Tell us a little bit about your journey as an artist.

I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember, with some of my earliest pieces being from preschool. I would say I don’t know exactly where the motivation came from, but that’s because, to me art is a very subconscious process, and I can tell that the styles that I enjoy or would even want to replicate in my own artwork today are derived from the children’s books I enjoyed when I was a toddler, most notably with author-illustrators like Eric Carle and Mo Willems. I think it’s important that I’m noting children’s book artists instead of historically famous people or ones that exist on social media, because with art being a subconscious process, I feel like what you see in life deeply influences your creativity and that even small things like books, movies and even the house you live in are all art, and that in everyone’s lives we’re all surrounded by really diverse expressions of creativity, and it depends on the person to want to make even more to fill the world with. Given the influences present in my life, I just happened to be one of those people.

Which has been your favorite project to work on at One River and why?

Probably Background Speedrun, not just because it was one of the first ones I did, but because it teaches something important about how taking photographs to create a background in your art instead of drawing one by hand can work well in both conserving time and as a stylistic approach. For me, it was mainly the latter, as even though I like to approach a lot of things with the idea of “what will take me less work”, there’s just something that is very charming about blending real life photography with digital artwork. Not only that, but the experience of taking the photos in the first place makes you feel more in tune with the piece overall, and depending on how many photos you take, you can even reuse the extras as references or paintings.

Describe One River in 3 words and tell us why

Inspiring young artists. I’m mainly self-taught, but I’ve seen a lot of kids, both in and outside of class, younger than me with interesting ideas that deserve to be explored through different school projects. Sometimes, it’s common to see them not wanting to do certain activities because of the work it’ll take, but it’s really important to step out of certain bubbles, and I’m glad that One River offers classes for certain niches that still allow them to be broad because of this. Even for me, there were times when I thought maybe a project wasn’t for me, but the important part is to keep pushing forward because maybe you’ll surprise yourself. So I guess I was one of those young artists, too.

What would you tell people who’ve never dabbled in art making are the real benefits to trying it?

It’s not about how appealing the piece is, and you don’t have to make something that will become famous. Artists in the media are always celebrated for either the level of detail they can create or the fame they’ve gotten from certain pieces, but at the end of the day, they’re just someone who happened to find their niche, like anyone else with a hobby. I feel as if whenever I see people who don’t draw attempting to draw something, even small, like a stick figure, they get embarrassed because they’ve never done something like it before, and by default, they’re already comparing themselves to other people. Even recognizing there’s room to improve on something as small as a doodle already makes someone an artist, and it shows that you don’t have to make the next Mona Lisa for your work to make you or someone else feel something, because art has always been about expressing the human experience, and sometimes the human experience means creating something as small as a single scribble on paper.

Would you like to share anything else about your experience at One River?

Even if you do art as a hobby, going to an inclusive place like One River will help you make new friends in the space, as well as maybe even inspire you to want to do art as something full-time in the future.