My journey to becoming a designer started with a pencil and a thought. I was four years old, watching cartoons in my mother’s bedroom when an animated commercial for a board game played on the screen. I had watched many cartoons before, but at that very moment, I watched this particular mouse character on screen and thought, "I want to draw that." So I grabbed a pencil, some scrap paper and a book to use as a hard surface, and I waited time and time again for the commercial to play so I could remember the mouse’s details and try to draw it.
I was the girl who doodled on the back of my class assignments when I finished early. I would “tattoo” myself and my friends with sharpie marker (which my mom hated). When pirating music became popular, I took it a step further and pirated Adobe Photoshop 7—and that’s what truly started my path to design. Growing up in an immigrant family, I was always discouraged from pursuing the arts as a career, because of the “starving artist” stereotypes. I used Photoshop to create graphics for my private blogs (shoutout to LiveJournal) and my MySpace account. That’s when I realized that this was something I wanted to pursue professionally. I took more fine arts, graphic design, photography, and some web design classes throughout high school and university… and the rest is history.
When I’m not working, you can find me doing arts and crafts projects with friends, traveling with my fiancé, going to local shows & events, contemplating what color to dye my hair next, playing video games, lifting weights, or training jiu jitsu.