In this self-portrait, I tried to depict the sense of calm movement one feels when relaxed. I wanted to emphasize the flowing water arcing towards the background.

This piece reflects on a cherished memory from my childhood when my mother would style my hair with braids, ties, and the addition of accessories. However, amidst the warmth of her worn hands, the pain from pulling my hair tightly was so intense that I found myself in tears almost every morning. I understand now that her actions were driven by love and I admire her strength. Yet, as a child, I struggled to perceive it that way. In my young mind, I felt akin to the koi fish that my mom always loved. She adored them, not for any emotional bond she shared with them, but simply because they were beautiful and represented wealth and prosperity. Consequently, I believed that the act of styling my hair was not an expression of love and understanding but rather an attempt to make me beautiful like a koi fish on display. This painting serves as a means for me to reconcile the gap in understanding—from my pain to hers—and to explore the complexities of my relationship with my mother. Furthermore, it serves as a story for others who also faced challenging relationships with their parents due to a difference in values and experiences.

This piece is an exploration of who I really am and who I pretend to be. Sometimes these people feel separate as if my mind is a different person than the one controlling my body.

A layered liquid watercolor and salt piece with colored pencil imagery over top. This piece is meant to demonstrate three large emotions present when someone is going through burnout. The red represents anger and frustration, the mouths being negative input and comments perceived from others, adding to the anger that is felt. The blue is meant to be sadness and disappointment in yourself. The eyes over top meant to convey a sense of being constantly watched and under many expectations by those around you. The grey is meant to represent a sense of numbness that comes on as you get deeper into the burnout. It shows the rising want to just give up because everything is so overwhelming and hard to accomplish. The piece started out with just the blue piece, then I added the other silhouette colors to further develop the concept and turned it into a triptych.

I've always centered my artwork around the idea of making my pieces dreamy. For this particular piece, I wanted to show how a memory bursts from a composed set of eyes, taking you into another world. I had never worked with this medium before and was terrified of the fact that I wouldn't be able to erase anything. So, I first started off by making the bottom piece, going into it with no design and seeing where my hands would lead me. After seeing those results I moved onto the top piece, knowing that it would have to be more controlled and tight knit. Hence, I made the design first and heavily focused on the brightness of the eyes as well as the sphere in the middle. Every detail on the top piece was purposely chosen to direct the one's eyes down to the bottom piece. Think of it as a trip down memory lane.

This painting, is one I procrastinated a lot on. This piece was made with the focus of the image, my partner, in mind at all times. I started off wanting to simply paint them as a good way to pass the time, but ended up liking it enough to place it here. Having her as the spot light greatly symbolizes her presence in my life, and as the title suggests, she's something bright that illuminates my life. Overall I really like this piece, I can say its one that brings me pride. I hope to display her beauty, and tried to the best of my ability.

This portrait examines the temporary anonymity that we have while wearing a mask or disguise. Blake is a dear friend of mine and was the inspiration for this painting. I took a photo of him with clown makeup on and used that as my reference. During the pandemic, I became interested in the concept of masks and what happens with social interactions and behaviors of people while wearing masks. How a mask can actually give someone a type of escape from themselves. I have seen a painfully shy person become someone else entirely while wearing a mask. Masks have a sort of power. I also thought of Halloween and how all the mask wearing creates a whole different mood and vibe everywhere. And what happens when the mask comes off? I observed how the behavior or mood would return to how it was without the mask almost instantly. I am facinated with how humans have always had rituals that include mask wearing. This is a concept I want to continue exploring. 18” X 24” Acrylic on Canvas

At my high school, we have an art elective called bio-sculpture, which is a course where we work with clay to create 3d clay works. This piece is a combination of two pieces I made in this class, with the bird being the first one and the hand the second. I chose to submit this piece, because it reminded me of the phrase “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. I feel like, although it is a quote from the Bible , is not religious in nature and embodies an extremely important trait, gratitude. I believe that gratitude is often an undeveloped aspect of humans, and can be significantly improved in this generation.

The Broken Gaze is a piece made of solely colored pencil and seeks to convey human life's vulnerability and raw beauty. Nine hours after the first marks were drawn on the black paper, the girl with the broken gaze was born. She strays away from the focal point as light beams onto her, serving as a metaphor for the challenges in interactions and revealing the delicate balance between strength and fragility in human connections. I aimed to juxtapose her with her surroundings to indicate how ostracized she is from her condition. She does not want to be the center of attention, but circumstance makes it inevitable. Through this blend of color, form, and texture, "Broken Gaze" reflects resilience and fear, offering a narrative that speaks to the universal human experience of love, loss, and the enduring pursuit of connection despite fear.

My artwork has always revolved around the developments of technology in our lives today, a profound phenomenon where humans integrate artificial things into their lives. Often this behavior is considered dangerous, that we must control the amount of technology we use. Falling back to the age old statements and arguments, I digest them fully in my artwork. With traditional methods such as pencil and ink, I explore the digital realm, a seemingly contradictory technique that I find helps me think. By having to make those deliberate choices to frame traditional artwork in a digital way, I can create layers of depth within a piece. I find myself using art to explore this question, to what limit is it okay for us to use technology? "Binary Circuitry" is a pencil piece answering this question through the metamorphosis of a human. The subject depicted appears to have undergone a drastic change from their original form, but it seems to bother them very little, thus depicting how our innate instinct to adapt led to a change in our humanity.

