Statement:

Art is a way for me to express and explore my deeper emotions after being officially diagnosed with dyslexia around the third or fourth grade while currently reading on a second grade level. By middle school, I was diagnosed with ADHD. In my life, I never really had to face difficulties when it came to the color of my skin, but the difficulties I had to face were with my invisible disability and people not understanding it. Additionally, coming from a broken home when I was growing up, doing art was the best way for me to escape my situation. Art is how I can build a bridge with my viewers. Now I have two younger siblings that see their older sister making art and being creative, making them also love doing art separately or together. Now that I’m older, I’ve found a family with people who love, help, and support me. 

The way I describe most of my creative thinking is kowai, which means scary cute. Growing up, I loved mythology across the world. Understanding other religions, paganism, Wicca and even witchcraft, was always fascinating to me. I like drawing random little things that make me smile and be happy. Sometimes they’re really cute, while sometimes I’ll do things with horns, monstrous teeth and claws. I describe my way of drawing as cartoonish. While inspired by cartoons, I also like the darker tones of mythology and illuminated manuscripts. I’m a person who believes that there is ying and yang in everything: where there’s always good in the bad and there’s always bad in the good. I am interested in how ying-yang is symbolic of the characters and how it can be arranged in the narrative.

I am something of a mixed media artist, as I like doing paintings, collages, watercolors, cray-pas, fashion sculptures, etc., and what made Covid so difficult was that I had to figure out what I can physically do in my house. So I stuck to doing drawings and coloring in light paints and colored pencils that I own.

For the first half of the capstone, I turned to Tarot cards and designed them with the images on my characters. I chose death and the 8 cups. The Death card Upright means change, new start, letting go, spiral transformation, positive endings. While the Reversed represents repeating negative patterns, resisting change, death of a relative or loved ones, dependencies. The death card is represented by Lizzie (red) because she is a doll of a child that is made of porcelain. Her original owners sold their souls to the devil to have Lizzie come to life. All is hate, vengeance, and bloodlust. The purple hand in this drawing represents Meko, her owner that can help control Lizzie’s sociopathic tendencies with murder. The white Calla lilies and white lilies represent the death of a baby. The reason why I picked these flowers is that Lizzie died very young. The red strings that connect her to her master's hands show her dependency.

The eight cups Tarot card’s upright image symbolizes abandonment, but also strength and courage. When the card is picked up in reverse it can mean faking happiness, toxic relationships, new love, a lack of self-awareness, the fear of abandonment or commitment, and moving on. The eight cups is being shown with Ax because I created him to be career-driven. I envision him as a pastry chef. He owns his own bakery, and he’s pictured as working from home with his back to the audience. On both counters, 8 cups are being shown in different arrangements with simple colors. Instead of the river in the original character, I replaced it with a kitchen sink because the water represents depth and emotional changes that the character needed to go through.

After I finished this Tarot cards project, I was able to plan for the second half of capstone. This project focused on creating a comic. I took an existing story from my youth about Rex, a character who morphed from being a sweet kid into a tsundere badass bully. The mediums used in these pages were alcoholic markers, some calligraphy ink, and colored pencils. I'm mixing the media in a way that has a very white color vibe but the colored pencils detail certain parts in the story. Somehow, art and stories were never difficult for me because I view it to express myself and have fun. Both Tarot cards and comic imagery capitalized on my interest in storytelling. The best part is that I was doing something that I want to do in the future as a career, as I want to make or create my own comics. Overall, these two projects that I did for this capstone totally represent my creativity and my future career plans.