My art is an Anime-Esque style of 2D illustrations and 2D animation that focuses on character emotion and story. I love making stories that will bring comfort to viewers when they need it.  

Growing up and bouncing between schools left me awkward in my childhood, but through art, I could make the images in my head come to life and create stories that made me feel less alone. This continued as I aged into adulthood. However, drawing was the one thing I could use to depict my feelings and thoughts through characters and the stories I created with them. 

My influences stem from late nights on Saturdays when anime episodes would start showing on TV. The first night I had ever seen anime was the 2003 Full Metal Alchemist and one episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion that completely changed the way I could imagine stories. From there, I was influenced by the manga artists that formed my childhood like Masashi Kishimoto, Arina Tanemura, Kento Miura, and Sui Ishida among others. The way they created dynamic shots to the way they crafted gorgeous and symbolic imagery of emotions and story beats, I found myself enamored with their work. To this day, I still go back and reread their work because it still hits my emotions like they did when I read them for the first time.  

From these influences, my style is inspired by manga and anime. I use the style of larger eyes and simplistic features to morph them into the expressions that I need for the moment. I don’t shy away from crinkling faces into crying or the way a face morphs when someone is laughing too hard. I use the expressive style to exaggerate emotions, but I have also found it work to make very subtle emotions. The slight shift in a face in bits of discomfort, to the subtle rage in a character’s expression. I work to make those feelings clear. I also implement this into the body, from using wide sweeping motions in fear to depicting soft and gentle touches that focus on the movement without thinking about realistic details. This is what my style is built upon. 

When I create art, I want to be able to trigger emotions and bring solace to those emotions afterwards. If I make something that makes someone feel sad, I want to be able to end the scene or story with a bit of hope near the end. Even when a scene is happy, I don’t wish to ruin that emotion but remind viewers that we can be happy when things aren’t always great. I work to create scenes that people can feel through my love for my craft of making art and telling stories.