As an artist, I believe that finding the correct course is essential for my growth and introduction into the industry. Working my way from the ground up from a young artist to now has been a very exciting and enjoyable experience, so now I wish to continue that journey and further my artistic education.
Growing up as an artistic child was a bit of a challenge but it definitely has shaped me into who I am today. I spent countless hours creating my own characters and stories in my own mind to just repeatedly draw to spend my time after school so naturally, I enjoy games such as the Fable series (which I grew up on) and Skyrim, games in particular that have a roleplaying and storyline aspect. In Skyrim for example, you are free to create your own character and play the way you want.
From 2020 to 2022, I studied Graphics, Illustration, and Game Art at Plymouth College of Art. During this course, I found a passion for comic design and story writing, so I am planning to use the skills I have learned and will learn from future courses to produce my own work. I have also picked up skills such as 3D modelling, which combines my love of digital art and my love of sculpting as well as giving me the skills I need to potentially go into game design in the future. I am skilled with various digital art programs; I started on something as simple as MS Paint when I was 13 but now I use more professional art programs like MediBang. I picked two interesting subjects for my GCSEs; Psychology and Astronomy. While I did not get to formally do an astronomy exam, I am still glad that I picked it as an extracurricular subject. Astronomy has been a favourite of mine ever since I was a child, I used to spend countless hours reading books about the stars and sitting out with my grandfather watching the constellations. I was in fact fortunate enough to visit Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station thanks to my incredible teacher. It was honestly one of the most amazing trips I ever had the opportunity to go on, we were able to learn about so many different types of satellites and how they work. Mental health plays a huge part in my work, especially in my comic where the main character has a lot of trauma related to an accident and also from family issues.
At the moment I am working on my personal comic, Cascade. I originally began development on this story during the 2020 pandemic as a source of entertainment to pass the time, but soon it actually became a project I genuinely wanted to develop and work on. Having my own comic is a brilliant way to work on the areas I struggle with, such as backgrounds and actually implementing my characters into a scene as well as more technical details like shading and lighting. This comic is very near and dear to my heart because as of late, certain marginalised groups have been looking for more accurate and positive representation in media. As someone who is a part of some marginalised groups (such as the LGBTQ+ community), I feel like I have the ability to at least attempt to provide a safe source of media for people as well as having characters that are good representation without relying on stereotypes. In the worlds of my comics, each of the fictional lands are intentionally inspired by real-world counterparts to help accurately portray certain aspects of communities such as religions and ethnicities.
In the future, my dream is to one day publish my comic professionally to start selling physical copies. That would mean everything to me, as Cascade is my heart-project and what I want to work on properly one day. Another dream I have would to become a professional character concept artist for games and TV shows, as designing characters is what I enjoy the most. At the end of the day, I'm always going to be a character designer at heart regardless of what pathway I eventually go down in my future career. As long as I am focusing on my dream of art and doing something that makes me happy, everything will be okay.