What materials and supplies do you use to make your work?

I mainly work with watercolors, colored pencils, and some ink. For watercolors, I’ve been collecting sets and individual tubes for a long time (8+ years) and they last a while, so I have a mixed collection of lovely colors from Daniel Smith, Schimnke, Windsor and Newton, Sennelier, and Kuretake. I really love all of the paints for different reasons like texture, particular shades or opacity, or just their personality and flare really.

I work on any paper I can use, but I do love using Fabriano paper for its texture. I like working in journals too and for sketching I use both sketchbooks and a lot of loose printer paper. If you’ve visited my Sketchbook page, you’ll notice I use lots of colored pencils to sketch. I love the color and feel to them and have transitioned to using Faber-Castell pencils, but I still use and love my Prismacolor pencils that I’ve had since before high school.

Finally, I love using watercolor pencils or light watercolor-graphite pencils to lay down my sketches before I paint. I also use ink here and there, either black sumi ink with a brush, waterproof pens, or colorful inks and dip pens (which are a newer material for me). And you never know, sometimes different project require different materials, so I do like to experiment from time to time. I also use my iPad Pro with Procreate and Photoshop to do touch ups, edits, and maneuver things around, but I tend to do alter very little digitally because I love the analogue look of my work.

What inspires you to create illustrations?

The desire to tell stories and navigate between various worlds. Not only are illustrations a kind of both translation and invention of a new space that knits together text and image, but illustrations also connect people, places, concepts, dreams, fears, hopes, feelings, and narratives together that often exist on their own. I think I’ve had a lifelong fascination and need to tell the stories of these meetings and combinations of different worlds. I make illustrations to try and communicate things visually, to express my own unique language, and to also be in communication with the languages of others-books, paintings, trees, food, conversations, spaces, and other creative humans.

Did you go to school for art?

Technically, yes, but really, no. My actual degree certificate does say Art (Art History), but I went to school for Art History and minored in Anthropology rather than studio or fine art, per say. Though I took 1-2 elective credits in fine art (and floral arrangement which is a whole other story) I spent my four years knee-deep in reading papers, books, lectures, and visual analysis. Art History is a discipline closer to the social sciences, and while it’s helpful to know about making art, most of the field is about understanding the world around which the art form was created. In order to do that, we art historians get to research and assemble together information to solve mysteries and illuminate art through combining fields like economics, science, politics, literature, linguistics, folklore, math, archeology, and much more, to form a more complete picture of and artist’s or artwork’s world.

We spend a lot of time reading, writing, looking, and continuing to gain fluency and familiarity with the visual languages of different time periods and places, and of course the similarities that run through them of art being made by human hands. For example, my final project for my degree was on one lesser-known painting by Georgia O’Keeffe of a stump in the desert. I had to produce 30+ pages examining how O'Keeffe’s life and world informed her art, and those of her contemporaries. I got to write about the socioeconomics of the Great Depression, the ecological devastation of drought and changing climate, gender, race, and class in the early 20th century, image ecosystems of nuclear age fears and wartime psychology, and O’Keeffe’s enduring relationship with nature and her personal creation and curation of aesthetics throughout her lifetime.

So, while I studied Art History, I was also learning so much about culture, visual communication, narratives, and life. I bring all this into my illustration work to create rich and detailed worlds.

If you’re interested in Art History, I run a small project on the side called Art History for Breakfast. It’s my way of getting to continue sharpening my skills and pursuing my own research in the field, while sharing art history with more people outside academia who want to understand visual communication better. and connection with our human story of art. Feel free to check it out. :)

What would be a dream illustration project for you?

A book of folklore would be an absolute dream. I love folktales and wanted to study folkloric studies for a while, though there are sadly so few programs for it, so I instead continue to read folktales from all over and imagine the visual and symbolic worlds within them. I would love to create a unique visual identity for the book and weave it throughout a whole collection, along with individual vignettes and spot illustrations. Perhaps, one day.

In particular, I’ve been steeped in New Mexican and Mexican folklore for many years. My Dad’s tales of La Llorona on the Rio wailing at night were very impressionable to me as a child, and I grew up loving ghost stories, strange creatures, and eerie places.

When did you decide to go into illustration?

I think like most creatives, there isn’t always a definitive point, but many small moments throughout the years that stack up to affect your path. I loved stories and had a big imagination as a child and took to things like plays and fashion and color and inventing things. For a while, I wanted to be an author because I think I just liked the idea of creating worlds from my head and getting to have a cool desk and reading nook. I also loved stories, visual worlds, and history.

Around the time of starting high school, my family starting moving a lot and so learning to draw and paint with watercolors and do art tutorials became one of my main activities and helped give me a lot of stability during so much change. I taught myself to draw mainly from a love of collecting folk art, historical photos, and vintage fashion patterns on Pinterest. I drew and drew for years, whatever I was interested in, and kept painting and trying out other mediums. I also nourished a love of literature, history, science, animals, plants, and stories.

While I was studying for my degree in Art History, I was always making art on the side and taking courses online through Domestika, where I was able to see illustration as an actual career and art form. I knew that telling visual stories in that way was exactly what I wanted to do within art.

Any advice to other illustrators/artists/creatives?

Dive into the world of what you love. Let it lead you and pull you and make you ask questions and feel things and explore. Never stop learning-whether it’s new technical skills, new ways of thinking or approaching feelings and stories, or simply learning something about the world around you. I think creatives can gain so much by being immersed in what they love or are fascinated by and revisiting it often, whether that’s a book, an obscure film, photographs, food, the way the light looks at a certain time a day, a place, a feeling. I think these elements are important paths to understanding your own visual language and becoming more familiar with it. But also, don’t be too harsh on yourself, it takes time and energy to exercise creativity and to understand and use that visual language. Be kind, as often as you can. To yourself, others, and the world. Keep growing.

What are some of your favorite books, foods, activities, etc.?

I love books and reading (even though I do struggle a lot with focusing my brain to actually do the reading instead of discover new books!). I love speculative fiction which encompasses fantasy, science-fiction, gothic, historical, horror, and other genres, and some favorite are a A Day of Fallen Night, The Jasmine Throne, Mexican Gothic, The Singing Hills Cyle, The Monk and the Robot, and

I also love Dracula and Frankenstein and was a really avid reader and writer of poems for a while. I used to submit to poetry contests and checkout poetry books from the library all the time. I think poetry has given me a wealth of language, tools, and understanding about myself and the world that was key to me growing up and learning to express myself artistically. Some poets I’d recommend highly are Mary Oliver, Natalie Diaz,

Lastly, food! I love food and learning to cook and bake new things. I’ve been vegetarian since my early teens, and am sometimes vegan due to lactose-intolerance and lots of digestive particularities. I now have neither my appendix nor gallbladder so I eat a bit strangely and have to cook everything from scratch, but I do enjoy mixing flavors and textures-it feels like magic to me. I grew up with Mexican/New Mexican food and so love making tortillas, beans, rice, calabcitas, peppers, and salsa. I also love pasta, bean and grain dishes, eggs, cabbage, noodles, and wraps. And cake, cookies, tea, coffee, and snacks are lovely.

If you actually have read all these responses, my deepest gratitude for being here and reading my actual human-written responses. Clearly, no robot could write like this. If you feel like saying hello, send me a message or email! I’d be happy to say hello back and get to know you :)