Hello !!
I am Justice soni-onovo Afamefuna, a contemporary Artist that lives in Nigeria. I studied Electrical engineering from the university of Nigeria Nsukka. I am so excited to make my first post on the Hive platform. I am also happy to share my thoughts and experience as an Artist living within the geographical part of Nigeria.
Art is not very much appreciated, understood and valued in this part of the world, and so its quite hard to thrive. In this parts it's also not easy to find people who are enthusaiastic about arts and this is one of the reasons I joined this plaatform as I hope to connect with other art lovers and learn a thing or two from them as i also share my perspectives with them too. I have seen quite a lot of beautiful artworks in this platform and I am really happy and I thank my friend @luckydrums for persuading me to join the hive community. I can tell that my experience here is God to be amazing
Art is one thing I love, I do it as my hobby and also as an occupation. Most people ask me why I studied Engineering and not Arts. I always laugh before replying them.
I am quite good in construction and maintenance of gadget/appliances, I love that I studied Engineering even though i have a strong passion for art is and of course I can never leave art as it makes me happy and gives me a sense of self fulfillment. This is one of my most recent works. Works I drew with a BIC pen.
I started Art professionally in the year 2020,during the pandemic times. Around that time, I decided to explore other parts of Art like drawing with pen. I was initially a pencil Artist before I got interested in pen drawings.
Due to the pandemic, I couldn't buy a pen as most art stores were shut down. I couldn't also afford to buy pencil materials at the time because they were quite expensive. I had no choice but to buy the the regular writing pen(The Ball point pen),although it was so good for my works.
It wasn't easy drawing with a pen at first. There was no room for mistakes or cortection. My art works were initially quite ugly and funny. Here are some pictures of my first pen work drawn on May 7th, 2020.
At some point I was thinking about quitting Arts because my works weren't as good as I wanted them to be. I was never impressed by them as they always seem quite mediocre and average. I always aspire to be the best at anything I do so I found it really hard to deal with my average work. I somehow found strength to continue and I got better because I persisted.
I started painting early last year. Painting was something I found very intriguing because of the colour mixtures and variance. I could sketch with both pen and pencil but I really wanted to try out painting. Finally, last year, on the 23rd of March I started painting. For the first month, I painted a total of 26 works but I would only show you 6 of my best works which I did with acrylic paints. I really liked them so I had to frame them.
YouTube really help me learn colour mixtures. What really encouraged me to paint is that I have the ideology that " you alone can teach yourself", It always works for me and it gives me a sense of independence and pushes me to strive hard and achieve anything I desire. These are the first paintings I did when I started painting.
You can see how unprofessional they look compared to the others paintings I did in that same month (March 2023). This justifies the saying that practice makes improvement.
Although I'm not a fine arts student, I usually go to the fine Art department in my school to watch fine art students paint. While watching them paint, I really learnt a lot of art techniques which I also apply in my works.
I also love writing in general, I love writing poems and inspirational articles. Guess what?, my writing talent manifested due to a heart break I had sometime ago. I can remember a certain day, how I woke up from my sleep holding my chest and panting hard because I saw her in my dreams (the heart breaker). I couldn't think of a way to express myself other than writing down the way I was feeling. Most of those writings were poetic. I would share some of them here on Hive in the coming days.
My favourite games are football, basketball and table tennis.
As an electrical engineering student, I did my IT last 2 years (2022) in a Transmission company - TCN (Transmission company of Nigeria) located in port Harcourt, Rivers state, Nigeria. It was fun. That was my first experience as being an electrical engineer, because it was more of practicals. I learnt how power is being generated, transmitted and then distributed to the final consumers.
I said earlier that I studied Electrical engineering from the University of Nigeria. I am grateful to God that I am now a graduate. I graduated on the 28th of July 2024. The picture below is a picture when I defended my Final project.
During my defense my Topic was on "The Design and construction of an Intelligent light control system using an LDR (light dependent resistor) motion sensor.
Baking and cooking is one thing I also learnt how to do during the Corona pandemic times of 2020. My sister is YouTuber, she Vlogs about Life style and different dishes. Her YouTube name is "Iamnzinne". You can check her YouTube channel out. You would also see me there. I usually help her while cooking and baking. Before she makes any Video based on cooking we both try the dishes out first before making the main dishes to be used for her You Tube. As time went on I learnt how to make several dishes while helping her out. I learnt how to make different soups, small chops. I also learnt how to bake bread manually (not using oven), just using gas at low heat. Here is a picture of the bread I baked with my sister.
While exploring different dishes we invented our own special type of dishes using Potatoes, green pepper, carrots, meats, flour, pepper stew sauce, ketchup, cabbages and other Recipes. We named the dish "Potato Tatashi". We didn't believe we both made a dish together, that would be that delicious.
My most touching moment was when I has an appendicitis surgery. It happened last 3 years on the 2nd of April 2021. It happened to me in my 3rd year in university. It just happened 2 weeks after my friend died of the appendicitis ,I was so pained . I cried for almost a week. How it all started was that I was in the Toilet having my bath , while I was bathing I felt a sharp pain on my abdomen, I shouted. I had to withstand the pain and go for my exam that same afternoon. The pain Left and came the next day ,the pain kept coming and going until a week passed. The following week the pain came with a full force and it weighed me down. I was immediately rushed to a hospital in nsukka where my school is located. I had to travel with my friend to Enugu another city very far from my school. The painful part is that I called 5 of my friends that day, to ask if they would be free to keep me company while travelling and also to be there in hospital during my Surgery, but just 1 of my friends came, his name is kelechi. It tells on how you might have many friends but just 1 real one. Kelechi followed me to Enugu and he even had to call his own family doctor
to help me out to carry out different test before the operation
was carried out. The operation was carried out in the st Basel hospital by 11pm that night. They injected me with drugs to prevent me from feeling pain. I thank God the operation was successful and that I am alive today.
I am so happy to be here on Hive. I plan on educating people about Art and also teaching people how to paint/draw. I hope it will put smiles on the faces of those that will come across my Articles. For those who took there time to read my first post, thank you so much.
