MEET THE ARTIST ✦

Ever since I can remember, I have been drawing. Some of my earliest “serious” drawings were recreations of stickers I collected as a child. I would study the characters and images I loved and try to recreate them myself, often with my medium of choice: Prismacolor colored pencils. Looking back, those early drawings were the beginning of something that has continued to shape who I am as an artist.

I continued taking art classes throughout junior high and high school, but by the time I graduated, art had become more of a hobby as I explored other possible career paths. Ultimately, however, I found my way back to art and changed my major halfway through college. I enrolled in the art program at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where I pursued a B.F.A. in Studio Illustration and graduated in 2015.

My education gave me a strong foundation in traditional art and illustration, but I was always fascinated by the possibilities of digital art. At the time, there were no true digital illustration courses offered through my university, so I decided to make digital illustration the focus of my B.F.A. thesis project. That experience became the beginning of my journey into digital art, and I have continued to teach myself and develop my digital illustration skills ever since.

Today, I am especially drawn to creating people and characters. Much of my work is inspired by the characters, stories, and worlds that shaped my childhood. I love revisiting those familiar pieces of my past and bringing them to life through my own artistic perspective. There is something incredibly rewarding about taking a character I loved as a child and imagining how I can reinterpret and reinvent them as an artist today.

Color plays an important role in my work. I love bold, expressive palettes and the way color can create energy, establish mood, and make a character feel alive. I am particularly inspired by artists such as Drew Struzan and Hayao Miyazaki, whose work has influenced me through its strong sense of character, storytelling, imagination, and ability to make an image feel like a glimpse into a much larger world.

At the heart of my work is joy and nostalgia. I want my illustrations to capture that feeling of childhood wonder—the excitement of discovering a favorite character, getting lost in an imagined world, and dreaming without limits. I hope my work can create that same spark for someone else: a moment of recognition, a smile, or the feeling of being transported back to a time when imagination seemed limitless.

Ultimately, I create because I believe there is something worth holding onto in the imagination of childhood. Illustration gives me a way to revisit those worlds, bring the characters I love to life, and share a little of that wonder with others.