My Mother had schizophrenia and it was very dramatic for me; I was always both sacred and afraid to face her. It didn't want to be around her at all even when she finally got on medication. It wasn't until much later when I dealt with some mental health issues of my own did I truly realize how dark and murky your mind can be. There was also something really beautiful about that unique mindset that you enter when you completely swim through it but still come out the other side. My mother was truly beautiful in her perseverance to over come her disease, and in this digital illustration I made of her I tried to capture ever bit of beauty I saw in her as she swam through that murky ocean of mental illness. Like the pink splotch on the picture, mental illness can seem like bothersome mistake, but it is apart of the picture nonetheless.

My piece commemorates the courage and compassion of Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker during World War II. Although she practiced Christianity, her empathy drew her to help others regardless of their religious beliefs. Known to many as the “Angel of the Warsaw,” she smuggled over 2,500 children out of the ghetto and situated them with non-Jewish families to protect them from the Nazis. For each child she saved, she recorded their original Jewish name along with their new name on slips of paper which she protected in buried jars. Using her records, she reunited many children with their families. In this piece I explored using watercolor and gouache on wood. Wood is very absorbent, which made the watercolor unpredictable, but I was able to obtain more vibrancy and control by using gouache. I wanted wood grain texture to show through in specific areas, so much of my process consisted of layering watercolor and watered down gouache. Inspired by the radial symmetry of Art Nouveau pieces, I used rings to depict Sendler in a virtuous light. In flower language, yellow tulips symbolize hope and new beginnings, much like the hope Irena Sendler brought to the families of Warsaw. The red poppies represent remembrance, which Sendler deserves. The budding poppies symbolize Sendler's compassion, which the world can always use.

I look up to my mom in so many ways, she is intelligent, kind hearted, and always makes me laugh. She has worked so hard to get to where she is today, and I'm strive to be like her. These shoes are like a pair my mom wears, I strive to be like my mom and fill her shoes.

Over the car radio, a girl my age pleaded for the bombings of her home to cease. Air raids turned her school to dust. Her little sister lost her life to sniper fire. Beside me, my own sister hummed along to the music in her headphones, oblivious to the horrors in the news. To be honest, I’m not very educated about the histories behind the wars I’m growing up with. Before the explosions began, I didn’t consider the lives of other teenagers in Ukraine, Palestine, or Israel. I focused on the trials and tribulations of my own story. But as the terror and violence continues to be publicized, I realize that I must care about those outside my Bay Area bubble. The girl on the radio could be me, born in a different country. My sister could be dead by bullet, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Only random luck keeps my childhood house and the dreams in it from becoming rubble, too. So I contribute my own voice to the millions begging for the killing to end. My fragile paper artwork represents the hopes of people victimized by war. The beautiful, vulnerable threads of those lives can be broken by hate, but also preserved by compassion. They ask for empathy. They ask for deliverance. Compared to the scale of the conflicts, “A Prayer for Peace” may not be much, but if my piece can move even one person to kindness, that will at least be something.

Similar to how new life may grow out of dead trees, Anew depicts how I am growing into another person, into someone new. Change is an inevitable part of life, no matter how much one tries to stop it. It can be seen as something positive, something negative, or something somewhere in the middle. The wire sculpture surrounding the ceramic components represents who I am now. It represents how I am taking parts of my past (the ceramic sculpture), and growing into a new person from that. The blood vessels extend into the old me, supplying the heart with bits and pieces of who I used to be. My heart rests in a different place now, as my identity is changing, and my loves and interests are no longer what they used to be. Although the wire is far less structurally sound than the solid ceramics, just like how I am still developing into who I truly want to be, it is the truth, and I cannot change it.

Zero: Deception is a piece made to capture the start of a tale. It is the first illustration of the a scene that takes place before a short story I wrote, that is the prologue to a novel I am hoping to finish. It is a very clear image I have had in my mind since the beginning of my idea, with a specific art style outside of my comfort zone that I am proud to have brought to life. This piece signifies not only a start to my story, but a new start for me as a creator. I hope that viewers of this artwork, even knowing not the writing that accompanies it, will have their own ideas of the story inspired in their minds by its visuals.

A black and white value scale self portrait using acrylic paint. I first started with a pencil sketch, then blocked out the background in all black. I start off with the darkest values in the eyes, nose, and mouth. I used an even gray shade on the skin and with layers I added highlights with white paint and shadows with black paint to the face to give it a realistic touch. I then worked my way around the portrait by using layers of black and gray for the lips, hand, and the rest of the features. I used a reference photo for the painting to help guide me to get the correct lighting, and dark values. I made the reference photo with procreate.

Idk I just felt like drawing it.

In this art piece, I took inspiration from Mario Games because I think our life is just like Mario Games. Even though you might face some obstacles you have no choice but to keep going, that’s how life works. I chose to draw a big Daisy field in the background to represent youth. The person in the middle of painting is holding a bucket to collect items. I drew that to represent how in the struggles, what we get out of that is experiences that may be useful in the future.

This painting represents the struggle that victims of sexual harassment have to face, especially between pretending as if they don't care and telling someone. Often, the victim is told that they are overreacting, and the harasser will play it off as a joke. I was motivated to make this piece after hearing stories about this topic from people I know, as well as my own experience. In the piece, hands come around the person in the center, reaching out and touching them, while the person looks downwards with their eyes closed, acting as if they are nonchalant in this situation.