Get in touch
Email clarissabittesart@gmail.com for business inquiries.
About me
Hi there! I’m so glad you’re here! While the usual standard contact page is a short summary of a person’s or brand’s achievements, I’ve decided to take some liberties to introduce myself and share my creative journey.
So, hello. I’m Clarissa and I draw. I was born and raised in Brazil and moved to US a few years ago. Unlike many artists, I did not grow up drawing. Instead, I spent most of my time as a child climbing trees, playing pretend, reading colorful books, and watching TV. At the age of 9, my parents decided I needed something to occupy my time and decided to enroll me in a drawing/painting course.
I did not have a natural talent, and that was clear from the beginning. I didn’t even like the course - what child would enjoy waking up at 7:30AM on Saturdays to draw for 3 hours? However, I was incredibly stubborn and competitive. And so, on an attempt to prove myself, I stuck with drawing.
At some point when I was 12, I discovered the fashion industry. Fashion shows and fashion illustration became a slight obsession, and I quickly accumulated a small library of resources on the subject. My drawing skills slowly developed in that time. I struggled a lot with traditional media and while I enjoyed drawing fashion illustration, it always seemed like something was missing from my art.
In 2016, I got an iPad for my birthday and discovered the wonders of digital illustration. While I’d love to say that my drawing skills improved then, it would still take me years of trial and error to create a piece I was proud of. In the meantime, I started creating videos on YouTube in Portuguese to share what I knew about digital illustration with fellow Brazilians and have since grown that channel to over 73.000 subscribers.
Three years later, I read about the “ten thousand hour rule” and decided that if I wanted to master drawing within ten years, I’d have to draw one thousand hours per year; which ends up being roughly 20-hours per week. And so, that became my new year’s resolution of 2019. I didn’t complete one thousand hours (it was closer to 600), but it was the most I had ever drawn in my life and the results were obvious. It turns out, practice does make perfect and that was the first time I actually experienced it.
Since then, I’ve been more focused on improving my drawing skills and creating work I’m excited about. I particularly enjoy creating illustrations that tell a story and hope to one day work on illustrating a picture book or a graphic novel. You can join my art journey through my YouTube channel (I’ve got an English one as well!) or support my work through my Etsy Shop.