.
Read the full video transcript
What will we find in today's ink plot?
So
this says a little bit about the
timeline which I'm doing these. Uh, I
want to create a backlog of these so
that I can
so that I can uh work on them without
that sort of daily pressure
that I put myself in
with the daily ink monsters.
And this one will be released sometime
in August,
but it is filmed
right after my birthday in July. So I am
for the first time drawing one of these,
a 46 year old man. And I wanted to
celebrate celebrate
to to to
acknowledge it with a self-portrait.
And
so I deliberately toss the ink one way
because I have a photo here where the
shadow is
slightly that way.
And I'm choosing this sepia color
because I used that a few days ago for
my last
random ink drawing which was called so
tired and I just loved that color. So I
wanted to
experiment more with it. Now I'm looking
at the photo
and at
the ink plot and I'm trying to find
where
they look similar.
Now this is here line is clearly
a line down here I think. So, and I'm
not going to try to be very accurate.
That's sort of why I'm
starting with the fan brush.
I just want a impression. Usually, I
like drawing self-portraits from
mirrors, but uh with the the the film
setup I have now, it would be a little
bit too much.
to also have
a mirror.
I just want to start
filling in very
carefully, sloppily. I mean, not
carefully, not careful at all. Filling
in
spaces.
I want wanted this to have some of the
same sort of type of feeling as
the last one I did
this
very loose and open watercolory feeling.
So,
let me see
when I start taking away.
Interesting. Okay, I'm going to go over
to this my messiest Chinese calligraphy
brush. It's been used and abused
for far too long. So, it's almost
impossible to get a nice clear tip on
it. That's sort of
a little bit of the fun
using it.
Using quite
a lot of
water here.
I want these
blends to happen. I want to just move
the
This is usually I say I'm working with
ink. This is actually
liquid watercolor.
So that's explains why I can
use it in this water colory way.
And the the idea here isn't to get a
perfect likeness. That perfect likeness
takes time. A and
it's not necessarily
as interesting,
at least for for me. One of the problems
with this photo is it's a little bit
dark and I'm getting a lot of
reflections. But if I go in
and I just adjust it a little bit and I
do the light balance, then it's a lot
harder
to read the shadows on it,
but I can get the general shape of at
least the shape of the beard
a little bit more.
I like the the ink that has gathered at
the bottom of the nose here.
Uh turning 30 30
turning 36 has been uh
uh
it's been a strange experience. I I I I
don't really
take a lot of stock in birthdays or
anything like that. I I I'm
feel like I've been consistently me for
my whole life really.
I I don't have this separation in my
head between
probably
this is common enough but I I don't
really
feel a lot of this separation
between my fouryear-old and my
14year-old and my
I'm I'm just a continuation of me.
So turning 46 doesn't
really
affect
much of anything.
But
46 has
the 46th year has been interesting and
challenging.
I I've been in a
let's say a family situation that's not
dramatic
but but but exhausting for the past
two years two and a half
I I don't remember anymore how long
took away all that niceness at the nose.
Why did I do that?
Yeah. So, it's been a challenging family
situation. Again, nothing dramatic and
nothing I will talk publicly about
because any family situation includes
other people than me and and I can say
what I want about me and my life and my
psyche and my diagnosis and all of that
stuff.
But I I sort of I can't
speak about my family in the same way or
about friends or about colleagues or I I
I don't like speaking for
others
and there are privacy issues as well.
That being said, what I'm trying to
aim towards
is that it's been a really
challenging situation
and uh
I I've uh not necessarily
handled it all that well all the time.
Uh, I'm switching to another brush that
I can have slightly more control over
because we're we're getting more
gradually more and more precise
with whatever we are doing here.
Okay.
So, I haven't been
really
I haven't buil been built for the
challenges I've been in.
And that's been challenging in itself.
Um,
and this whole year 2026,
I've felt like
I've barely
been awake
at all.
I've just been
flat.
Um
then
I've been through some diagn
diagnostic processes. So, I I've gotten
a
earlier this year
I was diagnosed with
Aspberers as it's called in Norway or
somewhere on the autism spectrum.
And uh
when I got diagnosed,
I I already knew that this was going to
be the result because
I had self diagnosed. I started to lose
faith by the end because you managed to
convince yourself out of most anything.
But I I was pretty certain that a
diagnosis was
inbound and that I and that the
autism spectrum
diagnosis explained a lot of things
about my life
that aren't necessarily explained by my
previous
bipolar diagnosis.
Um,
and then
a little bit later, just a little while
ago, actually,
I got my
ADHD diagnosis back. I had gotten it for
a few for a little while and then it got
taken away and then it got reinstated
now after a more thorough examination.
Uh, which is good because that means
potentially I can try
ADHD medication again, which is one of
the few or only medications I've ever
had that's
felt effective,
felt that it worked in any sense.
Yeah.
Uh but I can't go on
um ADHD medication because I have high
blood pressure.
And that was the sort of the third thing
that's happened quite recently is that I
after a few years of
uh being on blood pressure medication
and not monitoring my blood pressure
enough.
I went back or I went to my new doctor
and measured the blood pressure again. A
and it was really, really, really,
really, really bad.
so bad that I got the
message
that if I don't
fix it,
I
have a severely heightened risk of
dying within the next 10 years. And
guess what? I do not want to die within
the next 10 years. That would be uh
unpreferable for me. And
it didn't set off any sense of fright or
panic or anything like that, but it did
set off a set uh sense of
purpose.
