The ‘Warped Woman’ in this drawing is me. To be warped means to be distorted, to be changed from one’s normal way. As a person, but especially a woman, I am warped in many ways. When I was thirteen, I developed an eating disorder. It ravaged my life, my body, and my relationships. When I looked in a mirror, I would ache with the shame of having flesh. My body became unknown to myself—I was my own stranger. Now, years later, the girl in those photos is just as strange, but the woman I see in the mirror is not. It is in part because of this disconnection from myself that I explore and exhibit my body through art. As I drew her this time, seated at an easel in my school’s art classroom, I observed the people viewing me. Some were shocked, intrigued, aroused—all emotions that have been aimed at me over the years. There is no escape from being watched, so I purposely laid myself bare. I dare to trust myself, as I did with this piece, to create through my intuition. Some think I dare to be vulgar, but I disagree. Here, I may be doing any number of things, and most of them come with social stigma attached. Self-pleasure, shaving… I am at my most vulnerable and my most powerful. In a world that continues to create shame around women’s bodies, minds, and creations, I hope my artwork stands in defiance of this.

I created this artwork for an assignment in my english class. Based on The House On Mango Street we were told to create a piece of art that represented the female experience. I used quotes from the book, well known sayings, and songs I felt fit the prompt. Drawing on my own experiences I began to create my piece using elements such as water colors, craft paper, markers. The craft paper accentuates the wounds left by each experience and the effects on her life. Each pattern was chosen with great care to represent the loss of innocence, femininity , dreams. One such wound left by the dagger of society displays writing, which is the main characters biggest coping mechanism. The girls head is pictured as a brick wall symbolizing how many close themselves off to the world due to such experiences. I chose colors that are significant in the novel to paint the girls body. Then I highlighted words with red pen to have a greater impact. Lastly, I left the girl in my art faceless and nameless so, the viewer could see themself in my art no matter what they look like.

This art was all about expressing my feelings. I used patterns and lines to explain what I feel on the inside comparing to what I show or display on the outside. I used friends, school and other things to show how they effect me each day. So by showing what hurts on the inside sometimes and the fake me I express on the outside, all tied together into creating this portrait. Around me are patterns I used to express what ties me back into what I love and things that take me back to my happy place.(traveling, sunsets,music). I used more of darker colors on the inside and lighter colors on the outside. What I think makes this such a strong piece is that how I explained my art could maybe make people think more about how they treat others. I’m my artwork I had drawn my neck being tied on a rope with blood coming down it. I think when people look at that they think about me commuting suicide or feeling really depressed, but it was more of almost like me being on a leash. For a long time I was in a lot of drama, dealing with broken friendships and just life in general. But even still now it still feels like I’m a slave or a servant to them. As they tie me on their leash. Then around me, I have new friends that make me feel free, safe and welcome. They bring me to happiness.

Red is a piece about the hyper feminization and over sexualization of teenage girls in modern society. Utilizing a digital format with composition similar to that of comics and graphic novels I illustrate the dehumanizing emotions most teenage girls and young women experience.

This piece began when I was working towards depicting emotional deterioration through external processes. I began planning by creating small sketches with little detail to find what composition and design I would use. Once decided what the symmetry of my painting would be like, reference photos of myself hanging off a stage were taken with assistance of a friend. Once the photos necessary were taken, a sketch of what the painting would look like was created in a sketchbook and then sketched with watercolor pencil on watercolor paper. As I began to sketch I realized that my painting did not have enough depth and was boring. After thinking I decided to add vines to portray a sense of constriction and of organic processes taking over. Eventually the meaning shifted into being about destructive emotions and relationships. The plant constricting the body was ivy which is a very common invasive plant, similar to how destructive situations are very common. Once the main focus was complete it was difficult to decide what to use for the background, the original idea was to use decelularized ivy leaves with watercolor, however that subtracted from the main focus, therefore dirt became the background as it showed more contrast.

This painting is a depiction of heartbreak and alcoholism. I used a muted color palette and desolate setting to enhance the theme.

This is a surrealism peace that represents the hardships and obstacles i face. Depicted is me and several vultures either attacking me or entrapped in cages. The ones in cages represent the issues i have under control while the others are pecking away at me. My emotionless face represents my need to be seen as fearless and unphased.

Our piece is of a lot of Yellow Men. We chose random words and then and we distributed the words among ourselves randomly. To us, the Yellow Man is somewhat of a compulsion. Yellow Man, to us, is liberation. The origins of this is found in out first drawing of him, years ago. He was something you drew quick and dirty to annoy, and from those origins, he has escaped the bound of logic. To be a Yellow Man drawing, it was not determined by specific detail but by feeling: sharp harsh lines, disproportioned bodies, absurd corners were rule. We deconstructed what a Yellow Man was and by doing so elevated him beyond reason. Everything could be a Yellow Man, a giraffe, car, ruler, tooth, tongue, foot, screw, on and on. Truly exemplified in our piece, he can anything and he is everything.

My inspiration for this piece was the skeleton flower and roses.

This artwork was created as an assignment in my Graphic Design class. To create this piece, I had to outline six different shades of gray, a tedious process that took many hours to complete. Separating the shades of gray as well as putting good outlines took many hours to complete, but the end result was worth it. After outlining the different shades of gray, I filled them all in, working out adjustments and the stacking of layers as I did so. After picking a background color I was finished! It was an enjoyable, though tedious, process to go through and I learned a lot about Graphic Design through this process.

