Romelia Zavala
Artist Statement
I started my love for art when I was a kid, the child of an elementary school teacher. I remember doodling on notebook paper while my mom focused on her meetings. It evolved into a greater interest when I discovered my love for cartoons around the same time. I loved watching cartoons both old and recent and it kept inspiring me to draw more and more each day. Over time, I not only realized my passion in life, but also discovered how I want to use this passion. I don’t only want to make drawings of things I like. I want to use my artistic skills to show words, emotions, and implications that could only be fully realized in imagery. I wanted to express things such as personal thoughts, familiar feelings, and callbacks to memories, yet the only words shown being the title and short description. Communication design has taught me how to reach this goal not just in a freelancing setting as a graphic designer, but also as an artist and cartoonist who wants to speak to the world in the best way I know how.
When it comes to my creative works, I hope to convey myself or my ideas as clearly as I can. I sometimes have trouble being clear when it comes to speaking and I’m hoping it doesn’t transfer into my work as well. Even when I’m using symbolism and implications in my art, I make sure that I don’t unintentionally spread the wrong message. Through this method, I hope to show how one could have so much to say that it can’t be contained in words alone. Even a simple sketch can say a lot. I also want to show that one shouldn’t be afraid to experiment with art. For example, there would be times where I like a concept of a show, artwork, or media, but the execution was not done the way I hoped. Some people would be afraid to make another failed project, but I want to bring hope to people that creativity can flourish and even be reworked if desired. Overall, the best way I could explain this is that I want to inspire people to have fun and be empowered when creating art. To show that art can be both a fun experience and a form of strength.
I work by gaining inspiration from the world around me. This can range from the media I consume, to the memories I’ve experienced, even to the scenarios I daydream of. When I work, I basically go into my own world. I put on some music or play something on the tv and draw whatever is on my mind. It’s not easy for me to work on an art piece in silence most of the time. The ideas I get then materialize in sketches on any paper I can get a hold of. The sketches are never perfect, but they truly help translate the ideas I have from mind to reality. I then expand these sketches to a larger project such as transferring them to digital or tracing the drawing over mixed medium paper. Once this transfer is made, the project is reshaped and colored into completion. This is not always a seamless process, and errors can happen along the way. Sometimes the sketches needed to be reworked entirely to look more polished. Sometimes the medium I chose can go through their own issues such as inking mistakes or crashed image files. Sometimes the concept itself needs to be scrapped entirely and reworked from sketches once more. Either way, I overcome these issues by analyzing what went wrong and how I can improvise the mistake. I could utilize the inking mistake I made to salvage a drawing or recover what I could from a corrupt file to continue. From these occurrences, I learned that sometimes mistakes are what I needed to make an artwork reach its full potential.