So I I I've
managed to take that
message a and meditate and imagine not
not the thought of me dying because
that's something I've meditated on and
and thought about you know for
ever.
But the thought of
my kids losing their father or my wife
losing me,
not something I had meditated on.
So I started doing that and I started
exercising more regularly and I started
on new
heart medication and and stronger heart
medication, stronger doses of my old
heart medication and uh lo and behold in
just
a few days
the sort of stuper the eternal sleep
state I have been in
this year
started to disappear.
Uh I started feeling awake again.
not perfect, but feeling
like I could
do stuff like a normal person. So, so
conclusion being that part of what had
gotten me down this year
wasn't
the bad situation I was in.
It wasn't
my bipolar or my autism or my
uh ADHD.
It was
my heart
not working
or working too hard,
pumping blood through my system.
A and that's sort of um
this is a lesson I I've had to learn
all the time.
Because almost
every time there's something wrong with
me, I naturally assume
that it's my head.
It's always my head. It's always
my mind messing up for me. But once in a
while,
it's not. Once in a while
it is
the body.
Things that feel wrong
don't have to be
in the head.
And and that's a sort of a important
reminder for me because I I I've always
all my life had trouble realizing
how
the head is connected to the body and
part of the same organism.
A and
I have
slowly and gradually learned
that they are connected and that what I
do in terms
of
exercise
a and
sleep and and all of that stuff is so
incredibly
related to how I feel mentally.
But at the same time,
I it it's so incredibly easy to assume
that if I can't get that exercise done,
I if if I'm
not up for
whatever goals I'm trying to meet,
Then that must be
a willpower issue. Uh that must be a
it must be
my mental health.
not allowing me to do
what I need to do.
Filling in a little bit of this peach
here. Making my nose look a little bit
drunk.
Peach color there.
A little bit more peach.
Okay.
Yeah, let's just a little bit more life
into this.
Very light peach color.
Still.
Yep.
And it sort of
erases some of the
sepia color. That might be interesting.
Yeah. So, so, so the head and the
body being the part of the same
organism, it doesn't just go
one way where
you know,
it can go all sorts of ways. I almost
said both ways, but but it can get go
all sorts of
different interesting
ways.
Um,
now I want
blue eyes, but I'm thinking of using
this
purple
pink.
I'm putting in way too much pink there.
And I'll take it away
in a little while.
Want the nostril back.
The little line under the beard
back.
I like how parts are just disappearing
and coming back again.
And I don't want too much.
I don't want it to be too rigid. So,
I want everything to be very fluid.
Yeah. You can see there's a bit of a
wobble in the paper which doesn't look
good on the video,
but it will be
when you see it in real life will look a
lot better.
And also we will get a lot of that shade
away.
It looks very wobbly on the video.
Doesn't look as wobbly from where I'm
sitting. And also, it will once
it's dried, it will settle in a little
bit more.
Don't want to use any black on this.
I want the
face to be loose and open like this.
And some lines
going through the whole thing.
This is just a feeling thing.
And then
just a tiny dash
of white gouache.
And we're going to
clean the brush
and get a tiny bit of it
on the eye.
nice and thick tiny bit. And then a
thinner
tiny bit on some of the parts that I
want
to get back.
I'm going to
and again this will settle in
in a slightly different way than it
looks while still wet.
And we don't want to do too much. We
just want to
tighten it a nudge. A snudge. That's the
word. Tighten it a snudge.
Snudge tightening.
Sudge tightening
here.
That one we will get slightly back.
Yeah, I didn't need that one.
Okay, I think we have a self-portrait
for my
46th birthday.
I think
this is almost good enough. Let's see
here.
A little bit of
this
peach on the nose again
slightly.
Yeah, I think I like it.
more painterly than I
usually do. I consider myself an a
drawer, not a painter.
This is definitely
over into the watercolor painting
territory instead of the classic ink
territory. But I do
use ink and watercolor almost
interchangeably.
So the black I use is always almost
always the Indian ink but a lot of the
colors I use are actually watercolors
and I'll call it a random ink drawing
still
and I will
call this one 46
years old
and it this
random ink drawing
13.
Oh my.
So
uh now that I've uh uh revealed
you can watch this
see without the wobbles you can see it
better. We we'll get away the wobbles in
the drying process.
I like it.
I like it. Okay. Um
now you know the schedule for these. So,
so
a lot of the times hopefully I'll be two
months
earlier which means I can do things like
in August I can start drawing Halloween
images.
But but uh for this one drawn slightly
after my real birthday
and uh will be released late or mid mid
August
and that means uh I'm still working on
the
mastering ink through negative space art
course online art course and you can
sign up for
the waiting list to get some percentages
off. And uh
I in August it's getting closer and
closer and closer. As I'm drawing this,
it's still a little bit far apart, but
now when it's released, it's closer. And
yeah,
46 years old. Wait, my whole point with
this what what was
turning 46
was slightly strange because of
the years I've had now,
but
while things have layered on top and I
sort of feel like I
it should be heavy.
In actuality,
this is the most optimistic that I've
felt on a birthday
in a while. And it's all because I'm
starting to feel my energy come back.
It's been a few years.
And it's been especially this year,
but it's been a few years. So,
it's a good spot.
And happy belated birthday to me. Yay.