This piece holds many different meanings to me. It is mainly about the love I hold for my dad and the love I have for the way he views the world. My dad has dyslexia, mainly when someone hears that they will think of it being harder to read or to write, nobody thinks about the benefits. Being dyslexic for my dad is more about the way it opens his mind, while yes he may think differently than most and it may not be the most helpful in a standard class, he gets to look at things differently. He gets to see, enjoy, explore, and experience the world in an entirely different way than anyone would expect. While all of these things could be said about anyone because realistically everyone had their own way of seeing, what made this part of my dad so important to me is that he presented dyslexia like this to me my whole life. He made it so much easier for me to accept the fact that I was dyslexic as well and hold it like it was a gift. My dad has used his way of seeing to change my way of seeing into loving myself a little bit more. So for this piece I drew the eyes of my dad, I drew his way of seeing.

We as individuals have responsibility for certain issues or problems that need to be resolved or you wish you could. Sometimes the amount of resources available at hand such as time or an individual’s energy can be limited and lead to us having a voice in our mind telling us that we aren’t capable. Hence, making it more tough for us to face the issue as it can be from our perspective as burdensome or tiring. As many of us have felt overwhelmed by stress, eventually it can be too hard to manage. For me personally, I find stress to be difficult to cope with and it ultimately leads to what I can only describe as a feeling of numbness where you feel neither negative or positive emotions. It just doesn’t affect you anymore. Which leads to the loss of your goals for the future and your sources of motivation as it gets harder to care which explains the drawing of flowers in black and white. This numbness creates this mental action of questioning ourselves. I wanted to depict it through art as even as you attempt to find and mimic any emotions to grasp & feel, it’s not easy due to everything else being empty and black. But as the stress lifts up due to circumstances, specks of color–as seen in the small blue & orange mini flowers and the colored butterfly–start to brighten your view. Leading to loss of the feeling of numbness.

This book (and it's accompanying transliteration text) show the American and French Revolutions side by side, to compare each countries battle for freedom. Each panel is hand drawn, and represents a significant part of the countries fight. The accompanying text adds details and explanation to the pictures, and we're written by the illustrator of the main book. The books are hand sewn, and each illustrated panel corresponds to a written description in the text edition. They were made over the course of ~50 estimated hours, for a school world history assignment.

When I was given the chance in art class to do this, I immediately thought of drawing the 1967 Chevy Impala. I absolutely love and adore this car and the show, Supernatural, that it is driven in. This car means everything to me and being able to draw it and color it for an art competition.

This map depicts the Bay Area's public transportation network in an alternate reality 2023, which mostly fossilizes the old streetcar systems as they existed in the 1940s. It is to-scale, and cross-referenced with several historical sources and maps, synthesizing the electric traction of the Key System, Market Street Railway, SFMTA, Sacramento Northern, Northwestern Pacific, and Southern Pacific into something coherent and at least a little conceivable in the modern world with only three new rights of way. It isn’t an exercise in creating a better future, but instead a thought experiment reflecting on the past: how far can old-school streetcars really go in an urban environment with severe capacity constraints? How can the capacity of that old infrastructure be improved, without changing its at-grade character? Is there a universe in which street-running interurbans and ferry-train commuter exchanges can be practical? This method of providing transit requires deprioritizing auto traffic -- what kind of society is created by going maximally down this path?

Strawberry Moon is a 4’ by 6’ digital realism piece of bright red strawberries. The title of this piece comes from a term used by many indigenous tribes and agronomists to label the full moon in June. Strawberry Moon describes the short season of strawberries, a fruit associated with youth, summer, and sweetness. I depicted such qualities by using techniques of underpainting and complex shading for a bright and fresh appearance.

The artwork was inspired by my love of the ocean, coupled with the fiery colors of the mission district of where I spent most of my life in.

This piece is a dipiction how our society now always reaches for their desires. These desires turn into greed, and relationships falling apart due to this selfishness we as a society have. These hands reaching out represent all of our greed. We reach out for something that seems so clear and perfect; something that shines in the light and creates colors. We reach for what we see as perfect, and we fight one another to obtain this “perfection”.

I approached this project with the word "metamorphosis" in mind. From there, I made a list of words that reminded me of metamorphosis. Words like smush, squeeze, and change all stuck out to me, so I used those words to do some research for inspiration on where to start. One of the artists I came across was Johnson Tsang, who ended up being a big visual inspiration for my piece. His work helped me think about metamorphosis of the body, specifically the face. I was very interested in his work with relief sculptures, and wanted to challenge myself to go further and create something in full 3D. I had never worked with clay before, so this project was a time to experiment with all kinds of different techniques; I learned to create folds and creases in the skin, and had a strong focus on creating a look of a smushed and squeezed face. During my process, I thought specifically about the culture around wanting to change your face based on societal pressures to have the “perfect” look. I thought about personally wanting control over the shape and look of your face, as well as a societal control over your face and its “metamorphosis”. I liked squeeze and smush as words of metamorphosis because they relate to this idea of pinching and poking at your face to create “perfect”. I wanted my final piece to look slightly bumpy and rough to create a more realistic representation of human skin.

This piece is special to me because it has been a work in progress for quite a while now. I really have a love hate relationship with it, because I like it's simplicity but it took me so long to finish I'm a little sick of it to be honest! My process started with a red background and then I began adding shapes and layers on top of that. I like how the subject matter is very old and classic but the bright red brings a modern twist to it.