I don’t know what to write at these moments. Everyone says to write your thought process or inspiration, but there's much more inside my head than I could explain in 250 words. Even if I could say everything I wanted to say, I wouldn’t know how to write it. Fish tend to resonate with me. I was born and raised on the West Coast and I’m half Japanese, so seafood has always been a prominent part of my cultural diet. I also had many pet fish as a kid. Recently, I’ve found myself drawing fish on my class papers or notes with colored pencils and pens. While I normally draw betas, I enjoyed digitally painting overly colored koi. While fish could represent a lot of things in my art, I believe these fish represent my state of mind. Fish are very fluid and they rarely pose a threat, especially not koi. In an ideal world, koi would be free, but they are often put in a small pond for decoration. I look at the colored koi with both curiosity and exhaustion. Maybe we’re both decorations.

This spread is taken from my sketchbook, in which I explore the expressions and anatomy of the human back. As the title suggests, I tend to regularly study different features of the human body to strengthen my understanding of my characters and body types as well. In practicing this, I find creating my stories and lore about my characters to be easier and more free-flowing, with the way their bodies are constructed to help support their background stories and information. Simply sitting down and studying the body doesn't come easy for me - rather, I find myself often drawing at random intervals of the week, with no truly consistent schedule. When I've gathered enough sketches and drawings in the end, I like to compile them together to create a collage of my works. Additionally, I'd add small pieces of my week that were significant, such as in this piece where I included a notecard I had prepared for my upcoming AP US History exam. Putting all of my work together, whether that be art or for school, always gives me a sense of satisfaction and completion.

Inspiration from the Serpentine Pavillion in London.

The idea around it was a vigilante whose power involved art. She is drawing herself in the middle, with the hero’s she knows on the right and villains on the left. The drawing is unfinished though, so you can still see the background and half drawn characters while still seeing what they look like.

I was compelled to create a piece on freedom.

When I conceived this self-portrait early this school year, I was deep in the college application process and attempting to balance a busy student and teenager life.

I call this piece “Blossoming” because it shows a flower opening up which to me also represents blossoming as a teenager and coming in to a full bloom.

In this piece I wanted to showcase my representation of christmas.

I love nature and I’m very inspired by it, so the piece comes from nature and natural themes (flowers and skull) I’m also interested in folklore and magic, so the insertion of the fairy.

I decided to try something new, a new style of drawing that i havent tried before.

My love for the ocean and the environment has always been a huge inspiration for me.

This piece depicts my struggle as an Asian-American finding my voice while being Asian in a western world, and western in an Asian world.

"Academic Pressure" is a captivating work of art that sheds light on the unseen challenges faced by students.

In this artwork I chose to do the ride in Disneyland Paris called Space Mountain.

It’s the Sacramento state athletic logo.

I wanted to do an art piece about female beauty and want so I made my piece about Mother Earth in the universe.

The painting is of me and my older sibling.

This is a piece about growing up. I decided to compose a mini room using objects significant from my childhood. The vibrancy of the colors and surrealistic scale give the room a dreamlike quality, representative of core memories and the emotions of adolescence. I used figurines and toys I collected when I was younger, and I built other aspects of the room (including the chair and window) using cardboard followed by a paper mache process. After finishing the actual creation of the room, I photographed it and first made a black and white ink study of the lighting. Finally I painted the room using acrylic on an 18” x 24” sheet of gessoed watercolor paper. The entire process including building the room, photography, and the ink study took about 32 hours. The final painting took around 25 hours. I wanted to paint something representing the growing pains most teenagers experience. The happiness we can find in our nostalgia about the carefree innocent emotions that seemed so easy to access as children. Sometimes we find, in our reflection of the past, an escape from the responsibilities of growing up and the impending reality of adulthood.

I made this during an art class and I was very pleased with the product!

This piece is a dedication to my abuelita Maria who passed away two-years ago in Mexico. The piece captures one of my most treasured moments with my abuelita. We are celebrating my 4th birthday in Mexico with my grandparents and extended family. The day was filled with balloons, cake, laughter, music and warm weather. My abuela stands lovingly next to me as my mother takes our picture. I miss my abuelita's laughter and her soft hands. My father misses her even more, he wasn't able to say goodbye to my abuela and had not been able to see her for over 16yrs when she passed away suddenly. We honor my abuela every year during dia de muertos and say "presente" after her name.